Crime and Prison

Prison Reform’s Shell Game

Hard-won legislation meant to limit or end solitary confinement has run up against the power of correctional systems to neutralize change.

Cop Cities in a Militarized World

The United States has long supported the repression of Latin American land defenders. The tactics it exported are coming to the Atlanta forest.

A Climate Strategy of Last Resort

With time running out, jury nullification for civil disobedience is worth the risk.

Family Feud

Family policing is deeply unjust. The nuclear family is too.

Jurors Can Protect Abortion Access

Just as abolitionists fought the Fugitive Slave Act, those resisting the criminalization of reproductive health can employ jury nullification.

Life Sentences for Ahmaud Arbery’s Killers Are Nothing to Celebrate

Draconian individual punishment distracts from systemic change and reinforces the cruelest and most racist system of incarceration on the planet.

White Supremacists Aren’t “Lone Wolves”

The strategy of “leaderless resistance” has allowed white power activists to disguise the extent of their organizing.

What We Own This City Gets Wrong about Policing

Its illegitimacy goes far beyond the war on drugs.

Watergate’s Ironic Legacy

It has only gotten harder to hold presidents accountable.

Will Buffalo Change Anything?

David Hogg and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz discuss replacement theory, the gunman’s manifesto, and how we organize against violent white supremacy.

122 Immigrants Face the U.S. Death Penalty. Only 2 of Those Sentences Honor International Law.

Angel Francisco Breard was executed by Virginia in contempt of a treaty that required his home country to be notified when he was first charged. What difference might it have made if the U.S. had obeyed the law?

What Makes Laws Unjust

King could not accomplish what philosophers and theologians also failed to—distinguishing moral from immoral law in a polarized society.

How the Other Half Dies

Until COVID-19, tuberculosis killed more people each year than any other infectious disease. Its rising toll is increasingly fueled by mass incarceration.

Blue Lies Matter

We need to reckon with police lies not only as a form of individual misconduct but as a matter of political speech.

Why Policing and Prisons Can’t End Gender Violence

The authors of Abolition. Feminism. Now. discuss why racialized state violence and gender-based violence have to be fought together.

Twenty Years Later, Guantánamo Is Everywhere

The lawless—and ongoing—administration of the prison underwrites the broader democratic crisis we face today.

Demanding Justice for the Living

Derecka Purnell discusses her new book Becoming Abolitionists, how she came to join the movement against policing and prisons, and what a just world looks like.

Probation Profiteering Is the New Debtors’ Prison

We must end the widespread practice of funding government budgets by extorting poor people apprehended for minor offenses.

Making Communities Safe, Without the Police

Effective responses to violence—preventing it, interrupting it, holding people accountable, and helping people heal—already exist. We need to learn from and invest in them.

Politics and Prevention

New York State Rifle & Pistol v. Bruen may give the right—and its politics of racial resentment—a major win, at the cost of gun control laws known to prevent shootings.

Abolition Isn’t Only About Police

We also need to abolish prisons—as well as put an end to counterterrorism. An abolitionist reading list. 

Reclaiming the Power of Rebellion

Derecka Purnell interviews historian Elizabeth Hinton about her new book and how talk of “riots” discredits Black political demands.

Police and the License to Kill

Detroit police killed hundreds of unarmed Black people in response to the civil rights movement.

The Long History of Failed Police Reform

A century of failed attempts in Minneapolis.

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