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On World Refugee Day, Support Refugees, Don't Deport Them
The US dropped the bombs that forced Southeast Asian families to flee and is now deporting them back to the very land that is still littered with American bombs.
Jun 20, 2026
I was only an infant when my family slipped into a weathered wooden boat under the cover of darkness in 1978. Our journey across the mighty Mekong River was wrapped in an eerie, suffocating stillness as my parents, older brother, and I fled Laos. Whenever my mother recounts that night, she always ends with the same whispered awe: “It is a miracle you and Alex didn’t make a sound. I was terrified we wouldn’t make it.”
It would be decades before I fully grasped the terror of that treacherous crossing, the complex geopolitical forces at play, and the shared history between the US and my birth country that forced us out into the night.
I think of that river escape every year on World Refugee Day. It is a day to honor the immense courage of those forced to flee everything they know. For me, it is also a day that demands a deeply honest look at how we treat people once they arrive on our shores.
Following the violence that consumed Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam in 1975, millions fled, culminating in the largest refugee resettlement in American history. We arrived first through sponsorship programs, and later through the Refugee Act of 1980, laying new roots across the US. Today, our Southeast Asian American community has grown to over 3 million, with vibrant enclaves from California to Minnesota, and my home here in Ohio.
Instead of tearing families apart here at home, the United States must commit to fully funding the removal of unexploded ordnance in Laos until the job is done.
My family is one of the lucky ones. After years of hardship, Columbus welcomed us and helped us plant our roots. Today, I am full of gratitude for my parents' sacrifice, and we are proud to give back through family businesses we built and by serving on nonprofit boards like the annual Columbus Asian Festival and Legacies of War.
Not every story mirrors ours.
Many Southeast Asian refugees were resettled in severely under-resourced, over-policed neighborhoods without the support necessary to heal from the invisible, lingering wounds of war. Forced to navigate poverty and systemic barriers, some young refugees became entangled in the criminal justice system. Decades later—long after they have served their time, rehabilitated, and built families—they are being subjected to a cruel double punishment.
Since 1998, over 17,000 Southeast Asians have received deportation orders. Many have lived here for decades; the United States is their chosen home, and often the only home they have ever known. Once someone is deported, there is almost no way back, severing families permanently. These policies do not make America safer. They merely manufacture new trauma, uprooting lives all over again.
The tragic irony of these deportations is impossible to ignore. We are sending refugees back to a country still littered with the very weapons that drove their families into the dark to begin with.
Laos remains the most heavily bombed country per capita in history. From 1964 to 1973, in a covert effort to destroy traffic along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the US dropped at least 2.5 million tons of ordnance across 580,000 bombing missions. That is the equivalent of a planeload of bombs falling every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years. Even today, unexploded ordnance continues to claim civilian lives, with children making up over 60% of those harmed.
True accountability requires a different path. It requires cleaning up the remnants of war that America left behind in Laos and honoring the humanity of those who survived it. For decades, US programs have addressed these lasting legacies. These efforts not only save lives and support vulnerable communities, but they also bolster years of diplomatic progress in a region of immense strategic importance. Foreign aid is not charity—it is a strategic investment for our country. US assistance in Southeast Asia consistently garners bipartisan support precisely because it yields clear, tangible benefits: enhanced safety, economic stability, and strengthened bilateral cooperation.
Instead of tearing families apart here at home, the United States must commit to fully funding the removal of unexploded ordnance in Laos until the job is done. I urge members of Congress to join the UXO and Demining Caucus and support legislation like the Southeast Asian Deportation Relief Act. We must end this cycle of displacement and keep our communities whole.
The United States was forged by those seeking a better life. This enduring legacy is embodied by the Statue of Liberty, our "Mother of Exiles," who stands as a beacon of hope for people escaping persecution and war.
World Refugee Day was first celebrated 25 years ago. This year’s theme, "solidarity with refugees," calls on us to recognize that true compassion does not end at the border. It means standing by refugees as they build their lives, acknowledging the full weight of our shared past, and ensuring that no one who seeks refuge from danger is ever forced back into harm’s way.
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This Juneteenth, Remember That Organizing Is Key to Democracy
As corrupt leaders advance efforts to weaken democratic oversight and centralize power, we must activate our own agenda.
Jun 19, 2026
This Juneteenth arrives at a moment when many of the hard-fought gains of the civil rights movement feel undeniably fragile. The Supreme Court’s recent Louisiana v. Callais decision gave state lawmakers the green light to reduce Black voting power by redrawing congressional maps. Meanwhile, the SAVE America Act and other proof-of-citizenship efforts propose new burdens for millions of eligible voters—especially voters of color who are more likely to face difficulty accessing required records.
As Black Americans, this should concern us deeply. For years after the ratification of the 15th Amendment, our ancestors had to overcome poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and constant threats of violence to participate in our democracy. When Fannie Lou Hamer attempted to register to vote in Mississippi, she was fired from her job and forced from her home; Amzie Moore endured years of harassment and retaliation for helping Black Mississippians register to vote and build political power. But despite these hardships, they persevered.
Which is why one question continues to trouble me as a Black pastor and grassroots organizer: How did we move from a generation willing to risk everything for political participation to an overwhelming number of people believing participation doesn't matter?
Research shows that most Americans feel political leaders are out-of-touch with ordinary people, reflecting a deep and widespread sense that politics is reserved for an elite few. But we must remember that politics is simply the process of shaping the world around us—and by that definition, we are all politicians.
Organizing reminds people that change has always come from ordinary people deciding they have a stake in their own future.
At my organization, Live Free Illinois, we embrace our identities as politicians in our own right. For instance, in January, we successfully organized Gov. JB Pritzker to sign the Clean Slate Act, a transformational public safety bill that removes barriers to employment, housing, and education opportunities for people with past convictions. It took nearly five years of tireless organizing, but our bill crossed the finish line—and became a law with $5.6 million in funding to implement it. This victory makes clear that politics does not only belong to some unreachable class of leaders; it belongs to the people willing to organize and demand change.
