My Sister Died of an Overdose. Defunding the Police Might Have Saved Her.
My little sister Keeley died of a heroin and fentanyl overdose in February 2020, just as the pandemic was beginning to descend on the United States. Keeley was the mother of a young child. She was...
View ArticleSocial Workers Can No Longer Remain Silent on Oppression of Palestinians
In October, the State of Israel criminalized six Palestinian human rights organizations, designating them as “terrorist groups,” which effectively outlawed their work, and put their workers (human...
View Article700,000 US Teens Navigate School Without Family Support or Permanent Housing
Luisa, age 19, was fed up with her mom’s demand that she complete all the household cleaning, from scrubbing the toilets, to washing the dishes, to doing the laundry. “I couldn’t take it anymore,” she...
View ArticleBlack Sexual Violence Survivors Are Telling Their Stories — Only to Be Punished
On December 15, 2021, 10 days before Christmas, DeBraca Harris sat in a Chicago, Illinois, courtroom to learn whether the legal system would recognize the sexual violence she had endured and allow her...
View ArticleDrug Decriminalization Is Working in Oregon. Other States Should Follow.
As COVID-19 continues to rage, another health crisis persists — one that is decades long. In the first year of the pandemic, the United States hit the devastating milestone of 100,000 overdose deaths,...
View ArticleTexas Abortion Funds Work to Reduce Looming Harms of Post-“Roe” Criminalization
Abortion support networks in Texas, including nonprofit organizations that provide abortion funding to low-income and marginalized people in the state, already know what it’s like to live a post-Roe v....
View ArticleOverturning “Roe” Would Immediately Activate Abortion Penalties in 13 States
Fueling widespread anguish over this week’s revelation that Roe v. Wade will likely be overturned in the coming weeks is the reality that the end of Roe would immediately activate civil and criminal...
View ArticleEven Abortion Rights Opponents Are Aghast at Brutality of GOP Bill in Louisiana
Louisiana’s leading anti-abortion organization does not support a bill set for a Thursday vote that would qualify abortion as murder under state law. “Our long-standing policy is that...
View ArticleThe Drug War Drives Exploitation. We Need Drug Regulation, Not Criminalization.
With more than a million lives lost in the United States in the two decades since the drug overdose crisis began and more than 103,500 in 2021 alone, some would have us believe that we are at a...
View ArticleNow Is the Time to “Aid and Abet” Abortion
As reproductive rights organizers have long anticipated — and as a leaked memo all but confirmed last month — the Supreme Court has ruled to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The...
View ArticleGrassroots Defense Committees Support Criminalized Survivors of Violence
Bayley Pitts believed that she would receive help when she went to the police as a teenage victim of sexual violence at the hands of her biological father. She did not — and now, Pitts faces the...
View ArticleFederal Judge Blocks Arizona Law Giving “Personhood” Rights to Fertilized Eggs
A federal judge on Monday barred enforcement of a so-called “personhood” law in Arizona that advocacy groups warned would be used to criminalize abortion across the state. The Center for Reproductive...
View ArticleUnhoused Activists Are Fighting a Surge of Bills Criminalizing Homelessness
As soaring rents force many out of their homes, advocates across the country are battling a slew of state and local measures that criminalize homelessness and imperil those living on the street. Police...
View ArticleFacebook Is Collaborating With Cops to Criminalize Pregnancy Outcomes
Celeste Burgess, a 17-year-old girl, and her mother, Jessica Burgess, now face felony charges in their home state of Nebraska after Celeste Burgess allegedly self-managed an abortion after Nebraska’s...
View ArticleOklahoma’s “Child Abuse” Law Doesn’t Protect Children — It Criminalizes Mothers
Karina had been looking forward to Christmas. In November, she had reunited with her 6-year-old daughter, who had been staying with Karina’s sister after Karina was evicted. That month, the family...
View ArticleLet’s Abolish Systems That Criminalize and Punish Survivors of Abuse
Content warning: This article describes domestic and sexual abuse, as well as violence committed by prison guards. Thousands of the women and trans and gender nonconforming people who are doing time in...
View ArticlePeople With HIV Are Still Being Criminalized in 25 States
In 2008, Robert Suttle’s life was upended. The 30-year-old had been working as an assistant law clerk at the Second Circuit Court of Appeal in Shreveport, Louisiana, when police arrested him in front...
