LPE Originals
Don’t Reform Policing, Transform It
There is a distressing disconnect between the ringing demands for justice on the streets and the suite of “police reform” proposals that many experts say satisfy these demands.
LPE Originals
The Many Forms of Police Violence
By
Monica Bell
Over the past week, there has been unprecedented acknowledgment of the physical violence that Black people in America have faced, for generations, at the hands of police. While this is an important development, the work to eradicate police violence will not be complete if the public remains concerned only with the most visually and viscerally jarring forms of police violence, and those for which police seem most responsible. The public must realize that violence—not only of the physical sort, but also the structural and symbolic variety—is endemic to much of the routine work police do in communities across America.
LPE Originals
Gideon and the Promise of Right to Counsel
This week, we’re sharing two discussions on John Whitlow’s recently published article reflecting on New York’s right to counsel in evictions proceedings. Our contributors share visions of right to counsel that move beyond due process rights. The contributors show that right to counsel campaigns are part of broader movements that seek to address the material deprivation underlying the…
LPE Originals
After Money Bail: Lifting the Veil on Pretrial Detention
Ending money bail will not itself produce justice because we have been using money bail, and the detention it produces, to meet a host of social needs. Forsaking it will require us to find better ways to meet them.
LPE Originals
Reading Bail Reform Through a Critical Race Lens
Critical race theory can supply a framework for interpreting bail reform, as it renders legible the carceral reproduction of racial hierarchies as well as the law’s normalization of anti-Black criminalization.
LPE Originals
Community Bail Funds as a Tool for Prison Abolition
Four organizers with the National Bail Fund Network explore how community bail funds can serve as tools to advance abolitionist movement building.
LPE Originals
Moving from Ending Money Bail to Demanding Pretrial Freedom
Four organizers with the National Bail Fund Network provide a critique of dominant “bail reform” agendas, arguing for a more ambitious vision of pretrial freedom.
LPE Originals
“Bail Reform” & Carceral Control: A Critique of New York’s New Bail Laws
In this post, Survived & Punished NY presents an abolitionist critique of New York’s bail reform statute, calling for a bolder vision of freedom and a broader scope of change.
LPE Originals
What Comes After Money Bail? An LPE Perspective on Pretrial Detention
This is the first post in our series on Money Bail. Click here to read all posts in the series. It is no longer controversial to say that our current system of money bail is flawed. When more than 400,000 people are incarcerated pretrial at any one time—a majority there because they cannot afford the amount…
LPE Originals
Sex Work and Immigration: When Criminalization Is Disguised as Protection
By
Gilda Merlot
I am an undocumented immigrant from Honduras. I crossed the Guatemalan, Mexican, and U.S. borders when I was 5 years old. I’m currently a sex worker and a 25-year-old DACA recipient. Like most sex workers, I want decriminalization, or the elimination of all criminal penalties for sex work.
LPE Originals
Teaching Penal Abolition
By
Amna Akbar
In April, the New York Times ran a profile on abolitionist visionary and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and the Harvard Law Review published an entire issue on prison abolition. This fall, the University of Texas Law School Human Rights Center is hosting a conference on abolition. The new journalistic outlet The Appeal runs abolitionist pieces…
LPE Originals
To Reimagine Intervention Strategies: The Political Economy of Domestic Violence
In recent years, mainstream anti-domestic violence programs have moved away from a fixation on the criminal justice system to undertake economic justice initiatives designed to “respond to, address, and prevent financial abuse” related to domestic violence. The shift reflects the growing realization that strategies of remedy through the penal state have tended to fracture the…
LPE Originals
Restorative Justice and Moral Neoliberalism
By
Amy Cohen
Restorative justice is thus intriguing not only for how left organizers use it to advance prison abolition but also for how libertarian and conservative reformers have fashioned it into a tool of American neoliberalism.
LPE Originals
Who are “the People” in Criminal Procedure?
The customary case caption in criminal court, “The People v. Defendant,” pits the community against one lone person in an act of collective condemnation. When I was a public defender in New York City, it was common for judges, clerks, and other courtroom players to refer to individual Assistant District Attorneys as “the People,” as…
LPE Originals
Rethinking Criminal Law
Energized and challenged by the rise of powerful grassroots movements in the wake of the Ferguson and Baltimore rebellions, law professors are rethinking how to teach first-year Criminal Law. At the Law and Society Association annual meeting this summer, Alice Ristroph convened a group to ask “Are we teaching what we should be teaching? .…