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The #AIRS campaign, a coalition co-led by Vidal Guzman alongside people impacted by incarceration, aims to expose and dismantle the "prison–televisual complex"—the idea that prison is a spectacle to be profited from rather than a site of injustice. inquest.org/punishment-tv/

submitted 22 hours ago • 0 comments

So true. Monetizing the pain and suffering of the human condition that is American prison system is no less humiliating or demeaning than the side-show "freak" shows that used to ply their trade across the country at the turn of the century.

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

However much carceral reality TV shows create awareness around prison conditions, they do so in a way that reinforces the need for prisons rather than advocating for solutions to address the root causes of incarceration, writes Vidal Guzman of the #AIRS campaign. inquest.org/punishment-tv/

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

Thoughtful piece from Joseph Margulies. inquest.org/abolition-an...

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

This week's newsletter: Abolition and the presidency mailchi.mp/inquest.org/abolition-versus-t...

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

The Trump administration can be expected to lash out fiercely against people and localities working to end the harms of mass incarceration. But as Joseph Margulies writes, this worldview "looks backward as we drive forward": inquest.org/abolition-and-the-presidency/

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

@kwhitlock.bsky.social is right. The 47th admin’s shock-and-awe tactic with the EOs is intentional. It’s aimed to overwhelm and disorient us. So we need to think more imaginatively and strategically about how we organize. @inquest.bsky.social

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

A Bridge to Health: Medicaid access, both pre- and post-release, is a promising path to ensuring that reentry is a genuine, lasting return to freedom. inquest.org/a-bridge-to-...

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

"Reentry waivers have potential well beyond increasing access to substance use treatment, smoothing post-release enrollment in Medicaid, and priming people for coordinated care upon leaving prison. To fulfill that potential, the waivers must be designed beyond the context of the carceral system."

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

"[F]ollowing release from a [prison], [..] access to health care can be the difference between life and death. People who have been recently released from [..] prison are at drastically greater risk of death by suicide, overdose, and cardiovascular disease." #healthcare #uspol @inquest.bsky.social

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

Medicaid access for people newly released from prison, as well as for those nearing release, is a promising path to ensuring reentry is a genuine, lasting return to freedom, write John Card and Spencer Andrews. Here's how reentry waivers could work under current law.

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

"Some told their stories as if they were no big deal, casually joking about them. One person laughed about being beaten, at the age of seven, by his mother's boyfriend. He had a gun put to his head because he'd urinated while asleep."

submitted 10 days ago • 0 comments

This week's newsletter: Winning the wars mailchi.mp/inquest.org/winning-the-wars

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

"The challenge is to create new cultures of resistance and transformation. The root of this effort is building trustworthy relationships that over time begin to replace fear and enmity with caring community" - @kwhitlock.bsky.social in @inquest.bsky.social inquest.org/this-is-how-...

submitted 13 days ago • 0 comments

Inquest is honored to be a finalist for the National Magazine Awards in the General Excellence – Special Interest category! We're grateful to all our readers, donors, and authors—particularly our incarcerated and formerly incarcerated authors!

submitted 13 days ago • 0 comments

Abstinence-only drug treatment doesn’t work. For people in prison, where drugs flow freely, such programs place them at greater risk of relapse or even death, writes incarcerated writer Catherine LaFleur. In partnership with @empowermentave.bsky.social. inquest.org/surviving-abstinence/

submitted 13 days ago • 0 comments

"None of this will be easy. There are no certain outcomes. In some instances, there will be legal risks and attempts to intimidate organizations and individuals into silence. But to do nothing is to surrender our own humanity and any hope of a better, democratic future."

submitted 13 days ago • 1 comment

For @inquest.bsky.social, Catherine LaFleur writes that abstinence-only drug treatment doesn’t work. For people in prison, where drugs flow freely, such programs place them at greater risk of relapse. inquest.org/surviving-ab...

submitted 13 days ago • 0 comments

This Is How You Win the Culture Wars by @kwhitlock.bsky.social via @inquest.bsky.social inquest.org/this-is-how-...

submitted 14 days ago • 1 comment

"Survival in this moment demands that we prioritize relationship building over reactivity; that we prioritize solidarity over silence. In this way, we create the possibility of emerging from this violent hydraulic as a society, transformed for the better."

submitted 15 days ago • 0 comments

"At its best, the law represents the codification of a set of rules for a society that allows all people to live with dignity and freedom."Learning from @Sonali_Chakravarti and Inquest on the role of jurors in court: inquest.org/becoming-dec... #prison #carceral #JusticeMatters #RuleOfLaw

submitted 17 days ago • 0 comments

This is brilliant, and much needed now. Reality looks bleak, in so many ways, but here is hope, here’s what we need to do a lot more, to get out of this almighty big mess. And there’s a role for everyone. Thank you Kay.

submitted 15 days ago • 2 comments

Really looking forward to reading this tonight

submitted 15 days ago • 0 comments

This is a must read.

submitted 15 days ago • 0 comments

Kay Whitlock has been and is a guiding light.

submitted 15 days ago • 1 comment

Prioritizing relationship-building over reactivity, and solidarity over silence, is how abolitionist writer and activist @kwhitlock.bsky.social suggests we all confront the rising violence and authoritarianism in the days and years ahead. https://inquest.org/this-is-how-you-win-the-culture-wars/

submitted 15 days ago • 3 comments

“If I feel invisible and disposable to the powers that be, I’m ushered into a well-organized supremacist validation of my worth in which I learn that it’s others who are disposable, not me.”