Our ancestors did not organize because they believed the government was perfect. They organized because they understood that power would not listen unless it was confronted. They built churches, mutual aid networks, civic organizations, and political movements because they knew that liberation required disciplined collective action. That lesson is just as relevant today. The authoritarian forces seeking to diminish our democratic participation are counting on our exhaustion, our cynicism, and our disengagement. We cannot afford to give them any of those things.
That responsibility does not begin and end at the ballot box. It lives in church fellowship halls where neighbors gather to address violence in their communities, in voter registration drives after Sabbath, and in the courage of ordinary people who demand better from those in power. This may not look like the politics we’ve been taught to disdain, but they are among the most powerful political acts we can undertake. It is how our communities can transform shared concerns into lasting change.
I have spoken with many parishioners who have felt overwhelmed by the challenges facing our community. But when I encourage them to organize—to gather their neighbors, advance shared priorities, and demand accountability—something shifts. They begin to recognize that the power they were searching for was already in their hands. Organizing reminds people that change has always come from ordinary people deciding they have a stake in their own future.
Juneteenth is a timely reminder that our democracy demands more than participation; it demands organization. As corrupt leaders advance efforts to weaken democratic oversight and centralize power, we must activate our own agenda—and hold elected officials accountable to it. The future of our communities depends on whether we are willing to embrace that responsibility.
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There Is No Right Way for the State to Kill People
From noose to needle to nitrogen, our constant search for a more acceptable way to administer the death penalty is a story of failure—not moral progress.
May 31, 2026
As a long-time death penalty abolitionist, I’ve often compared the death penalty in America to a train with no brakes: Once the machinery starts moving, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to stop.
But the real problem is that the train should never have been built.
Today, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Arkansas are experimenting with nitrogen gas executions, a method officials claim is more humane. But from noose to needle to nitrogen, our constant search for a more acceptable way to kill is a story of failure—not moral progress.
There’s no acceptable way to practice a form of state killing that, for Black Americans especially, has long been intertwined with terror.
History should make us skeptical whenever governments begin searching for new technologies to make killing appear more acceptable.
Take my home state of Arkansas. Within a year of becoming a state in 1836, Arkansas adopted laws establishing a racial hierarchy by which even civilian whites could dispossess or punish a Black person. These codes even designated certain offenses as capital crimes when committed by Black people but lesser crimes when committed by white people.
The message was clear: Some lives were worth less than others.
That message echoed through the decades that followed. Between 1877 and 1950, Arkansas recorded 493 documented lynchings—the highest per capita rate in the nation. In Arkansas and throughout the South, these killings were not hidden crimes. They were public spectacles—acts of terror meant to reinforce social hierarchy.
Eventually, lynching became politically unacceptable. But state killing did not disappear—it simply changed form. The spectacle moved behind prison walls, and the language became more clinical. But the act of killing remained the same.
George Hays, who served two terms as governor of Arkansas, wrote in 1927 that “if the death penalty were to be removed from our statute-books, the tendency to commit deeds of violence would be heightened owing to the Negro problem. The greater number of the race do not maintain the same ideals as the whites.”
Since the Civil War, Arkansas has executed nearly 500 people—and 68% of those executed were Black or Native American. This is not distant history. Black inmates make up about 50% or more of the state’s death row today, despite Black Arkansans comprising less than 16% of the state’s total population.
Nor is Arkansas an outlier. Nationally, over half the people on death row today are Black or Hispanic.
Modern executions are often carried out by lethal injection, presented as sterile and humane. The condemned is strapped to a gurney while witnesses sit behind glass and chemicals stop the heart. But as these chemicals become less available, Arkansas and some other states have replaced lethal injection with nitrogen gas executions.
They claim the method is painless, but it is death by suffocation. Even veterinarians are forbidden from euthanizing cats and dogs with nitrogen hypoxia because it takes too long to lose consciousness and amounts to torture.
History should make us skeptical whenever governments begin searching for new technologies to make killing appear more acceptable. During the Holocaust, Nazi Germany constructed gas chambers designed to turn mass death into a technical process. This process was bureaucratic, hidden from public view, and deemed “efficient.”
Today, the death penalty follows a disturbingly similar logic. Each generation promises that the newest method will finally make execution humane. The noose. The electric chair. The gas chamber. Lethal injection. Now nitrogen gas.
Yet the fundamental act has never changed. The state still kills. The train keeps moving. Even when jurors change their minds. Even when victims’ families plead for mercy. Stopping the train requires courage—especially from elected leaders who have the power to do it.
Our history tells us what happens when a society accepts killing as justice. The death penalty has evolved for nearly two centuries, but there is only one real measure of moral progress: not how we kill, but whether we finally choose to stop.
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Different Faiths, One Moral Call: Why Mercy Must Prevail for Sonny Burton
As faith leaders, we walk alongside families in their pain, and we know this truth intimately: More death does not heal trauma. It only deepens it. As people of faith, we believe this moment calls for mercy.
Mar 04, 2026
As people of faith, a Muslim Imam, a Jewish Rabbi, a Protestant Pastor, and a Catholic Archbishop, we come from different traditions, yet we arrive at the same moral truth: The power to take a life must be exercised with profound humility, restraint, and reverence for human dignity. When irreversible harm is at stake, mercy is not weakness; it is moral strength. Across our faith traditions, we are taught that justice is not simply punishment. Justice divorced from mercy ceases to be just at all.
Our faiths teach that judgment ultimately belongs to God. Our responsibility is to protect life whenever possible, to act with compassion toward victims, and to refrain from violence when it is no longer necessary to protect society. Compassion for those who grieve is essential, as is humility about the limits of human judgment. God is God, and we are not.
Doug Battle’s life was taken, and that loss is permanent and devastating. We hold his family and loved ones in prayer, and we do not minimize their grief or the harm caused. Faith does not ask us to forget the victim, nor does it excuse the wrongdoing that led to this tragedy. Rather, it calls us to confront suffering truthfully to honor the life that was lost while resisting the belief that another death can restore what has been taken.
When those most deeply affected by violence, particularly a victim’s own family, call for mercy, faith asks us to listen with care. In this case, the victim’s daughter has publicly urged the governor to choose clemency, and 6 of the 8 original jurors, who once bore the responsibility of this decision, now support mercy in the form of clemency for Sonny Burton. Extreme punishment does not heal loss. It compounds it.
