At 24, Jarrell Daniels was released from prison after six years behind bars. It was a Thursday. The following Tuesday, he came back to the same facility in street clothes to attend the college class he’d started on the inside. He’s now a sophomore at Columbia University. The class that so inspired him was a novel experiment in an already unconventional setting: half of the students were people incarcerated in the facility, and half were local prosecutors. Their subject was the criminal justice system. Hear more about the experience, now being replicated by other district attorney’s offices, from Daniels, and from Lucy Lang, who conceived of the idea. A former Manhattan assistant district attorney, Lang is now the executive director of the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution.

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With Kim Foxx running for re-election as State’s Attorney in Cook County (Chicago), it’s an excellent moment to revisit one of the best conversations we’ve had on the podcast. Foxx, the first African-American woman to lead the office, has faced a campaign of sustained, often vicious, opposition from the moment she took the job and every indication is she should expect more of the same in her attempt to renew her mandate. But recent reporting—notably from The Marshall Project—suggests she is also following through on her promise to transform Chicago’s justice system. What is clear from this candid September 2018 interview is that Foxx knew she’d be fighting off critics every step of the way: “I think people wanted to have a narrative about what it meant for a black woman from the projects to have this job.”

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Hear all of the episodes in our Prosecutor Power series.

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