Andrew Krinks is a writer, educator, scholar, organizer, and movement builder working at the intersections of religion, racial capitalism, mass criminalization, abolition, and housing justice in Nashville, Tennessee.

His book White Property, Black Trespass: Racial Capitalism and the Religious Function of Mass Criminalization (NYU Press 2024) outlines the inherently religious function that criminalization fulfills for a colonial racial capitalist order that puts its faith in cops and cages to save it from the existential threat of disorder that its own structural violence creates. The story of criminalization, the book argues, begins with the eurochristian aspiration to become God at the expense of all others—an aspiration that gives rise to the pseudo-sacred powers of whiteness and property, and, by extension, the police power that exists to serve and protect them. Tracing the historical continuity and religiosity of the color line, the property line, and the thin blue line, the book reveals police power as the pseudo-divine power to exile nonwhite and dispossessed trespassers to carceral hell. Andrew has also published multiple essays and articles on criminalization and abolition in various journals and edited volumes.

Andrew teaches college, seminary, and inside-out prison courses on religion, theology, ethics, carcerality, abolition, and social justice, and has conducted participatory action research on the impacts of prisons and policing. He also facilitates popular political education on criminalization, abolition, and political spirituality with movement organizations, churches, and university students. In continuity with his writing and teaching, Andrew organizes and builds movement capacity in Nashville and across the southeast for a world of genuine safety and abundance for all beyond police and prisons.