A system that knows when not to kill demonstrates wisdom, not weakness.
While Sonny Burton bears responsibility for his actions, faith traditions consistently teach that punishment must be proportionate to culpability. Capital punishment has long been understood, even by its supporters, as reserved for the most extreme acts of intent and responsibility.
Burton’s case brings this teaching into sharp focus. He did not pull the trigger that took a life, yet he faces execution while the state agreed to resentence the triggerman to life without parole and he later died in prison. In moments like this, faith calls us to examine not only what the law permits, but what conscience requires.
Clemency in such circumstances is not a failure of justice. It is a humane expression of justice, one that recognizes accountability while refusing to impose irreversible punishment where moral certainty is absent. Exercising restraint in such moments can strengthen, rather than weaken, public trust. A system that knows when not to kill demonstrates wisdom, not weakness.
In a situation such as this, where a non-shooter still faces death while the State resentenced the shooter to life without parole, prudence calls for restraint. This is not about being “soft on crime.” It is about being faithful to a vision of justice that is humane, measured, and worthy of public trust.
As faith leaders, we walk alongside families in their pain, and we know this truth intimately: More death does not heal trauma. It only deepens it. As people of faith, we believe this moment calls for mercy.
Governor Ivey, as people of faith, we respectfully ask you to choose humility over finality and mercy over irreversible harm. Clemency for Sonny Burton would not deny justice; it would affirm the sacred value of life.
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In Blow to 'Fetal Personhood' Push, Alabamian Serving 18 Years After Stillbirth Gets New Trial
"I'm hopeful that my new trial will end with me being freed, because I simply lost my pregnancy at home because of an infection," said Brooke Shoemaker, who has already spent five years in prison.
Dec 30, 2025
While Brooke Shoemaker and a rights group representing her in court are celebrating this week after an Alabama judge threw out her conviction and ordered a new trial, her case is also drawing attention to the dangers of "fetal personhood" policies.
"Laws and judicial decisions that grant fetuses—and in some cases embryos and fertilized eggs—the same legal rights and status given to born people, such as the right to life, is 'fetal personhood,'" explains the website of the group, Pregnancy Justice. "When fetuses have rights, this fundamentally changes the legal rights and status of all pregnant people, opening the door to criminalization, surveillance, and obstetric violence."
Since the US Supreme Court's Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization ruling ended the federal right to abortion in 2022, far-right activists and politicians have ramped up their fight for fetal personhood policies. Pregnancy Justice found that in the two years after the decision, the number of people who faced criminal charges related to their pregnancies hit its highest level in US history.
Shoemaker's case began even earlier, in 2017, when she experienced a stillbirth at home about 24-26 weeks into her pregnancy. Paramedics brought her to a hospital, where she disclosed using methamphetamine while pregnant. Although a medical examiner could not determine whether the drug use caused the stillbirth—and, according to Pregnancy Justice, "her placenta showed clear signs of infection"—a jury found her guilty of chemical endangerment of a minor. She's served five years of her 18-year sentence.
"After becoming Ms. Shoemaker's counsel in 2024, Pregnancy Justice filed a petition alongside Andrew Stanley of the Samford Law Office requesting a hearing based on new evidence about the infection that led to the demise of Ms. Shoemaker's pregnancy, leading the judge to agree with Pregnancy Justice's medical witness and to vacate the conviction," the rights group said in a Monday statement.
Lee County Circuit Judge Jeffrey Tickal wrote in his December 22 order that "should the facts had been known, and brought before the jury, the results probably would have been different."
Shoemaker said Monday that "after years of fighting, I'm thankful that I'm finally being heard, and I pray that my next Christmas will be spent at home with my children and parents... I'm hopeful that my new trial will end with me being freed, because I simply lost my pregnancy at home because of an infection. I loved and wanted my baby, and I never deserved this."
Although Tickal's decision came three days before Christmas, the 45-year-old mother of four remained behind bars for the holiday last week, as the state appeals.
"While we are thrilled with the judge's decision, we are outraged that Ms. Shoemaker is still behind bars when she should have been home for Christmas," said former Pregnancy Justice senior staff attorney Emma Roth. "She was convicted based on feelings, not facts. Pregnancy Justice will continue to fight on appeal and prove that pregnancies end tragically for reasons far beyond a mother's control. Women like Ms. Shoemaker should be allowed to grieve their loss without fearing arrest."
AL.com reported Tuesday that "Alabama is unique in that it is one of only three states, along with Oklahoma and South Carolina, where the state Supreme Court allows the application of criminal laws meant to punish child abuse or child endangerment to be applied in the context of pregnancy."
However, similar cases aren't restricted to those states. Pregnancy Justice found that in the two years following Dobbs, "prosecutors initiated cases in 16 states: Alabama, California, Florida, Idaho, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. While prosecutions were brought in all of these states, to date, the majority of the reported cases occurred in Alabama (192) and Oklahoma (112)."
This is fantastic news!!I wrote in my book how the medical examiner ruled the cause of the stillbirth "undetermined," but the coroner (who lacks medical training) instead listed cause of stillbirth as mom's meth usage on the fetal death certificate.
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— Jill Wieber Lens (@jillwieberlens.bsky.social) December 30, 2025 at 12:25 PM
"Prosecutors used a variety of criminal statutes to charge the defendants in these cases, often bringing more than one charge against an individual defendant," the group's report continues. "In total, the 412 defendants faced 441 charges for conduct related to pregnancy, pregnancy loss, or birth. The majority of charges (398/441) asserted some form of child abuse, neglect, or endangerment."
"As has been the case for decades, nearly all the cases alleged that the pregnant person used a substance during pregnancy," the report adds. "In 268 cases, substance use was the only allegation made against the pregnant person. In the midst of a wide-ranging crisis in maternal healthcare and despite maternal healthcare deserts across the country, prosecutors or police argued that pregnant people's failure to obtain prenatal care was evidence of a crime. This was the case in 29 of 412 cases."
