How effective is therapy or treatment when it’s used instead of incarceration, and what are the challenges to conducting it inside the coercive context of the criminal justice system? New Thinking host Matt Watkins is joined by clinical psychologist Jacob Ham who works with justice-involved young people affected by trauma, and John Jay College’s Deborah Koetzle who evaluates programs aiming to help participants rebuild lives outside of the justice system.

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**This episode was originally released in January 2019**

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Josie Duffy Rice says remaking the justice system is a generational struggle, but it’s one progressives are winning. The well-known criminal justice commentator and activist, president of the news site The Appeal and host of its podcast, Justice in America, explains why she believes in the power of big ideas and offers her take on the federal election, “defund the police,” and the role of the media in promoting, or thwarting, change.

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Why do some young people carry guns? It’s a difficult question to answer. People in heavily-policed neighborhoods with high rates of violence aren’t generally enthusiastic about answering questions about gun use. In this special episode, hear from three of the authors of a groundbreaking year-long study into young people and guns. The findings are disturbing, but if the goal is to learn directly from marginalized communities what they need to combat gun use, no less important is the remarkable way the research was conducted.

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In their book, Prison By Any Other Name, activists Victoria Law and Maya Schenwar contend that much of what is packaged today as “reforms” to the criminal legal system are extending, not countering, that system’s harmful effects. So what is the ultimate goal of reform of a system like the criminal legal system? (Episode nominated for a Media for a Just Society award in 2021.)

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While crime of nearly every kind has been declining amid COVID-19, in cities across the country, gun violence and homicides have been the exceptions. Long-time researcher and former Obama DOJ official, Thomas Abt, says there are proven solutions to reduce the violence. But he says both the right and the left fail to grasp the essence of any solution: focus on the violence itself. Abt is the author of Bleeding Out: The Devastating Consequences of Urban Violence and a Bold New Plan for Peace in the Streets.

This episode was originally released in July 2019 (new episodes start next week!)

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Listen back to New Thinking’s episode with Patrick Sharkey, author of Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, The Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence.

Learn more about the Center for Court Innovation’s “credible messenger” violence interruption program, Save Our Streets.

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The alleged use of a $20 counterfeit bill, selling loose cigarettes on a street corner, a broken brake light—think how many police encounters that ended with the killing of a Black person began with misdemeanor enforcement. If you want to shrink the role of police and the justice system, misdemeanors are the best place to start. Low-level, often “order maintenance,” charges make up 80 percent of criminal cases, and it’s here the justice system’s endemic racial disparities are at their most yawning.

In this conversation from February 2019, Alexandra Natapoff explains how the consequences of the sprawling misdemeanor system can trail someone for life. She calls that system “one of the great, under-appreciated engines of racial inequality in this country,” tracing its roots to the backlash against Reconstruction at the end of the Civil War.

A professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, Natapoff is the author of Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal.

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Restorative justice is about repairing harm. But for Black Americans, what is there to be restored to? This episode features a roundtable with eight members of the Center for Court Innovation’s Restorative Justice in Schools team. They spent three years embedded in five Brooklyn high schools—all five schools are overwhelmingly Black, and all five had some of the highest suspension rates in New York City.

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The episode features music from Zanny London, a student at one of the high schools in the program. Find more of his work on SoundCloud and Instagram.

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The death of George Floyd after a white Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee to Floyd’s neck for close to nine minutes has triggered a wave of long-held anger and revulsion across the country. Vincent Southerland, the executive director of the Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law at NYU, compares Floyd’s death—in public, in broad daylight—to a lynching. The furor comes in the midst of a pandemic itself exacerbated by racism. How will COVID-19, and the reaction to police violence, affect the deep racial patterns of the justice system?

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Interview recorded May 29

Hear the first episode in the ‘Justice and the Virus’ series with Rachel Barkow

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With justice systems across the country scrambling to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a lot of talk about what justice is going to look like when the virus ends. But what has the response actually consisted of—especially from prisons and jails, which have emerged as epicenters of the virus—and is there any reason to anticipate a “new normal” to emerge? New York University law professor Rachel Barkow explains her skepticism.

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Hear Barkow on New Thinking discuss her 2019 book, Prisoners of Politics: Breaking the Cycle of Mass Incarceration

Interview recorded on May 19

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The infection rate from COVID-19 in New York City’s Rikers Island jails is currently almost 30 times the rate for the U.S. as a whole. As the city struggled to get people out from behind bars—criticized both for moving too slowly, and for even contemplating releasing anyone early from a jail sentence—it turned to a trio of nonprofits to repurpose a successful program on the fly. The urgency of supporting people being released abruptly from jail in the midst of a pandemic is clear, but so are the challenges. The experience also raises the question: what happens to criminal justice when the virus ends?

Interview recorded on May 1

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See a summary of results from the Rikers Early Release Program

Listen to a related New Thinking: ‘Jail-Attributable Deaths’

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