mass incarceration

Journalist Nicholas Dawidoff tells the tragic story of Bobby Johnson and his neighborhood on the poor, Black side of town. 

Perhaps for the same reasons people are today.

What if all were extended the gift of a second chance?

"By building social capacity, communities can respond to their own issues rather than rely on responses from the criminal justice system."

The new criminal justice law is modest. But it may signal a shifting narrative.

Two new books provide a devastating vision of America’s mental health crisis.

Is private management more efficient? Is it wrong to profit from punishment? Is the whole idea immoral in concept?

Incarceration is a tomb. It beats death into people.

John Pfaff's Locked In adds to what we've learned from Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow.

Who I'd invite to my writers' dinner party

Several recent films and shows portray people of color with a complexity that James Baldwin once assumed was impossible for pop culture.

For some kids, jail is a school field trip. For others, it's nearly inevitable.

My state has the same number of churches as prisoners. This fact haunts me.

Some riots protest injustice. Others perpetuate it.

Here in Washington State, there is roughly the same number of churches as there are prisoners.

Though most of the American churches in the past failed to be a people that manifested the kingdom of God in society during racialized chattel slavery, as well as during Jim Crow white supremacy, we have the opportunity to repent and live into a new and more Jesus-shaped story, being a people that do what God requires; doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly before our God. (Micah 6:8)

Imprisonment in this country is long on punishment and shamefully short on rehabilitation.

Marie Gottschalk describes an American penal system that has all but abandoned any real attempt to rehabilitate its inmates.