Portside

To save the planet, a Green New Deal has to transform our entire society. Part of that transformation must include the deconstruction of our system of mass incarceration.

But the persistence of racially biased policing means that unless American policing reckons with its racist roots, it is likely to keep repeating mistakes of the past.

Ava DuVernay’s miniseries shows why the hysteria surrounding the 1989 case caused more children to stand trial as adults than at any other time in U.S. history.

Led by people directly impacted by imprisonment, organizations in California have been building on the growing national momentum to end the money bail system.

Imagine a quickly assembled militia, with legally purchased firearms and military-like training, having a standoff with US Border Patrol over the family separations that have occurred at the border of the United States and Mexico.

A five-step guide to the police repression of protest from Ferguson to Baltimore and beyond

A 2009 study found that in Paris, individuals perceived as ‘black’ or ‘Arab’ were, respectively, six and eight times more likely to be stopped and searched than individuals perceived as ‘white’. Sihame Assbague, a spokesperson for Stop le Contrôle au Faciès, finds this baffling: ‘We have a left-wing government caving to a really right-wing police union.’

The successes of the civil rights movement were hardly based on simply revealing the racism of the United States. The Black Panthers and civil rights movements were about creating alternative bases of power, e.g. structures be they in law, mass mobilizations or community organizations that went beyond venting a narrative.