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In my latest for @truthout I wrote about our urgent need to abolish the death penalty. So many lives lost.
Rather than practices rooted in power and retribution, we need a framing of justice that centers rehabilitation—one grounded in healing, transformation, and human dignity.
The death penalty is always an atrocity, not just for the wrongfully convicted. We must abolish it.
truthout.org/articles/the-de…
Mustafa Ali-Smith retweeted
Mayor Zohran Mamdani is taking concrete steps on community safety and accountability by expanding gun violence prevention services and appointing four experts in criminal prosecution, public defense, civil rights, and violence prevention to the Civilian Complaint Review Board.
Mustafa Ali-Smith retweeted
"Effective, accountable policing alongside comprehensive crime prevention was a cornerstone of Mamdani’s campaign. It must remain the guiding principle of his administration.
Vera's Insha Rahman and Hans Menos on public safety in a @NYDailyNews op-ed: nydailynews.com/2026/10/16/n…
Mustafa Ali-Smith retweeted
Check out my new guide to the 25 essential tracks made in prisons.
themarshallproject.org/2026/…
Mustafa Ali-Smith retweeted
For decades, "tough on crime" legislation has failed communities and ratcheted up incarceration.
Today, lawmakers in Congress continue to support bills that won’t work to prevent crime or break its cycle.
Mustafa Ali-Smith retweeted
Much of the reaction to the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act has been focused on the national and state levels, but its effect in silencing Black voters at the local level might be even larger, @GrahamDavidA argues. theatlantic.com/newsletters/…
Mustafa Ali-Smith retweeted
The Clemency Project “gives students the opportunity to see that you're not defined by the worst thing that you did,” said Joe Krakora, a former New Jersey public defender and SPIA in NJ affiliate. spia.princeton.edu/news/stud…
Mustafa Ali-Smith retweeted
This makes my blood boil. The arrest for being short $2. The number of cops surrounding her & her child for no justifiable reason. The cop picking up & carrying her child without permission & to who knows where. Why are we funding state violence instead of public transportation?
BREAKING | Woman Taken Into Custody After Allegedly Being Short on LIRR Fare
A Citizen App user on the scene reports that a woman and her son were two dollars short for the LIRR train, prompting a police response. Citizen App video shows the woman being taken into custody. #ProtectTheWorld
Mustafa Ali-Smith retweeted
In @VitalCityNYC today with some ideas for a comprehensive approach to traffic and road safety for the Mamdani administration.
"Speed cameras should be the first step toward improved transportation infrastructure across New York City," write @aaron_stagoff, Jonathan Ben-Menachem & @BrendenBeck.
vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-speed-c…
News broke yesterday that Claudette Colvin died at the age of 86. And I find myself sitting with the weight of it—the weight of a name that should have been a household name but became, instead, a story many of us may have never heard before.
Claudette Colvin paid the price of the ticket, the cost of admission to this American struggle for dignity and freedom. We are living our lives, in part, because of what she sacrificed.
open.substack.com/pub/redesi…
Mustafa Ali-Smith retweeted
The ICE killing in Minneapolis represents a refinement of what Noem and Trump and the American right's underlying message has distilled into: that the right kind of people are entitled to destroy anything that threatens, frightens, impedes or even annoys them, and that this right is so sovereign and so unencumbered that any misapplication of it rises only to the level of collateral damage.
bit.ly/4symglZ
In my most recent essay, I put some words together about ICE, which, to talk about ICE is to talk about violence in this country. How it is defended. How it is maintained.
Read below:
open.substack.com/pub/redesi…
Mustafa Ali-Smith retweeted
On this day in 1931, a mob of 2,000 white people seized a Black man named Raymond Gunn, placed him on the roof of a school for white students, and burned him alive.
calendar.eji.org/racial-inju…
My latest essay: The Price of Freedom: on clemency power and the selective nature of American mercy.
open.substack.com/pub/redesi…
Mustafa Ali-Smith retweeted
“I tell my students, ‘When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else”. - Toni Morrison born Feb 18.
Mustafa Ali-Smith retweeted
Unhoused people face a litany of unfair criminal charges simply because they’re unhoused – usually for actions they take when just trying to survive.
Clearly, the solution to homelessness is not more criminalization. No one should be punished for not having a place to stay.
ALT Graph titled: Unhoused people are less often jailed for "violent" charges compared to others, and more often jailed for charges related to survival behaviors
Mustafa Ali-Smith retweeted
1 in 3 people behind bars is in jail. Most have yet to be tried in court and are legally innocent.
Does that look like a system built on justice?
ALT Pie chart showing 653,000 people are in jail in the US
Sending a big congratulations to @DorothyERoberts, @ruha9, and the rest of these remarkable folks!
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