Prisons and Police Archives

Cooking Noodles on Rikers Island

In their new book, City Time, former inmates David Campbell and Jarrod Shanahan take a sociological look at life inside

May 6, 2025 • by Carina Filemyr

Not only is Rikers Island geographically isolated—a landmass situated on the East River between the Bronx and Queens—but what happens there is kept out of the public’s sight. Journalists are given limited entry into day-to-day life on the island, which houses the city's largest jail. Now, in City Time: On ...

Migration

From Moral Panic to Government Policy and Research

The stated rationale for policing street gangs in Montreal has always been “prevention” rather than actual incidents

March 24, 2025 • by Benoit Décary-Secours and Anne-Marie Livingstone

The evolution of criminological research on gangs in Quebec mirrors events elsewhere. It began in the late 1980s with a media frenzy that attracted the attention of political elites and became the object of government policy and research....

From Moral Panic to Government Policy and Research

Europe & Central Asia

Violence and Policing Minorities

Why do the Polish public trust the police?

March 12, 2025 • by Agnieszka Kościańska

Before the 2020 pro-choice protests [in Poland], the police maintained a high level of social trust despite a series of cases of excessive violence reported by the media. For instance, in 1996 the police entered a Romanian Roma camp in Warsaw at 2 a.m., demolishing it and arresting everybody they ...

Activism

The “Prose of Counterinsurgency”

Policing, migration, militarization, and the liberal-democratic provocation of the fascist turn in the Republican Party

November 1, 2024 • by James Porter

What Ranajit Guha has called the “prose of counterinsurgency” surely comes closest to characterizing the current state of abolitionist struggles within the context of the US presidential election campaign. With this concept, the postcolonial historian describes the strategies by which uprisings against imperial forms of domination have been degraded as ...

Prisons and Police

Why School Security Makes Students Less Safe

Much has been said about police failures in Uvalde. But that failure occurred before they even arrived

July 6, 2022 • by Zeynep Gönen

What proposals to “harden the schools” succeed at is building out a police and penal state, one that has been growing exponentially since the 1970s, into social institutions where it targets poor and racialized populations....

Why School Security Makes Students Less Safe

Prisons and Police

When Children Commit Atrocities

Crimes that tear at our hearts are also opportunities to forgive

January 5, 2022 • by Harold Pollack

A member of my own family was beaten to death by a high school student. That boy is now a man. He walks the streets today. I believe justice has been served....

Gender

Murder, Marines, and the Mojave

On the 20th anniversary of its publication, author Deanne Stillman contemplates the repercussions of her much-discussed book, “Twentynine Palms”

June 2, 2021 • by Bliss Bowen and Deanne Stillman

_____ If you live in Southern California, odds are better than even that you’ve heard about Twentynine Palms. Deanne Stillman’s 2001 book examines the barbaric rape and murder of 15-year-old Mandi Scott and 20-year-old Rosalie Ortega in August 1991 by a Gulf War veteran. The murderer was stationed at the nearby ...

Prisons and Police

Police Abolition — or Electronic Surveillance?

RoboCop returns

July 9, 2020 • by Micol Seigel

These moves may yield genuine improvements in public life in the United States, something other than the same old tired reforms -- civilian review boards, community policing, recruitment of Black and brown cadets, training and so on -- all of which have proven to be ineffective. But even as the nation ...

Police Abolition — or Electronic Surveillance?

Prisons and Police

Behind Bars in the Age of Coronavirus

A letter from prison

June 18, 2020 • by Phyllis Dietrichson

Is it wise or exploitative? My “soap shop” job is part of a difficult matrix of concepts. On the one hand, I am grateful to have the opportunity to work and contribute to the cause. On the other, I feel expendable and like a slave. But then again, I once ...

Prisons and Police

Out of Jail and Homeless

City struggles to stop COVID-19’s spread among New York’s recently released prisoners

May 6, 2020 • by Abigail Kramer

Stefan Outlaw had just recovered from the worst of his COVID-19 symptoms when he learned that a charitable fund had paid to bail him out of the Rikers Island jail. It was mid-March, and much of the jail population was quarantined in cells for 24 hours a day. Outlaw, age ...

Interviews

America’s Epidemic of Domestic Violence

An interview with Rachel Louise Snyder

April 28, 2020 • by Rachel Louise Snyder and LaVonne Elaine Roberts

LaVonne Roberts [LR]: You point out that most (54 percent) of mass shootings intersect with domestic violence. As a Texan, I grew up hearing about Charles Whitman, who, on August 1, 1966, after fatally stabbing his mother and his wife, killed 14 people and wounded 31 others. Is there any hope that convicted domestic ...

Activism

Write Back Soon

Mass Incarceration and “Writing Intensive” Vulnerability

December 3, 2019 • by Ianna Hawkins Owen

Throughout that typically chilly Bay Area summer, I was turning over in my mind the problem of satisfying the “writing intensive” designation of my new undergraduate seminar, “Black Writing To/From/About Prison.” I struggled to come up with a way to make the course’s mandated four papers, or 20-pages of writing, ...

Prisons and Police

Cooking Noodles on Rikers Island

In their new book, City Time, former inmates David Campbell and Jarrod Shanahan take a sociological look at life inside

From Moral Panic to Government Policy and Research

The stated rationale for policing street gangs in Montreal has always been “prevention” rather than actual incidents

Violence and Policing Minorities

Why do the Polish public trust the police?

The “Prose of Counterinsurgency”

Policing, migration, militarization, and the liberal-democratic provocation of the fascist turn in the Republican Party

Why School Security Makes Students Less Safe

Much has been said about police failures in Uvalde. But that failure occurred before they even arrived

When Children Commit Atrocities

Crimes that tear at our hearts are also opportunities to forgive

Murder, Marines, and the Mojave

On the 20th anniversary of its publication, author Deanne Stillman contemplates the repercussions of her much-discussed book, “Twentynine Palms”

Police Abolition — or Electronic Surveillance?

RoboCop returns

Behind Bars in the Age of Coronavirus

A letter from prison

Out of Jail and Homeless

City struggles to stop COVID-19’s spread among New York’s recently released prisoners

America’s Epidemic of Domestic Violence

An interview with Rachel Louise Snyder

Write Back Soon

Mass Incarceration and “Writing Intensive” Vulnerability

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