Police unions, prison guard unions, district attorney associations, and others in the law enforcement lobby have long wielded their power to nix any reforms that attack the carceral state. To defund the police, we’ll have to challenge their power head-on.
US police departments spend tens of millions of dollars every year to manipulate the news, flooding the discourse with “copaganda.” These aggressive tactics give the public a distorted view of what public safety means, what threatens it, and how to solve it.
Ending the horrors of our criminal justice system won't just require proposing strong progressive criminal justice policy — it will also require building a mass movement that can end mass incarceration. Bernie Sanders is the only candidate who's doing both.
The 1980s saw the spread of a nationwide panic about “stranger danger,” a supposed epidemic of child kidnappings and murders. Under the guise of protecting children, the media-driven hysteria helped spur mass incarceration.
Leading liberal Bill de Blasio is turning away from social programs in favor of tough-on-crime policies.
Bill Clinton's political career has been a disaster for black Americans.
The left hopes to push a de Blasio administration, but his police commissioner may not budge.
Minnesota is still living in the long shadow of George Floyd’s murder, the uprising it sparked, and the backlash that followed. Keith Ellison’s reelection bid for the state’s attorney general is playing out in that shadow.
Rudy Giuliani is crisscrossing the Americas, spreading the draconian policies he pioneered in New York City.
In 1993, New York had its first black mayor — and Rudy Giuliani stirred up a police riot at City Hall.
What does it say about the state of Israel and its backers that it can get away with repeated attacks on aid shipments to Palestinian civilians?
The violence in Mexico isn't just fueled by megalomaniac drug lords as depicted in shows like Narcos. Transnational capital is also responsible for the bloodshed.
The remake of Death Wish is a failure — because the law-and-order politics animating the original film triumphed long ago.
Anti-mafia authors, police investigators, and far-right militants in Italy have a new obsession — organized crime by Nigerian citizens. But sensationalism about Nigerians importing “black magic” and “bloodthirsty violence” from afar fails to grasp the root of the problem — the criminal forms of organization that pervade Italian capitalism as a whole.
Rather than asking whether law enforcement and vigilantes like Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse support or oppose one another, we can see them as different groups who are both performing the same function — policing society.
The highly acclaimed new book Ghettoside tries to explain inner-city violence while papering over structural oppression.
Netflix’s new series Ripley, the latest iteration of Patricia Highsmith’s murderous con man from The Talented Mr Ripley, is an arty, inert snooze. Its flat portrayal of the title character doesn’t come close to the novels or other fantastic adaptations.
Debates during the rise of Margaret Thatcher can tell us much about how to respond to our political moment.
Bill Clinton's crime policies left many poor people with only two options: prison, or homelessness.