About - Movements Against Mass Incarceration

Uncovering Untold and Suppressed Histories

We’re building the United States' first archive to center the political ideas and movement-building of incarcerated people and their allies.

A Gap in the Conversation

The U.S. has one of the largest prison populations globally, growing fivefold since 1980. A national conversation now seeks to address the root causes and downstream effects of mass incarceration, as well as the role of racism at each level of the carceral system.

Among the most important change agents influencing the conversation are incarcerated people themselves, who act by developing political visions, organizing networks, building and influencing institutions, and educating and challenging non-incarcerated publics. However, their contributions are often suppressed or overlooked.

Centering the Ideas and Experiences of People in Prisons

"The cost of silence is a lot more compared to the price I'll pay if I speak up. And so I've got to speak up."
Teresa Njoroge

Launched in 2024, Movements Against Mass Incarceration is creating a first-of-its-kind archive that centers the political ideas and movement-building of incarcerated people. This project is led by David Knight at Incite Institute at Columbia University and supported by a three-year grant from the Mellon Foundation.

This project will focus specifically on movements led by Black and Brown people who have experienced incarceration, as well as allied individuals and organizations outside of prisons. This work has several goals, including:

Creating go-to historical source materials for researchers and the public.
Resourcing movements that can be supported from preserving and sharing histories.
Facilitating fellowships and opportunities for individuals and organizations to create derivative works.

Between December 2023 and March 2026, Movements Against Mass Incarceration will conduct oral history interviews with 200 organizers, activists, and politically-oriented artists who are directly impacted by incarceration. In November 2024, we began releasing interviews to the public.

We're also partnering with the Marshall Project, a Pulitzer Prize-winning news nonprofit focused on the criminal legal system, to investigate the political attitudes and actions of incarcerated people in the United States. This partnership centers on a series of surveys conducted by the Marshall Project in prisons and jails. These surveys were weighted by David Knight and made available on our website to enable statistical inference to the U.S. jail and prison populations.