Illusions of Safety
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”…
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White Man’s Justice Is Black People’s Grief
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…
There’s No Justice in a Death Sentence for
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…
Force Multipliers
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…
Prison Lockdowns Are Becoming More Frequent
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…
Pride Has Always Been About Ending Mass Incarceration
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…
Bail Reform: What’s at Stake
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…
It’s Time to Abolish Grand Juries Once and for All
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…
California’s Civil Grand Juries
The last of their kind in the nation By Katy St. Clair There is a tenet of American democracy that has fallen by the wayside in most every state except for one: California. It’s the…
Educating for Democracy
By Michael Schwalbe The latest case of right-wing Republican meddling in the curriculum of North Carolina’s public universities comes in the form of a proposed requirement, engineered by the political appointees who constitute the UNC…