Dismantling Mass Incarceration

America’s criminal justice system perpetuates profound social and racial harms. But despite growing recognition of its destructiveness, the vast machinery of the carceral state remains very much intact. How can its damage be undone?

In this pathbreaking reader, three of the nation’s leading advocates for change—Premal Dharia, Maria Hawilo, and the Pulitzer Prize–winning author James Forman Jr.—provide us with tools to move from critique to action and from despair to hope. Dismantling Mass Incarceration surveys various approaches to confronting the carceral state, exploring a wide range of bold but practical interventions. Rather than prescribing solutions, the book offers a forum for discussions—and disagreements—about how the work of police, prosecutors, public defenders, judges, and prisons can be reformed, rethought, or even abolished. The book’s contributors include noted figures such as Angela Y. Davis, Clint Smith, and Larry Krasner, as well as local organizers, scholars, lawyers, judges, and people who have been incarcerated. Dismantling Mass Incarceration is an invaluable guide for anyone who wishes to understand America’s culture of punishment—and hasten its end.

“A glimpse behind the legal curtain, revealing what we must do to change.”—Keith Ellison, attorney general of Minnesota