When the publication was released last year, Pregnancy Justice president Lourdes A. Rivera said in a statement that "the Dobbs decision emboldened prosecutors to develop ever more aggressive strategies to prosecute pregnancy, leading to the most pregnancy-related criminal cases on record."
"This is directly tied to the radical legal doctrine of 'fetal personhood,' which grants full legal rights to an embryo or fetus, turning them into victims of crimes perpetrated by pregnant women," Rivera argued. "To turn the tide on criminalization, we need to separate healthcare from the criminal legal system and to change policy and practices to ensure that pregnant people can safely access the healthcare they need, without fear of criminalization. This report demonstrates that, in post-Dobbs America, being pregnant places people at increased risk, not only of dire health outcomes, but of arrest."
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Illinois Proved Bail Reform Works; Washington Wants to Undermine It
Illinois did not just pass bail reform with the Pretrial Fairness Act—it built a safer, fairer, and more lasting pretrial system. Other states should take note.
Oct 13, 2025
Two years ago last month, Illinois became the first state to end cash bail. Critics warned the change would unleash chaos. It didn’t. Instead, Illinois proved that bail reform works—and endures.
Now, Congress and the White House are ignoring those facts, weaponizing fear and misinformation to attack the law and push for rollbacks nationwide. We can’t let them rewrite the story.
All my life, I’ve watched courts measure humanity against a dollar figure, jailing people—including members of my own family—not because they may be dangerous but because they’re poor. Cash bail doesn’t make us safer; it turns freedom into a commodity. That’s why I’ve spent more than a decade working in states across the country to build a pretrial system where safety, not wealth, determines who goes free before trial.
Cash bail doesn’t just punish poverty—it undermines the fundamental purpose of our pretrial system. It jails thousands of legally innocent people simply because they can’t pay, costing taxpayers billions and destabilizing lives. Even a few days behind bars can mean the loss of someone’s job, housing, or custody of their children, pushing them deeper into crisis and increasing the likelihood of future justice system involvement. Meanwhile, those with money—including people who may pose serious risks—can buy their freedom.
The lesson from Illinois is clear: Reform is not easy, but it is achievable and worth the fight.
Bail reform flips that logic. Under Illinois’ Pretrial Fairness Act, judges still decide when someone must be detained, but those decisions follow real hearings where evidence is presented—not the size of someone’s bank account. People can still be held if they pose a risk, but no one is jailed simply for being poor, and no one can buy their way out.
Despite the facts, public fear about crime is often driven not by bail reform but by visible crises like homelessness, untreated mental illness, and addiction—problems our legal system was never designed to solve. Too often, these conditions are criminalized through low-level charges instead of addressed with care. Cash bail can’t fix them—but investments in housing, treatment, and community services can. Yet just as those solutions are most needed, President Donald Trump and Congress slashed their funding. That failure, not bail reform, is the real threat to public safety.
Illinois recognized cash bail’s harm and built a different path. Its Pretrial Fairness Act is a national model, proving that reform is possible, sustainable, and broadly supported when built with care. The act was drafted with input from legal experts, lawmakers, impacted leaders, victims’ rights advocates, and grassroots organizers, balancing ideals and practical realities. Negotiations required compromise, but the core principle held: No one would be jailed simply for being poor.
Courts and communities had two years to prepare before the law took effect, and the coalition that championed it didn’t scatter—it trained judges, secured funding, and defended the law. The Bail Project, where I work, was one of many partners demonstrating the law’s potential. From 2019 to 2022, we provided free bail assistance and pretrial support to nearly 1,500 low-income Illinoisans—95% of whom returned to court without having money on the line. Building on that work, we invested $2.9 million in Chicago to pilot a supportive pretrial release model linking people to housing, jobs, healthcare, transportation, and court reminders. We also connected people released on recognizance bonds with affordable apartments—showing how stability keeps people from cycling back into jail.
Since implementation, crime did not surge—in fact, Chicago had its lowest summer murder rate since the 1960s—and court appearance rates held steady. The evidence is clear: Communities are not less safe because people are no longer detained for being poor. Illinois shows that when freedom is determined by risk and evidence rather than wealth, safety and fairness go hand in hand.
Yet even in the face of evidence, critics continue to exploit public anxieties about crime. In several states, misinformation has derailed reform—from outright repeal in Alaska to rapid rollbacks in New York and California. Illinois broke that pattern. Lawmakers held firm, recognizing that retreat would betray the communities most harmed by cash bail. That resolve is what separates reforms that endure from those that collapse.
Illinois did not just pass bail reform with the Pretrial Fairness Act—it built a safer, fairer, and more lasting pretrial system. Other states should take note. The lesson from Illinois is clear: Reform is not easy, but it is achievable and worth the fight.
History shows this pattern again and again: Every generation confronts reforms once branded as dangerous. Seat belt laws. Social Security. Medicaid. Each was dismissed as risky. Each is now recognized as essential. Illinois’ Pretrial Fairness Act belongs in that lineage.
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Crime and Punishment US Style: an Interview with David Garland
The author and NYU professor explains why America’s modern regime of policing and punishment is altogether extraordinary when measured against the practices of other developed nations.
Aug 28, 2025
The United States is a global outlier in several significant areas, not least of which is its extraordinary penal state with its penchant for extreme punitiveness.
Indeed, as Professor David Garland, one of the world’s most influential criminologists, argues in the interview that follows, for historical parallels with the penal state in the US one must look to the case of the Gulag system during Joseph Stalin’s reign as dictator of the Soviet Union. Moreover, Professor Garland contents that behind the harshness and cruelty of the US criminal legal system lies the nation’s racialized political economy, and that transforming the latter is a prerequisite for restructuring the former.
David Garland is the Arthur T. Vanderbilt professor of law and professor of sociology at New York University and an honorary professor at Edinburgh University. He is author of the newly published book Law and Order Leviathan: America’s Extraordinary Regime of Policing and Punishment.
C. J. Polychroniou: The United States has long portrayed itself as the greatest and freest country in the world, a model democracy for other countries across the globe. The reality, however, is that the US is the most economically unequal society in the developed world and one of the worst countries for racial equality. In addition, its weak and fragile liberal-democratic institutions have been exposed in recent times for all to see, while its penal system is what may easily be described as a national disgrace and an international embarrassment. Indeed, as you argue in your recently published book Law and Order Leviathan, the US is also an outlier among modern democracies in its policing and punishment practices, and this is indeed by no means a new phenomenon. How should we understand the country’s long-standing obsession with law and order?