View ArticleWoman Arrested in South Carolina for Allegedly Taking Abortion Pills in 2021
A woman in South Carolina was arrested and charged this week for allegedly taking abortion pills in 2021. As first reported by The State, the woman sought medical care associated with labor pains in...
View ArticleProposed Florida Bill Could Allow “Legal Kidnapping” of Trans Children
Florida’s unrelenting assault on trans livelihood has extended itself to criminalizing close supporters of trans individuals seeking gender-affirming care. On March 13, Florida’s Senate Committee on...
View ArticleNew Memphis Program Would Arrest Kids for Playing Music, Dancing, Selling Candy
Memphis Police Department’s (MPD) new Juvenile Crime Abatement Program, which was announced on Friday, has been paused for more discussion after community organizations decried the program as a racist...
View ArticleGeorgia Anti-Abortion Law Adds “Unborn Dependents” to Tax Code
This story was originally published in English at Prism. This tax season in Georgia, some people were asked an unexpected question: “Were you pregnant in 2022?” It’s the first time anyone in the U.S....
View Article3 Tennessee Teens Overdosed and 2 Died. Now the Survivor Is Charged With Murder.
An estimated 109,680 people died of a drug overdose in 2022. Police and policy makers at all levels of government spent billions of dollars over the past decade attempting to contain this crisis, but...
View ArticleCriminalized Survivors Face Judgement and Abuse From Their Own Defense Attorneys
“They’re offering you 40, I think you should take it.” This was Kwaneta Harris’s first interaction with her lawyer. Forty years in prison for protecting her life from a man she once cared for deeply....
View ArticlePregnant Black Woman Wrongly Arrested in Detroit Using Facial Recognition
Recent reports have revealed that the Detroit Police Department wrongly arrested a pregnant Black woman for a crime she did not commit after she was misidentified by the city’s facial recognition...
View ArticlePolish Government Develops Test That Can Detect If Someone Took Abortion Pills
Polish scientists have developed lab tests that can detect if a person has taken abortion pills and are reportedly using the tests to investigate pregnancy outcomes in the country, according to a...
View ArticleNearly 80 Percent of All Pregnancy-Related Arrests Occur in 5 Southern States
A new report released by Pregnancy Justice, a nonprofit that defends pregnant people from criminalization, has found that nearly 1,400 people in the U.S. were arrested for actions related to their...
View ArticlePolice Further Traumatize Sexual Assault Victims by Turning Them Into Suspects
Sequestered in a small interrogation room, sipping an iced coffee, Nicole Chase was trying to explain just how dysfunctional things had become at Nodine’s Smokehouse Deli and Restaurant, a family-owned...
View ArticleCriminalized Survivor Tracy McCarter Discusses the Movement to Free Her
October is National Domestic Violence Awareness and Prevention Month, and we look at how Black and Brown survivors of domestic abuse are further criminalized by police and prisons — and how activists...
View ArticleMother Sues Alabama Jail After Being Forced to Give Birth Alone in a Shower
Attorneys for an incarcerated mother in Alabama say she experienced nothing less than “torture” when she was jailed while pregnant, denied prescribed psychiatric medication and forced to give birth...
View ArticlePregnancy Criminalization in the US Is an “Avoidable Human Rights Crisis”
A new report from legal reproductive justice group If/When/How found that between 2000 and 2020, 61 people, including seven minors, were criminally investigated or arrested for allegedly ending their...
View ArticleSouth Carolina Is Ripping Infants Away From Their Mothers Over Pot Use
Imagine toiling on your feet throughout an entire pregnancy, trying desperately to gain weight despite debilitating nausea, surviving domestic violence while pregnant and finally giving birth to a...
View ArticleChallenging the Criminalization of Trauma Survivors
What do successful alternatives to policing, prosecution and prison actually look like? And how would they work? A group of Chicago’s leading public safety, health and justice innovators gathered at...
View ArticleConservatives in Tennessee, Oklahoma Introduce “Abortion Trafficking” Bills
Right-wing lawmakers in Tennessee and Oklahoma have introduced “abortion trafficking” bills that would criminalize helping pregnant minors access abortions out of state. These bills mirror Idaho’s...
View ArticleI’ve Been Unhoused. It Could Happen to You. Let’s Stop Criminalizing It.
