Abolition Now

Policy & Reform

Purchased Testimony: The Informant Economy That Sends Innocent People to Prison

Across American courtrooms, prosecutors routinely deploy a tool that criminologists and defense attorneys have long identified as among the most dangerous in the legal arsenal: the incentivized jailhouse informant. Driven by sentence reductions, favorable housing arrangements, and material rewards, these witnesses have a documented history of fabricating testimony that destroys innocent lives. Understanding the institutional machinery that sustains this practice is the first step toward dismantl

Oct 16, 2026

Policy & Reform

Stitched Into Servitude: The Constitutional Loophole That Turned American Prisons Into Factories

A clause buried in the Thirteenth Amendment has permitted the legal extraction of labor from incarcerated people for more than a century and a half, generating billions of dollars annually for corporations and state governments alike. This is not a relic of history — it is a living architecture of exploitation, reinforced by contracts, court decisions, and political silence. Understanding how it works is the first step toward tearing it down.

Oct 16, 2026

Policy & Reform

Crossing the Aisle of Conscience: Former Prosecutors Who Now Fight the Machine They Once Fed

A small but growing cohort of former district attorneys and assistant prosecutors have abandoned the charging table to defend the very people they once sought to cage. Their journeys illuminate the rot at the heart of the prosecutorial system — and raise urgent questions about how abolitionists can leverage their defections.

Oct 16, 2026

Policy & Reform

Traffic Stops as Deportation Warrants: How Local Police Became Federal Immigration Agents — and How Cities Are Breaking Free

Across the United States, a web of federal agreements and data-sharing arrangements has quietly transformed local police departments into instruments of immigration enforcement — turning a broken taillight or an expired registration into the first step toward deportation. This investigation traces the legal architecture that makes this conversion possible and examines the municipal policies that have successfully dismantled it.

Oct 16, 2026

Policy & Reform

Groomed for the Cage: How Legal Education Manufactures Prosecutors and Abandons Defenders

America's most prestigious law schools are quietly operating as recruitment pipelines for the carceral state, lavishing resources on prosecution-track students while starving public defense and abolitionist legal work of prestige, funding, and institutional support. The result is a legal profession structurally engineered to maintain mass incarceration — and a reform movement left scrambling for talent it never had the infrastructure to cultivate.

Oct 15, 2026

Policy & Reform

Supervision for Sale: The Shadow Industry Turning Probation Into a Profit Machine

Across dozens of states, private probation companies have quietly constructed a fee-extraction empire that punishes poverty and feeds people back into the carceral system — all while operating with minimal public scrutiny. These corporations do not run prisons, yet they have become indispensable architects of mass incarceration, lobbying for the very policies that guarantee their revenue streams. Understanding how this shadow industry functions is essential to any serious abolitionist project.

Oct 15, 2026

Policy & Reform

Supervised Into Failure: How Parole and Probation Became Engines of Reincarceration

For hundreds of thousands of Americans, the end of a prison sentence does not mean freedom — it means trading one cage for another, defined by surveillance, fees, and conditions designed to be broken. Parole and probation systems, ostensibly built to support reentry, have become among the most reliable pipelines back to incarceration. Understanding how these systems work — and how organizers are fighting to dismantle them — is essential to any serious abolitionist project.

Oct 14, 2026

Policy & Reform

Locked Out of Mercy: How State Legislatures Have Quietly Dismantled the Governor's Power to Pardon

Across the country, state legislatures have spent decades quietly erecting procedural walls, mandatory waiting periods, and political veto mechanisms that effectively strip governors of their constitutional clemency authority. What was once a robust executive instrument for correcting injustice has been hollowed out by statutory restrictions that serve the carceral state far more than they serve the public. Organizers are now fighting back—demanding legislative reform that restores the full prom

Oct 14, 2026

Activist Toolkit

Wolves in Reform Clothing: How Corporate Money Is Colonizing the Abolitionist Movement

Private prison companies, predatory lenders, and billionaire donors have discovered that wrapping themselves in the language of criminal justice reform is extraordinarily good for business. Grassroots organizers must learn to identify these extractive actors before their co-optation hollows out the movement from within. Here is how to recognize the pattern—and what to do when you find it.

Oct 14, 2026

Policy & Reform

Lost in the Queue: How Bureaucratic Rot and Political Cowardice Keep Clemency Applicants Caged for Years

Tens of thousands of people sit in American prisons and jails with clemency applications filed, reviewed, and then buried beneath layers of procedural inertia. The machinery designed to offer mercy has been deliberately allowed to corrode—and the human cost is measured in years stolen from lives already diminished by incarceration. This investigation examines the structural failures that transform clemency from a constitutional safeguard into a bureaucratic illusion.