David Garland: Yes, people think of America as Alexis de Tocqueville’s civil society when in fact it’s often closer to Thomas Hobbes’ authoritarian state. We see these repressive characteristics today in the conduct of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, but for the last 40 years the leading example has been the massive deployment of penal power by America’s criminal legal system—a deployment that has occurred at every level of government with broad bipartisan support.
The fundamental cause that has shaped America’s penal state is the nation’s racialized political economy and the material conditions created by its economic and political structures.
America’s modern regime of policing and punishment is altogether extraordinary when measured against the practices of other developed nations. American police kill civilians at a much higher rate; American courts impose longer and more frequent prison sentences; American prisons house massively more individuals, particularly Blacks and Latinos; and Americans with felony convictions are subject to many more controls and constraints after they serve their sentence. No other democracy exercises penal power to this extent. To find historical parallels, we have to look to the Soviet gulags or Mao’s political prison system.
There are many causes that converged to bring about America’s penal Leviathan—fear of crime, racism, neoliberalism, the appeal of law and order politics, a culture of cruelty and indifference—but the fundamental cause that has shaped America’s penal state is the nation’s racialized political economy and the material conditions created by its economic and political structures.
C. J. Polychroniou: The US has a weak welfare system and a distinct political economy in general compared to many European countries. Is there a direct link between weak welfare structures and the employment of aggressive policing and harsh punishment?
David Garland: Yes, and the book shows in detail what these linkages are and how they operate. Like its penal state, America’s political economy is an international outlier, with characteristics that set it apart from the economic arrangements of other high-income nations. This is especially true of its labor market—which provides fewer protections for working people, and more low-paid, precarious employment, making for a level of insecurity and instability that is unknown elsewhere in the developed world. On top of this, America’s welfare state provides less support for poor people and for those in need.
Material conditions for working people grew worse after the 1960s when the economic dislocations of deindustrialization were exacerbated by the collapse of the New Deal order, the decline of trade unions, and federal government’s abandonment of the inner cities. In the 1980s and 1990s, America exhibited social-problem levels markedly higher than other developed nations, the most striking of which was a rate of lethal violence—mostly gun homicides—that was off-the-charts high compared to other affluent countries.
The outlier status of America’s penal state will persist unless and until the nation’s political economy is transformed.
Drawing on urban studies and the sociology of violence, I show how pressures produced by America’s political economy—unemployment, disinvestment, deteriorating housing, limited social services, and so on—destabilize poor neighborhoods, undermining community life and family functioning, especially in racially segregated areas with concentrated poverty and population turnover. The result is that the vital processes of socialization, social integration, and informal social control normally carried out by families, schools, neighbors, and employers grow weak and fail, leading to social problems, social disorder, and criminal violence. These problems are deepened by the widespread availability of guns—another exceptional feature of the American landscape.
When homicides and armed robbery rates rose, and cities became disorderly and unsafe, voters demanded that something be done to improve public safety and protect their businesses and property values. But the same political economy that disorganized communities and triggered criminogenic processes also limited the governmental responses to these problems. In America’s racialized ultra-liberal political economy, redistributive policies are generally unpopular. And because responsibility for public safety is, in the US, a local function, few municipalities had the resources needed to respond to crime using the social policies and economic investments that are common in social democratic nations. Instead, they defaulted to the cheap policy instruments that were within their toolkit, namely police and punishment.
Moreover, American-style policing and punishment turns out to be remarkably aggressive. Why? Because of public indifference to the fate of those caught up in the carceral net; because the courts refuse to hold police and prisons to account; but mainly because penal state agents operate against a social background that is more disorganized, more dangerous, and more gun-laden than that of any other developed nation.
C. J. Polychroniou: As you point out in your book, public sentiments about police brutality, mass incarceration, and the penal state experienced a major shift away from punitive measures following the police murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. Indeed, as street protests ensued, the tenets of police and prison abolition gained currency, although alternatives still needed to be worked out. Be that as it may, the politics of law and order have since returned with a vengeance, as evidenced by the reelection of US President Donald Trump, who ran a campaign based on fear and anxiety. How do we explain this reversal?
David Garland: The plague year of 2020 was an extraordinary time, during which public anxiety and hopes for radical change often coexisted. (During the pandemic, the US created a pop-up European-style welfare state, with stimulus checks for every household; enhanced unemployment, housing, and child-allowance benefits; and massively extended healthcare coverage—only to dismantle it once the crisis had passed.) In retrospect, we can see that the massive street demonstrations that followed the police killing of George Floyd were possible because so many people were no longer at work or in school, making them available to join in the protests. Of course, many Americans were genuinely shocked by the brazen violence and racist disregard for human life that Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin displayed. But it is worth remembering, that by 2020, homicide levels and crime rates in general had been falling for more than a decade, relaxing public demands for tough-on-crime policies and enabling activists, such as the Black Lives Matter movement and local groups of abolitionists, to draw public attention to the pathologies of police violence, mass incarceration, and racialized criminal justice.
Democrats need to take the crime problem seriously and offer their own strategies and solutions—not just watered down versions of right-wing bromides.
In general, though, the American public is very conservative on matters of crime control and public safety, and demands for the “abolition” or “defunding” of police and prisons were never liable to have much traction beyond the world of activists, advocates, and academics—even when the liberal media briefly introduced these ideas into the mainstream. And while the life chances of middle-class white people are not normally affected by police violence or harsh prison sentences—in sharp contrast to poor communities of color—they are affected by crime and violence. So when, in the fall of 2020, there were reports of an uptick in shootings and homicides, public support drained away from Black Lives Matter and voters reverted to their long-standing preference for law-and-order candidates—as we saw in the election of Eric Adams to NYC Mayor, in the deselection of several progressive prosecutors, and eventually in the victory of Donald Trump. So the reversal was a political regression to the mean following an extraordinary historic moment.