For a period in 2005, I was one of the more than 740,000 people who were experiencing homelessness at that time in the U.S. On an eastern section of Sunset Boulevard where tourists never venture,...
View ArticleIVF Patient Speaks Out Against Alabama High Court’s Embyro Ruling
Reproductive health and medical groups are asking the Alabama Supreme Court to rehear the case in which the justices ruled frozen embryos should be considered children. The decision sent shockwaves...
View ArticleCriminal Charges Filed Against Russian Gay Club for “LGBT Extremism”
Russian authorities have initiated the country’s first-ever criminal case into “LGBT extremism,” according to Yekaterina Mizulina, head of the Kremlin-aligned Safe Internet League. Mizulina asserted...
View ArticleSCOTUS Ignores Housing Crisis in Hearing on Laws Criminalizing Unhoused People
Grants Pass, Oregon, population 39,000, has passed three ordinances since 2017 to prohibit “sleeping on public sidewalks, streets, or alleyways,” and prohibit camping on “sidewalks, streets, alleys,...
View ArticleGrieving Mothers Say Punitive New Drug Laws Won’t Solve the Overdose Crisis
Ahead of Mother’s Day, grieving moms who lost their children to drug overdose are warning that the wave of punitive anti-drug legislation sweeping the country would not have prevented the deaths of...
View ArticleWill Involuntary Homelessness Become a Crime?
On April 22nd, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments for Grants Pass v. Johnson, a case that focuses on whether unhoused — the term that has generally replaced “homeless” — people with no indoor...
View ArticleAnti-Mask Laws Target Gaza Protests, But They Threaten All Progressive Movements
Across the United States, right-wing legislators are targeting protesters who oppose the genocide in Palestine by resurrecting laws against wearing face masks in public. In North Carolina, the...
View Article2 Years After the End of “Roe,” We Must Demand More Than Its Restoration
Two years after the Supreme Court decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ended federal protections for the legal right to abortion, the number of people traveling across state lines to...
View ArticleSCOTUS Ruling Sets Stage for Battle Over Camping Bans Against Unhoused People
The conservative majority on the Supreme Court ruled last week that cities can enforce bans on sleeping outside and essentially criminalize homelessness. City governments in western states now have the...
View ArticleIllinois Students Who Protested Gaza Genocide Are Facing Felony Mob Charges
Pre-trial hearings for students who participated in a Gaza solidarity encampment in central Illinois last spring are being held on November 20 and December 4, 2024. The outcome of the four students’...
View ArticleThe Right Has a 150-Page Battle Plan to Shut Down Progressive Civil Society
In the wake of Donald Trump’s election, after a campaign in which Trump threatened the press, the left and “the enemy within,” 204 Republicans and 15 Democrats in the House of Representatives decided...
View ArticleUS’s First Overdose Prevention Site Continues Research-Backed, Lifesaving Work
At 8 a.m. on a Monday morning, most of the soft recliners in the waiting area of the three-story East Harlem overdose prevention center (OPC) are already occupied by those who have come to consume...
View ArticleThe Attack on Mahmoud Khalil Is Straight Out of the “War on Terror” Playbook
Mahmoud Khalil did everything by the book. The 30-year-old Palestinian came to the United States to study, completed his master’s degree at an Ivy League school, married a U.S. citizen and obtained...
View ArticleFederal Judge Halts Alabama’s Effort to Target Interstate Abortion Care
A federal court has ruled that Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall and district attorneys cannot take legal action against people who help pregnant Alabamians access abortion care in states where...
View ArticleTrump Lawsuit Against Driving Access Seeks to Grab Undocumented People’s Data
For the six years Marina, 35, had no valid driver’s license, she felt constant fear when behind the wheel. She would limit her travels to what was strictly necessary, forgoing professional, educational...
View ArticleMothers of Imprisoned Sons Struggle Emotionally and Financially With No Support
Every mother of an incarcerated son has the day her child entered state custody memorized: Whether she had been waiting in semiconscious dread for the call that started it all, or was stunned by a...
View Article3 Years in, Horrors Wrought by Anti-Abortion “Dobbs” Ruling Are Apparent to All
It’s been three years since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, an odious Supreme Court ruling that has unleashed a veritable crisis of rights, health, and safety for people who can become...
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