Oct 14, 2026

Policy & Reform

The Stroke of a Pen That Could Empty Prisons: Why Executives Keep Their Clemency Powers Locked Away

Governors and presidents hold the constitutional authority to immediately free thousands of incarcerated people — yet this power collects dust while families are destroyed and lives are consumed by cages. Understanding why executive clemency remains so radically underused is the first step toward demanding its deployment as a genuine instrument of justice.

Oct 13, 2026

Policy & Reform

Elected to Reform, Empowered to Cage: The Impossible Position of the Progressive Prosecutor

Progressive district attorneys arrive in office carrying the hopes of reform movements—only to discover that the machinery of prosecution was never designed to deliver justice. This investigation exposes the structural contradictions that neutralize even the most well-intentioned elected prosecutors, and examines how grassroots organizers are constructing accountability systems that refuse to wait for the courtroom.

Oct 12, 2026

Activist Toolkit

Badge, Ballot, and Backlash: How Police Unions Are Engineering the Death of Reform—and How Organizers Are Fighting Back

Across the country, police unions are deploying a sophisticated arsenal of fear-based messaging, campaign cash, and manufactured crime statistics to roll back hard-won defunding victories. But grassroots coalitions are learning to outmaneuver them—and their strategies offer a replicable blueprint for every community still in the fight.

Oct 12, 2026

Activist Toolkit

From Budget Lines to Building Blocks: How Five Communities Defunded Police and Invested in Something Better

Across the United States, a handful of cities and counties have moved beyond the slogan and achieved actual, measurable reductions in police spending — redirecting those funds toward housing, mental health infrastructure, and youth services. Their campaigns offer a practical roadmap for organizers ready to do the same in their own communities.

Oct 12, 2026

Policy & Reform

Rogue or Restrained? Why Reform-Minded District Attorneys Keep Losing to the System They're Trying to Change

A growing wave of progressive prosecutors entered office promising to dismantle mass incarceration from within — only to collide with legislative walls, judicial resistance, and political retaliation. Their struggles reveal a hard truth: no single elected official, however principled, can reform a system designed to resist exactly that kind of change.

Oct 12, 2026

Policy & Reform

Sentenced to Debt: The Hidden Financial Penalties That Extend Punishment Far Beyond Prison Walls

For millions of Americans, a criminal conviction does not end when a sentence is served — it inaugurates decades of court-ordered fees, supervision costs, and restitution demands that can consume entire lifetimes. These financial obligations function as a parallel punishment system, one that operates largely out of public view and falls with crushing force on low-income people and communities of color. Grassroots campaigns across the country are now demanding what legislators have long refused t

Oct 12, 2026

Activist Toolkit

Treatment, Not Handcuffs: How Cities Are Dismantling the Criminalization of Mental Health and Addiction

Across the United States, a growing movement is challenging the foundational assumption that police are the appropriate first responders to mental health crises and substance use. From Oregon's landmark drug decriminalization measure to community-based crisis response programs in cities like Denver and Eugene, organizers and public health advocates are proving that care — not criminalization — produces better outcomes for individuals and communities alike. This is what abolition looks like in pr

Oct 12, 2026

Policy & Reform

Freedom Shouldn't Have a Price Tag: The Rise of Community Bail Funds and the Fight to End Pretrial Detention

America's cash bail system is not a neutral mechanism of justice—it is a wealth-sorting machine that decides who walks free and who rots in a cage before any verdict is rendered. Across the country, community bail funds and legal defense collectives are dismantling this architecture one freed person at a time. This piece examines how the bail-industrial complex operates, who profits from it, and how grassroots organizers are building genuine freedom from the ground up.

Oct 11, 2026

Activist Toolkit

Reclaiming the Hallways: A Practical Guide to Removing Police from Schools and Investing in Student Futures

School resource officers were introduced with promises of safety, but the data tells a different story: their presence escalates discipline, criminalizes adolescent behavior, and funnels Black and Brown students into the criminal legal system at devastating rates. This guide examines how the school-to-prison pipeline is constructed, profiles districts that have successfully eliminated police from their campuses, and equips school board advocates and parent organizers with a concrete roadmap for

Oct 11, 2026

Activist Toolkit

Classrooms Over Cruisers: A Community Organizer's Blueprint for Removing Police from Schools

Across the United States, hundreds of thousands of students encounter law enforcement officers before they encounter a school counselor. The school-to-prison pipeline is not an accident — it is a budget choice, replicated in district after district, that prioritizes policing over care. This guide is for the educators, parents, students, and organizers ready to reverse that choice.

Oct 11, 2026