By Meg O’Connor Over the past three years, tens of thousands of people in crisis have been met with behavioral health specialists and social workers instead of police officers. Interactions like these are taking place…
Brought to You by Prison Labor Jamiles Lartey If you’ve shopped at Walmart, Target, Costco, Whole Foods or many other large grocery chains recently, there’s a chance you purchased food produced by prison labor, according…
On freedom from policing By Mariame Kaba We’re in the midst of yet another bipartisan crime panic. Democratic mayors in San Francisco, Chicago, D.C., Atlanta, and New York City are loudly demanding “law and order”…
By Kevin Cooper “It’s not whether you win or lose that counts, but how you play the game that matters.” That’s what my people are often told. But we are not told that this so-called…
My Parents’ Murder Commentary by Megan Smith This month, I stood in front of the North Carolina Governor’s Mansion and asked Roy Cooper to remove all 135 people from our state’s death row and commute…
How the criminal, legal, and child welfare systems cooperate to punish families By Emma Peyton Williams The harmful effects of the criminal legal system on children are well-established. For years, evidence has shown that a…
and More Brutal By Silja J.A. Talvi Every morning, Mary Frances Barbee wakes up and experiences a “microsecond of happiness before the terror sets in.” Barbee had a heart attack, transient ischemic attack and then…
By Andrea Woods, qainat khan We celebrate Pride [2023] in defiance of the almost 500 anti-LGBTQ bills pending or passed in state legislatures around the country. Unsurprisingly, these attacks are turning to the criminal legal…
On any given day in 2020, roughly 630,000 people were locked up in local jails. The majority of them had not been convicted of a crime. After an arrest—wrongful or not—a person’s ability to leave…
Chava Shapiro and James Clark On August 29, a grand jury in Fulton County, Ga., issued an indictment against 61 alleged participants in the movement to defend Atlanta’s Weelaunee Forest and stop the building of…