However, I believe the protests of 2020, and the radical critique of the penal state that accompanied them, have changed the public discourse in important ways, introducing new ideas and radicalizing many young people who form part of the Democratic Party base. My hope is that this new level of concern about penal state repression will be joined with realistic, progressive proposals for dealing with crime and disorder. Democrats need to take the crime problem seriously and offer their own strategies and solutions—not just watered down versions of right-wing bromides. The emphasis should be on non-penal crime-control measures such as situational crime prevention; designing public spaces to make them safer; improving police training and effectiveness; relieving police of tasks for which they are not suited; enabling communities and not-for-profits to launch crime-reduction initiatives; supporting victims to reduce the likelihood of revictimization; and so on. Crime and disorder are real problems for working people; and the victims of homicide and assaults are most often poor and Black. Sustainable reform of the penal state must go hand in hand with effective crime control.
C. J. Polychroniou: What realistic possibilities are available to us for bringing about penal change if we do not first succeed in restructuring the political economy of the United States?
David Garland: To be clear, the outlier status of America’s penal state will persist unless and until the nation’s political economy is transformed. It is that peculiar political economy that makes American violence, policing, and punishment so extreme compared to other affluent nations. However, there is a range—I call it a “bandwidth”—of possible variation within which American crime, policing, and punishment can be changed: a structurally determined floor and ceiling between which lies the possibility of significant reform. That bandwidth of variation is a key part of the theoretical analysis set out in the book, and an empirical fact confirmed by recent developments.
Criminogenic processes and crime control policies are loosely coupled with political economy, not mechanically and directly determined by it. Crime-control policies can be altered, criminogenic processes interrupted, community work activated without any alternation in larger socioeconomic arrangements. For those hoping to bring about penal change, the existence of this relative autonomy is vitally important. It means that even if Nordic or Western European levels remain out of reach, there is nevertheless the real possibility of life-altering improvements in policing, punishment, and public safety.
There is a bandwidth of possibility within which variations in violence levels and penal state policies can occur even in the absence of larger structural change.
We know this because the last few decades have witnessed many instances of significant change. Over the last 20 years, the nation’s imprisonment rates declined from a high point of 765 per 100,000 to a new level closer to 600 per 100,000. Between 1995 and 2020 the nation’s annual homicide rate declined from around 10 murders for every 100,000 people to 5 per 100,000. Shootings of civilians by the New York Police Department (NYPD) dropped dramatically—from an average of 62 people shot and killed each year in the early 1970s to an average of nine per year between 2015 and 2021—after new forms of training, guidelines, and accountability were introduced. The NYPD also reduced its deployment of stop and frisk from over 680,000 per year in 2011 to 11,000 in 2018—the result of a court ruling not a social transformation. Between 1997 and 2023, 2 million formerly incarcerated people regained the right to vote, thanks to campaigns against felon disfranchisement. And since 2000, the imprisonment rate for Black men has fallen by almost half, thanks in large part to the scaling back the war on drugs.
Each of these changes was significant, even radical, affecting the lives of hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of people. Together, they amount to an empirical demonstration of the book’s theoretical claim that there is a bandwidth of possibility within which variations in violence levels and penal state policies can occur even in the absence of larger structural change.
Nevertheless, the gravitational force exerted by structural arrangements—and the powerful interests that support them—is, in the final analysis, ineluctable. America’s political economy sets definite limits to what can be achieved and imposes upper bounds on what is possible. Until its structures are transformed, America’s penal state will continue to impose a level of punishment and control that has no equivalent in the developed world.
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With DC Law Enforcement Under His Control, Trump Says Death Penalty Coming Back
"So in DC and Washington, states are going to have to make their own decision, but if somebody kills somebody... it's the death penalty, OK?" the president said during a cabinet meeting.
Aug 26, 2025
US President Donald Trump on Tuesday said that he wants to bring the death penalty back to Washington, DC, where capital punishment has been outlawed for more than 40 years.
In a cabinet meeting, Trump pitched bringing back the death penalty as part of his purported solution to what he claims is Washington, DC's violent crime crisis—one that isn't backed up by data.
"Anybody murders something in the capital? Capital punishment," Trump said. "If somebody kills somebody in the capital, Washington, DC, we're going to be seeking the death penalty. And it's a very strong preventative. And everybody that's heard it agrees with it. I don't know if we're ready for it in this country... we have no choice. So in DC and Washington, states are going to have to make their own decision, but if somebody kills somebody... it's the death penalty, OK?"
Trump: "Anybody murders something in the capital -- capital punishment. Capital, capital punishment. If somebody kills somebody in the capital -- Washington DC -- we're going to be seeking the death penalty." pic.twitter.com/zDbQb2IGI7
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 26, 2025
It's unclear how Trump would implement the death penalty given that the DC Council abolished it in 1981 and DC voters overwhelmingly voted against a referendum to bring it back in 1992. However, the Trump administration has been trying to hit alleged criminals in the city with federal charges that could potentially expose them to harsher punishments.
Prosecutors in DC are permitted to seek the death penalty for certain crimes, including some homicides, but a jury has to agree to it.
Trump has a long history of glorifying the death penalty dating back to at least 1989, when he took out a full-page newspaper ad in which he declared it was time to "bring back the death penalty" to deal with crime in New York City.
The Trump ad was printed in the wake of five Black male teenagers—known popularly as the "Central Park Five"—being falsely accused of brutally beating and raping a woman in Central Park. Even after the five men were eventually exonerated years later, Trump refused to acknowledge their innocence and continued to insist upon their guilt, as recently as during the 2024 presidential election campaign.
In the last months of his first term, Trump went on what one publication called an "execution spree," ordering the federal executions of at least 13 people who were on Death Row.
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Trump Pushes Policies That 'Treat Homelessness and Mental Illness as a Crime'
"Homelessness is a policy failure," said one ACLU leader. "Weaponizing federal funding to fuel cruel and ineffective approaches to homelessness won't solve this crisis."
Jul 24, 2025
Advocates for mental health and unhoused people blasted U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday over his executive order titled "Ending Crime and Disorder on America's Streets."
