How can we hold accountable systems that are designed only to understand punishment?
Criminal justice reform
This community-developed plan could serve as a model for how to simultaneously decarcerate and decarbonize.
Treatment programs rather than incarceration are far more effective for drug-related offenses.
“The only way that we are going to get people to have a decent, equitable future is to completely re-envision this entire rubric that is suffocating and killing our people,” says lawyer Noelle Hanrahan.
People of color were the most harmed by the war on cannabis, but we can heal the damage of prohibition and ensure a fairer future.
Re-entering society after being incarcerated takes a heavy emotional toll.
A campaign to free Black mothers from pretrial detention highlights the role that women play in helping one another navigate a dehumanizing system.
A week of action in Atlanta this March showcases widespread opposition to a planned police training center, which would be the largest in the nation. An organizer explains what’s at stake.
How Los Angeles abolitionist organizers are taking on pretrial incarceration and judicial power through community resistance.
The Minnesota Freedom Fund offers resources to low-income people of color who are jailed—and so much more.
L.A. County activists are working to replace violent jails with mental health facilities, and to reallocate funding from incarceration toward social services.
A big decrease in the incarceration rate of Black adults may lead to parity in the near future.
Attorney Sia Henry shares a wrenching personal experience highlighting the challenges of operating in world where prison abolition is not yet a reality.
The demand to “defund the police” asks politicians to go beyond platitudes and actually end the violence of policing, shifting resources in ways that promote the redistribution of wealth.
We can work for safety and liberation by investing in community-based alternatives to policing, like mental health programs, public education, restorative justice practices, and economic justice.
Gun violence cannot be abstracted from a broader culture of violence and authoritarianism that calls for more gun ownership, more police, and more national security.
Trials are far from impartial if the defendant is poor or reliant on public defenders. These people are working to re-balance the scales of justice.
Police too often claim that confusion during an encounter caused them to fire fatal shots, as in the case of Patrick Lyoya. But there are solutions.
State legislatures and elected officials around the country have almost always responded to crime with more police funding in spite of little to no positive results. Instead, they could tackle the recidivism rate, solve the housing crisis, and reduce poverty.
Formerly incarcerated mental health care providers are supplementing traditional resources for those still in prison—with mutually beneficial results.
Everette Taylor has been as good a father as the prison system has allowed. He’s one of millions of Americans who remains incarcerated for far too long.
Breonna Taylor's father, who remained close to all six children, including Breonna while she was alive, is being held in a Michigan prison. An incarcerated writer makes the case for Everette’s freedom.
Everette Taylor didn’t get to say goodbye to his daughter. Stuck behind prison walls, Taylor speaks with YES! about how he remains connected to his surviving children despite decades of incarceration.
Since 2000, toxic tours in this community have evolved from talking about pollution, to now include systemic racism, policing, and mass incarceration.
Prison reformists—many of whom are serving long sentences—have united to change the cruel and arbitrary carceral system.
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