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Tag: Crime and Prison

Azadeh Shahshahani

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

David McDermott Hughes

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

Will Holub-Moorman

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

Sonali Chakravarti

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

Joseph Margulies

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

David Hogg, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Kathleen Belew

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

Stuart Schrader

Its illegitimacy goes far beyond the war on drugs.

Stuart Streichler

Amidst the January 6 hearings, the fiftieth anniversary of Nixon’s scandal reminds us that it has only gotten harder to hold presidents accountable.

David Hogg, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

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

Matt Nadel
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?
Randall L. Kennedy

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

Katharine S. Walter
Until COVID-19, tuberculosis killed more people each year than any other infectious disease. Its rising toll is increasingly fueled by mass incarceration.
nia t. evans
We need to reckon with police lies not only as a form of individual misconduct but as a matter of political speech.
nia t. evans, Beth E. Richie, Erica R. Meiners, Gina Dent, Angela Y. Davis
The authors of Abolition. Feminism. Now. discuss why racialized state violence and gender-based violence have to be fought together.
Baher Azmy

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

Derecka Purnell, nia t. evans

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.

Andrew Ross

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

Danielle Sered, Amanda Alexander

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.

Jonathan M. Metzl

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

Derecka Purnell, Elizabeth Hinton
Activist Derecka Purnell interviews historian Elizabeth Hinton about her new book, America on Fire, and how the label “riot” discredits Black political demands.
Matthew D. Lassiter
Detroit police killed hundreds of unarmed Blacks in response to the civil rights movement. Their ability to get away with it reveals why most of today’s proposals to make police more accountable are bound to fail, and how we can do better.
Michael Brenes
A century of failed liberal attempts at policing reform in Minneapolis supports the view that none of the city council’s current proposals will prevent there from being another George Floyd.
Sonali Chakravarti
As a space for democratic deliberation and decision-making, the jury box still has the potential to shift the criminal legal system. But, first, we must change who is able to serve on a jury.
Judith Levine
The Netflix series Dead to Me suggests that we might get closer to justice by forgiving each other and ourselves for the sometimes literally fatal flaw of being human.
Ellen Wayland-Smith
Elizabeth Catte’s new book examines how Virginia progressives believed the forced sterilization of poor whites would pave the way to a bright future—and how their legacy endures in national parks and prisons.
Michael Serota

Many U.S. criminal statutes betray the bedrock legal principle of mens rea. The result is a deeply unjust system that punishes the morally innocent.

Erica R. Meiners, Judith Levine

Instead of deterring sexual violence, criminalization has empowered policing and punishment.

Anne Gray Fischer
Forms of gender-specific violence are baked into the structure of law enforcement. Reform efforts will fail until we eliminate police discretion over women’s bodies.
Joseph Margulies

In many states, legal regimes sanction the predictable murder of innocent black men. Justice will not be served until the law changes.

Scott Casleton, Alex Vitale
Sociologist Alex Vitale explains how the U.S. policing crisis begins with politics—the decision to embrace neoliberal austerity and to turn the social problems it creates over to police.
Matthew Clair
Success in transforming the criminal justice system will depend on convincing judges to shift how they relate to—and rely upon—police in their criminal courtrooms.
Lydia Pelot-Hobbs
As post-Katrina New Orleans illustrates, even ambitious attempts to reform police leave intact the structures of racial violence. Worse yet, such efforts drain public money that could instead have been invested in caring for communities.
Joanna Schwartz, Kate Levine
In order to achieve lasting change, we must focus on systemic problems across the criminal justice system. That includes holding prosecutors accountable, not just police.
Joseph J. Fischel
Pride festivities attempt every year to reinforce the idea of an LGBT community, but when it comes to views on policing, white gay men and trans women of color often have little in common.
Atiya Husain

Counterterrorism largely ensnares people of color.

Dan Berger
Jalil Muntaqim, a Black Panther imprisoned since 1971, is one of thousands of elderly prisoners the United States has refused to free during the pandemic.
Gili Kliger
Police brutality is not isolated and exceptional. As Chicago’s decades-long history of police torture illustrates, it is built into the systemic nature of racial violence.
Garrett Felber
Prison and police abolition were key to the thinking of many midcentury civil rights activists. Understanding why can help us ask for change in our own time.
Jocelyn Simonson
Reform efforts will fail. Only a power shift to communities can improve public safety.
Elizabeth Hinton

A proper understanding of urban rebellion depends on our ability to interpret it not as a wave of criminality, but as political violence.

Jamala Rogers, Jason Q. Purnell, Walter Johnson, Colin Gordon
Black Americans are dying of COVID-19 at much higher rates than whites, and nowhere more so than in St. Louis. This is the result of racist policies which collapsed the social safety net while setting blacks in the path of danger.
Joseph Margulies

States should release from prison far more than the very small percentage of low-level, nonviolent offenders they hold.

Scott W. Stern

Conservatives have long been sounding the alarm about “undeserving” people receiving public assistance.

Sonali Chakravarti
Prosecutors use a system of “strikes” to engineer nearly all-white juries. Eliminating this system would not only make juries less racist, but also bring us closer to the original intent of the jury system.
Shannon Ross

One man’s struggle to earn a degree while incarcerated shows how far tough-on-crime policies go to prevent prisoners from having a second chance.

Andrea L. Dennis, Erik Nielson
Prosecutors use defendants’ rap lyrics to win cases despite the flimsiest evidence. Behind this rests a unique paranoia around hip hop and a long history of criminalizing black art. 
Christine Hume
Bizarre restrictions are levied against people on the sex offense registry on Halloween. But do they actually make children safer or simply reveal what we fear?

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