Fiscal structures and funding priorities that local public finance experts have long taken to be intractable are being challenged by a new generation. Although the scale of these actions certainly is new, community groups and local activists have long used tax and budget advocacy as a means for abolitionist organizing.
George Floyd’s family will almost certainly bring a lawsuit against Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin, the three officers on the scene who stood by, and the City as a whole. Assuming Floyd’s family prevails, who will foot the bill? And who should?
Cities across the country are in turmoil after the cold-blooded killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. While the protests are motivated by and calling for a range of solutions to the ongoing problem of police brutality, the loudest call is for accountability in the form of criminal charges against the officers involved in Floyd’s death. Already, these calls have born fruit.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
Four organizers with the National Bail Fund Network explore how community bail funds can serve as tools to advance abolitionist movement building.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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…
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…
