Ruth Wilson Gilmore

An in-depth reckoning with the Gates Foundation as a discrete actor is long overdue.

Popular accounts often trace the origins of forced penal labor to the post-Civil War South. But a vast system of forced penal labor existed in the antebellum North.

An interview on the queer history of a forgotten prison.

Infrastructural projects should be understood in terms of whose lives they make more livable—and the futures they enable or foreclose.

In “Captives,” former Rikers detainee Jarrod Shanahan traces the history of New York City’s sprawling jail complex, and its centrality to brutal class struggle.

A conversation with Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò on his new book, which investigates the co-option of identity politics and the importance of coalitional organizing. 

By documenting how public debt produced our present nightmare, Destin Jenkins allows us to dream about using public money to mend the ills of our era.

As wartime labor shortages depleted police forces, and fear of crime grew, chiefs turned to new initiatives to strengthen and professionalize their officers.

Radical Black thinkers have long argued that racial slavery created its own unique form of American fascism.

One idea inherited from 1960s radicalism is that of “white privilege,” a protean concept invoked to explain wealth, political power, and even cognition.

The New Deal's legacies of infrastructure and economic development, and entrenching structural racism, reveal the potential and mistakes to avoid for the Green New Deal.

Prison and police abolition were key to the thinking of many midcentury civil rights activists. Understanding why can help us ask for change in our own time.