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A New Sheriff in Town
In December, New Orleans, once known as the most incarcerated city in the most incarcerated state in the most incarcerated nation in the world, elected Susan Hutson, a woman many are calling the...
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150 Years Is Enough
You’ve likely seen the viral video by now. A fight between two boys — one Black and one white-presenting — in a Bridgewater, New Jersey mall. What could have been a youthful scuffle soon escalated...
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Meeting the Moment
I never could imagine running for district attorney. And now that a few months have passed since Election Day, it seems surreal that I actually did. I’ve served as a public defender in my hometown of...
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A Prosecutor’s Decarceral Potential
When George Floyd was murdered by members of the Minneapolis Police Department, I was working as a public defender in Hennepin County, the Minnesota county that includes Minneapolis. It was the third...
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Do You Know Their Names?
I am standing in an air-conditioned auditorium thinking about Michelle Cusseaux and the countless other Black women killed by the police whose deaths “no one was paying attention” to. My audience on...
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Ending Carceral Censorship
I’d just sent a report I wrote on prison censorship out for peer review when, scrolling through Instagram two days later, I saw a post from Inside Books, a longstanding, Austin-based prison book...
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Renewing New Orleans
On the afternoon of February 3, 2011, more than a hundred Orleans Parish Prison Reform Coalition (OPPRC) members and supporters filled New Orleans City Council chambers to demand a cap on the prison’s...
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Beauty on the Inside
In October, Inquest hosted a public screening of Beyond Walls, an anthology of five short documentary films advocating for police and prison abolition. Beyond Walls grew out of a project by Working...
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A Breakthrough on Solitary
On May 17, 2020, seventy-four-year-old Korean immigrant Choung Woong Ahn took his own life after being placed in Mesa Verde Detention Center’s “medical isolation,” a euphemism for solitary...
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Disrupting Carceral Narratives
To live in the United States is to be aware of the high levels of interpersonal violence in everyday life. Far less often do we acknowledge the prevalence of state violence. On the rare occasions when...
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