Think of probation as an enormous testing period: will you be able to adhere to the thicket of conditions governing your daily life? Fail at any of them and you could be sent to prison. At the heart o

A brief, moving excerpt from the recent award ceremony at the New York Public Library announcing the inaugural winner of the Inside Literary Prize, the first major U.S. book award to be judged exclusi

"They actually care. They want to hear about what we think, the ones that they have shut away." - The Inside Literary Prize is the first major U.S. book award to be judged exclusively by people who ar

What would it mean to decriminalize mental healthto stop criminalizing the symptoms of what is very often untreated mental illness? And what would it mean to put racial justice at the center of that

Three years ago, Oregon broke with the War on Drugs, decriminalizing the possession of most illicit drugs. The measure promised instead a "health-based approach." But the legislature has just ended th

Vincent Schiraldi used to run probation in New York City; now hes asking whether it should even exist. Schiraldi says some of the roots of mass supervisionand its connection to mass incarcerationca

A profile of the fight to secure lawyers for people facing eviction and the radical impact that is having in Housing Court. With its 1963 Gideon decision, the Supreme Court guaranteed a lawyer to any

As the legal scholar Paul Butler wrote ten years ago, "On every anniversary of Gideon, liberals bemoan the state of indigent defense." On this 60th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision g

April Barber Scales was a pregnant 15-year-old when she received two life sentences; Anthony Willis was 16 when he was sent away for life. After more than 25 years behind bars, they each received some

A recent two-day training for Manhattan prosecutors was a drumbeat on the harms of incarceration; hardly the typical message prosecutors receive. The training was part of a wider effort by D.A. Alvin