Trump's order directs U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to end policies that restrict the government from institutionalizing "individuals on the streets who are a risk to themselves or others." She must also work with other Cabinet members "to prioritize grants for states and municipalities that enforce prohibitions on open illicit drug use, urban camping and loitering, and urban squatting, and track the location of sex offenders."
As a White House fact sheet highlights, the order also "redirects funding to ensure that individuals camping on streets and causing public disorder and that are suffering from serious mental illness or addiction are moved into treatment centers, assisted outpatient treatment, or other facilities." Further, it ensures grant money does not "fund drug injection sites or illicit drug use."
In a statement to USA Today, which first reported on the executive action, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that "by removing vagrant criminals from our streets and redirecting resources toward substance abuse programs, the Trump administration will ensure that Americans feel safe in their own communities and that individuals suffering from addiction or mental health struggles are able to get the help they need."
Meanwhile, National Coalition for the Homeless executive director Donald Whitehead Jr. declared that "everyone deserves a safe place to live."
Trump's policies, he said, "ignore decades of evidence-based housing and support services in practice. They represent a punitive approach that has consistently failed to resolve homelessness and instead exacerbates the challenges faced by vulnerable individuals."
Predictable, but no less shocking or reprehensible: Trump just signed an executive order urging states to forcibly institutionalize homeless people, defund Housing First, criminalize encampments, and cut aid to cities that don't comply.
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— Brian Goldstone (@brian-goldstone.bsky.social) July 24, 2025 at 5:14 PM
The National Homelessness Law Center (NHLC) similarly called out the president for pushing policies that "treat homelessness and mental illness as a crime."
"Across America, sky-high rents are both the leading cause of homelessness and a primary cause of financial stress for most families," NHLC said. "Instead of helping people who are struggling to make ends meet, Donald Trump remains focused on backwards, expensive, and ineffective policies that make homelessness worse."
"The National Homelessness Law Center strongly condemns today's executive order, which deprives people of their basic rights and makes it harder to solve homelessness," the group added. "This executive order is rooted in outdated, racist myths about homelessness and will undoubtedly make homelessness worse."
Scout Katovich, senior staff attorney with the ACLU's Trone Center for Justice and Equality, tied the order to the Republican Party's broader agenda, saying that "from the so-called 'Big Beautiful Bill' that will strip healthcare from millions to this dangerous executive order, every action this administration takes displays remarkable disdain for the rights and dignity of vulnerable people."
"Pushing people into locked institutions and forcing treatment won't solve homelessness or support people with disabilities," she said. "The exact opposite is true—institutions are dangerous and deadly, and forced treatment doesn't work. We need safe, decent, and affordable housing as well as equal access to medical care and voluntary, community-based mental health and evidence-based substance use treatment from trusted providers."
"But instead of investing in these proven solutions, President Trump is blaming individuals for systemic failures and doubling down on policies that punish people with nowhere else to go—all after signing a law that decimates Medicaid, the number one payer for addiction and mental health services," Katovich added. "Homelessness is a policy failure. Weaponizing federal funding to fuel cruel and ineffective approaches to homelessness won't solve this crisis."
As The Washington Post reported:
The executive order was issued as the Trump administration has slashed more than $1 billion in Covid-era grants administered by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and is proposing to slash hundreds of millions more in agency grants.
"There's no question we need to do more to address both homelessness and untreated substance use disorder and mental health conditions in the U.S.," said Regina LaBelle, director of the Addiction and Public Policy Initiative at the Georgetown University Law Center and a former drug policy official in the Biden White House. "But issuing an executive order, while disinvesting in treatment and other funding that will help prevent homelessness and untreated health conditions, will do nothing to address the fundamental issues facing the country."
Trump's order comes after the latest federal figures showed a surge in homelessness, and the U.S. Supreme Court's right-wing majority ruled last year that local governments can enforce bans on sleeping outdoors, effectively criminalizing homelessness.
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How Does Copaganda Work and Why Is It Harmful?
Copaganda contributes to a cycle in which the root causes of our safety problems never get solved even though people in power constantly claim to be trying.
May 17, 2025
Copaganda is a specific type of propaganda in which the punishment bureaucracy and the powerful interests behind it influence how we think about crime and safety. I use the term “punishment bureaucracy” instead of “criminal justice system” in this book because it is a more accurate and less deceptive way to describe the constellation of public and private institutions that develop, enforce, and profit from criminal law. The government determines what things are considered a “crime” subject to punishment versus what things are permitted or tolerated even if they hurt people. Then, the government determines what kinds of punishments are appropriate for the conduct it prohibits. Across history and different societies, the definition of crime and how it should be punished has varied depending on who has power and what serves their interests, not an objective evaluation of what causes harm.
The powerful define crime to suit their interests, making some things legal and others punishable. They also decide how what is criminalized gets punished. Should the government execute or cage or whip people who break a law? Should the government mandate a public apology, permit survivors to initiate restorative processes, seize assets, require volunteer work, revoke a business or driver’s license, confine someone to their home, banish them? Should society show them love and give them help? Should society instead invest more in preventing certain harms from happening in the first place?
Having defined crime and punishment, the government also determines which crimes to enforce against which people. “Law enforcement” rarely responds to most violations of the law. It only enforces some criminal laws against some people some of the time.
The obsessive focus by news outlets on the punishment bureaucracy as a solution to interpersonal harm draws away resources from investment in the things that work better, along with a sense of urgency for those priorities.
These decisions, too, follow patterns of power, not safety. That is why U.S. police chose for many years to arrest more people for marijuana possession than for all “violent crime” combined. That is why police prioritize budgets for SWAT teams to search for drugs in poor communities over testing rape kits. That is why the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office responded to proposed county budget cuts by threatening to cut the divisions that handle white-collar crimes and sexual abuse. That is why about 90 percent of people prosecuted for crimes are very poor. That is why no senior figures were prosecuted for the 2008 financial crisis or the U.S. torture program after 9/11. That is why police tolerate widespread drug use in dorms at Ivy League universities. That is why most of the undercover police operations in hundreds of U.S. cities target disproportionately Black, Hispanic, and immigrant people instead of other police officers, prosecutors, real estate developers, fraternities with histories of drug distribution and rape, or corporate board rooms with histories of tax evasion, fraud, and insider trading. That is why a playground fight at a low-income school results in a child being taken away from their parents and jailed with a criminal record, while the same fight at a prep school may result in a call to parents for an early pickup that afternoon.
