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Crime and prison

War & Security

The Making of the American Gulag

During the Cold War, the “police apparatus” was held up as a prime example of Soviet repression. Yet in its efforts to fight subversives, the United States ended up with its own carceral state. 

Stuart Schrader

Law & Justice, Reading Lists

The Legality and Reality of Torture

Our best writing from our archives on why torture is not the same thing as interrogation.

Rosie Gillies, Boston Review

Law & Justice

The Metastasis of the Misdemeanor System

The misdemeanor system is four times the size of the felony system. With so many gradations of minor crimes—many involving fines in a very informal process—prejudice and inequality shapes prosecution.

Brandon L. Garrett

Law & Justice

How Cars Transformed Policing

Before the mass adoption of the car, most communities barely had a police force and citizens shared responsibility for enforcing laws. Then the car changed everything.

Sarah A. Seo

Reading Lists

The United States Doesn’t Have a Gun Problem

Our problem is that we keep producing killers.

Rosie Gillies, Boston Review

Reading Lists

The College Admissions Scam Is Not the Problem

It's not just celebrity moms — middle-class families are guilty too.

Rosie Gillies, Boston Review

Class & Inequality

Puerto Rico’s War on Its Poor

In the 1990s, Puerto Rico showed Washington how militarized policing and privatization can extract profits from poor people of color.

Marisol LeBrón

Law & Justice

Managing Innocence

The Innocence Movement faces a perverse rhetorical puzzle: righting the isolated wrongful conviction only reinforces public faith in the system as a whole.

Joseph Margulies

Law & Justice

In the Name of Public Safety

The Mass Bail Out at Rikers Island shows that freedom is a critical part of public safety.

Jocelyn Simonson

Reading Lists

Prison Strike 2018

Surveying incarceration: from Attica to Appalachia and prison profiteering to “poverty penalties.”

Rosie Gillies, Boston Review

Law & Justice, Race

Hoverboarding While Black

In the era of digital neighborhoods, social networks embolden a new kind of racial surveillance.

Clarence Harlan Orsi

Race

The Forgotten Baldwin

James Baldwin’s book about the Atlanta child murders speaks best to the era of Black Lives Matter.

Joseph Vogel

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