Criminalization

Anti-Sex Work Feminism and the Lived Reality of Criminalization and State Violence

Watch Now: A PRA Roundtable Discussion

Anti-Sex Work Feminists have a (deadly) listening problem: a problem listening to the people whose lives and livelihoods have been made economically and socially precarious by the state and made subject to daily violence by its carceral arm. In this…

Webinar

Blurring the Border

Immigration Enforcement and Solidarity in Ohio

“Families Belong Together” rally and march in Ohio, June 30, 2018.

The growth of immigration enforcement further north has led many within the immigrant and refugee communities to feel that they, too, live on the border.

Article

Beyond Strange Bedfellows

How the “War on Trafficking” Was Made to Unite the Left and Right

President Donald Trump signs H.R. 1865 (FOSTA) into law, 2018.

The prevailing narrative about “human trafficking” was shaped by a relatively small group of political influencers on the Right who had dreams of organizing Christian activists around winnable social issues.

Article

Immigrant Justice and the Right Wing's Eliminationist Agenda

A Q&A with Hamid Khan

Los Angeles March for Immigrant Rights, 2017.

Hamid Khan, a coordinator with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition—as well as a Political Research Associates board member—has long been active in the immigrants’ rights debate, having immigrated to the United States from Pakistan in 1979. As a board…

Q&A

Captive Audience

How Prison Ministries Prioritize Salvation Over Justice

As bipartisan reform efforts have steadily drifted rightward, the heavy hand of evangelicals in prison reform efforts has created new kinds of problems. In the eight years I spent researching my book, God In Captivity: The Rise of Faith-Based Prison…

Article

California's Prop 47 Savings in Context

On June 8, 2017, the California Board of State and Community Corrections announced the reallocation of $103 million in savings resulting from the passage of 2014’s Proposition 47 criminal justice sentencing reforms to drug treatment, mental health…

Article

Endgame

How “Bipartisan Criminal Justice Reform” Institutionalizes a Right-Wing, Neoliberal Agenda

More than an actual means of improving policy, “bipartisan criminal justice reform” has become a mantra signifying hope: that people of good will can come together across ideological divides and partisan gridlock to end our country’s overreliance on…

Article

Black Lives Over Broken Windows

Challenging the Policing Paradigm Rooted in Right-Wing “Folk Wisdom”

Regrouping for day 3 of the week of outrage surrounding the denial of justice for Eric Garner on December 10, 2016

When protesters developed a platform to end police violence in the wake of the 2014 police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the first of their 10 demands was to end “broken windows” policing, the law enforcement paradigm…

Article

Tracking Blackness: A Q&A with Dark Matters Author Simone Browne

Simone Browne, an associate professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, describes her new book, Dark Matters: On The Surveillance of Blackness, as a conversation between Black Studies and Surveillance…

Q&A

Crime Control & Political Repression

From the War On Drugs To The War On Terror

American political time is often rhetorically divided into before and after the attacks of September 11, 2001. In this model, “before” signals liberty and respect for individual rights while “after” brought increasing restrictions and surveillance…

Article

35 Years of Demonization

The Criminalization of Black Women

Black woman in field facing away from camera with arms in the air crossed at the wrist.

Between 1990 and 2000, the number of people in U.S. prisons and jails increased from 292 per 100,000 to 481 per 100,000. But the number of women in prison rose even more sharply, doubling over the ten-year period.

Article

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