Tag: Crime and Prison

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.

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

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

White gay men and trans women of color often have little in common.

Counterterrorism largely ensnares people of color.

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.

On Chicago’s decades-long history of police torture.

Prison and police abolition were key to the thinking of many midcentury civil rights activists.

Reform efforts will fail. Only a power shift to communities can improve public safety.

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

St. Louis is a microcosm of American structural racism.

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

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

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.

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.