In an unequal society where a few have more money and power than the many, the punishment bureaucracy is a tool for preserving inequalities. It maintains the social order by using government violence to manage the unrest that comes from unfairness, desperation, and alienation, and it crushes organized opposition against the political system. These functions explain why the punishment bureaucracy expands during times of growing inequality and social agitation. Throughout history, those who are comfortable with how society looks tend to preserve and expand the punishment bureaucracy, even though—and largely because—it operates as an anti-democratic force. Those who have wanted to change certain aspects of our society—such as movements for workers, racial justice, women’s suffrage, economic equality, peace, ecological sustainability, immigrant rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and so on—have tended throughout history to combat the size, power, and discretion of the punishment bureaucracy. Why? Because it is almost always wielded against them.
So, how does copaganda work? It has three main roles.
Job #1: Narrowing Our Understanding of Threat
The first job of copaganda is to narrow our conception of threat. Rather than the bigger threats to our safety caused by people with power, we narrow our conception to crimes committed by the poorest, most vulnerable people in our society. For example, wage theft by employers dwarfs all other property crime combined—such as burglaries, retail theft, and robberies—costing an estimated $50 billion every year. Tax evasion steals about $1 trillion each year. That’s over sixty times the wealth lost in all police-reported property crime. There are hundreds of thousands of known Clean Water Act violations each year, causing cancer, kidney failure, rotting teeth, damage to the nervous system, and death. Over 100,000 people in the United States die every year from air pollution, about five times the number of homicides. At the same time, most sexual assaults, domestic violence crimes, and sex offenses against children go unreported, unrecorded, and ignored by the legal system. Punishment bureaucrats feed reporters stories that measure “safety” as any short-term increase or decrease in, say, official homicide or robbery rates, rather than by how many people died from lack of health care, how many children suffered lead poisoning, how many families were rendered homeless by eviction or foreclosure, how many people couldn’t pay utility bills because of various white-collar crimes, how many thousands of illegal assaults police and jail guards committed, and so on. Sometimes the rates of various crimes go up and down, and we should all be concerned about any form of violence against any human being. But the first job of copaganda is getting us focused almost exclu- sively on a narrow range of the threats we face, mostly the officially-recorded crimes of poor people, rather than the large-scale devastation wrought by people with power and money.
Job #2: Manufacturing Fear
The second job of copaganda is to manufacture crises and panics about this narrow category of threats. After the 2020 George Floyd uprisings, for example, the news bombarded the public with a series of “crime waves” concerning various forms of crime committed by the poor even though government data showed that, despite some categories of police-reported crime rising and others falling at the beginning of the pandemic, overall property and violent crime continued to be at near-historic fifty-year lows the entire time. As a result of continual news-generated panics, nearly every year of this century, public opinion polls showed people believing that police-reported crime was rising, even when it was generally falling.
Copaganda leaves the public in a vague state of fear. It manufactures suspicion against poor people, immigrants, and racial minorities rather than, say, bankers, pharmaceutical executives, fraternity brothers, landlords, employers, and polluters. Copaganda also engenders fear of strangers while obscuring the oppressive forces that lead to interpersonal violence between acquaintances, friends, and family members. (Police themselves commit one-third of all stranger-homicides in the U.S., but these figures are generally excluded from reported crime rates.) This matters because when people are in a perpetual state of fear for their physical safety, they are more likely to support the punishment bureaucracy and authoritarian reactions against those they fear.
Job #3: Promoting Punishment as the Solution
The third job of copaganda is to convince the public to spend more money on the punishment bureaucracy by framing police, prosecutors, probation, parole, and prisons as effective solutions to interpersonal harm. Copaganda links safety to things the punishment bureaucracy does, while downplaying the connection between safety and the material, structural conditions of people’s lives. So, for example, a rise in homeless people sleeping in the street might be framed as an economic problem requiring more affordable housing, but copaganda frames it as “disorder” solvable with more arrests for trespassing. Instead of linking sexual assault to toxic masculinity or a lack of resources and vibrant social connections to escape high-risk situations, copaganda links it to an under-resourced punishment system. Like a media-induced Stockholm syndrome, copaganda sells us the illusion that the violent abuser is somehow the liberator, the protector, our best and only option.
If police, prosecutions, and prisons made us safe, we would be living in the safest society in world history. But, as I discuss later, greater investment in the punishment bureaucracy actually increases a number of social harms, including physical violence, sexual harm, disease, trauma, drug abuse, mental illness, isolation, and even, in the long term, police-recorded crime. Instead, overwhelming evidence supports addressing the controllable things that determine the levels of interpersonal harm in our society, including: poverty; lack of affordable housing; inadequate healthcare and mental wellness resources; nutrition; access to recreation and exercise; pollution; human and social connection; design of cities, buildings, and physical environments; and early-childhood education. Addressing root causes like these would lower police-reported crime and also prevent the other harms that flow from inequality that never make it into the legal system for punishment, including millions of avoidable deaths and unnecessary suffering that exceed the narrow category of harm that police record as “crime.”
The obsessive focus by news outlets on the punishment bureaucracy as a solution to interpersonal harm draws away resources from investment in the things that work better, along with a sense of urgency for those priorities. It also promotes the surveillance and repression of social movements that are trying to solve those root structural problems by fighting for a more equal and sustainable society. Copaganda thus contributes to a cycle in which the root causes of our safety problems never get solved even though people in power constantly claim to be trying.
As you read the examples collected in this book with the above three themes in mind, ask yourself: what kind of public is created by consuming such news? If we see one of these articles once, we may not notice anything odd, or we may shake our heads at how silly, uninformed, and nefarious it is. But if we see thousands of them over the course of years, and we hardly see anything else, we become different people. It is the ubiquity of copaganda that requires us to set up daily practices of individual and collective vigilance.
Copyright © 2025 by Alec Karakatsanis. This excerpt originally appeared in Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News, published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission and please note that it is not available for re-posting elsewhere.
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