submitted 15 days ago • 1 comment

My latest for @inquest.bsky.social ...and yes, we can ultimately win, if we are willing to work in transformative ways. It will require the best we have in ourselves, but along the way, we may become quietly courageous in ways that will surprise and energize us. inquest.org/this-is-how-...

submitted 15 days ago • 6 comments

Read an excerpt from IMPRISONED MINDS: LOST BOYS, TRAPPED MEN, AND SOLUTIONS FROM WITHIN THE PRISON in Inquest:

submitted 16 days ago • 1 comment

This week's newsletter: Becoming decarceral jurors https://mailchi.mp/inquest.org/becoming-decarceral-jurors

submitted 18 days ago • 0 comments

Erik Maloney, an incarcerated psychology researcher, has theorized that many men in prison have had their minds "imprisoned" long before their incarceration. Here are some of his stark findings. From @rutgersupress.bsky.social. https://inquest.org/freeing-the-mind/

submitted 19 days ago • 1 comment

Joe Biden made history when he commuted the sentences of just about everyone on federal death row. But he lost the moral argument against the death penalty when he denied mercy to some, writes Carol Steiker. https://inquest.org/almost-anti-death-penalty/

submitted 19 days ago • 0 comments

"The power of a jury to acquit is arguably the single most powerful tool that citizens have for stopping someone from going to prison."

submitted 21 days ago • 2 comments

"[A jury's power] to nullify [.] is not one that most jurors will know about, nor will the court condone discussion of it." "To refuse to participate in a jury trial because of the [legal system's] great harms [.] would [.] throw away the chance to block an unfair punishment." @inquest.bsky.social

submitted 21 days ago • 0 comments

For anyone committed to ending the scope and scale of mass incarceration, the jury system is worth serving in—and preserving, writes Sonali Chakravarti. Resisting over-punishment and unjust punishment by the state is why it exists. https://inquest.org/becoming-decarceral-jurors/

submitted 21 days ago • 0 comments

"Settler colonialism works by making invisible the appropriation of Indigenous lands and oceanic spaces. It severs the caretaking relations of Indigenous people to land, water, and the elements and eliminates their presence through a range of technologies that relegate them to the past."

submitted 24 days ago • 0 comments

"[W]e have an obligation to counsel about how oppression operates ... A fuller engagement with issues makes it easier to show clients why their options may actually be limited in criminal court, while also showing where they or others can push back on those limitations in other forums."

submitted 24 days ago • 0 comments

I can't overstate the extent to which the criminal legal system is built on a foundation of vibes rather than data. This piece on the (practical, human, data-driven) case against pre-trial detention is a fantastic illustration: inquest.org/no-more-pret...

submitted 29 days ago • 0 comments

This week's newsletter: All of us or none https://mailchi.mp/inquest.org/all-of-us-or-none

submitted 25 days ago • 0 comments

#BULawProf @apetrigh.bsky.social writes for @inquest.bsky.social on the ways defense lawyers can not only counsel their clients on an individual criminal case, but the broader system of mass incarceration. Read more ⬇️ inquest.org/decarceral-c...

submitted 26 days ago • 0 comments

Really grateful to the folks at inquest for letting me share some thoughts I've been noodling over about client counseling.

submitted 27 days ago • 0 comments

"If [lawyers] only ever push back on our [legal] clients when they ask why [systemic oppression] is the way it is, we are then part of the reason it is that way." "[D]ialogue can lead to [...] collaboration, both partners demystifying the law and [...] [challenging] [...] it." @inquest.bsky.social

submitted 27 days ago • 0 comments

How might a defense lawyer counsel her client not just about an individual criminal case, but about the broader oppression of our system of mass incarceration? Former public defender @apetrigh.bsky.social of @bulaw.bsky.social offers insights. https://inquest.org/decarceral-counseling/

submitted 27 days ago • 0 comments

"Settler colonial logics course through deportation policies, which rely heavily on criminalization and incarceration—two potent assertions of U.S. sovereignty over a space that, in actuality, is animated by Indigenous politics of self-governance." @inquest.bsky.social #uspol

submitted 28 days ago • 1 comment

"In the tradition of civil disobedience, the IYC activists risked arrest and deportation to expose the violence of the penal and deportation systems in the United States. The main message—'All of Us or None'—telegraphed their solidarity with all those who are fodder for the carceral system."

submitted 28 days ago • 0 comments

“We must not mistake current practices of policing, surveillance, and deportations as a “moment in time.” Instead, (…) continuing legacies of resistance requires us to turn our attention to enduring strains of violence perpetuated by the U.S. racist, colonial, and capitalist history.”

submitted 28 days ago • 0 comments

Anti-detention activists, and the broader migrant justice movement, aren't just concerned with keeping people from deportation. Their aim is to put an end to the harms of the entire punishment industry. An excerpt from Monisha Das Gupta's 'All of Us or None,' out now from @dukepress.bsky.social.

submitted 29 days ago • 0 comments

"The widespread use of pretrial detention is a relatively new phenomenon, and its expanded use was largely untethered from the problem of flight or public safety." On coming to realise that the detention of legally innocent people pretrial (on remand) is indefensible: inquest.org/no-more-pret...

submitted 30 days ago • 0 comments

There's no shortage of things to read about how abolitionist analysis will help in the context we're facing. One of the things such pieces tend to focus on is that people are criminalized, in part, because criminalized people are already seen as disposable. One good read: inquest.org/the-terrain-...

submitted 33 days ago • 0 comments