New Thinking, from the Center for Justice Innovation

Latest Episodes:

Criminal Justice as Social Justice: Bruce Western Feb 12, 2020

Show notes

Bruce Western’s book, Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison, is, as its title suggests, about the challenges confronting people re-entering society after a period behind bars. But it’s also inevitably about the deep harms of incarceration itself. And moving further backward still, it’s about the problems and life-histories that leave people vulnerable to the criminal justice system in the first place. Ethically, Western asks, what are we to make of a system whose default response to those problems is jail or prison? In Homeward, Western outlines a very different, much more hopeful vision.

This is an updated version of an episode originally released in September 2018.

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“One of These Days We Might Find Us Some Free”: Reginald Dwayne Betts Jan 16, 2020

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In 1996, 16-year-old Reginald Dwayne Betts was sentenced to nine years in prison for a carjacking. He spent much of that time reading, and eventually writing. After prison, he went to Yale Law School and published a memoir and three books of poems. But he’s still wrestling with what “after prison” means. This is a conversation about incarceration, blackness, and the weight of history, both political and personal. Betts’s most recent collection of poems is Felon.

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Introducing ‘In Practice’ Jan 02, 2020

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In Practice is a new podcast from the Center for Court Innovation focusing on practitioners—people working on the ground to make things better for those touched by the justice system. On the first episode, host Rob Wolf looks at the challenge domestic violence cases pose to probation departments. Subscribe today (Apple podcasts)!

College Incarcerated Dec 19, 2019

Show notes

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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Kim Foxx: Rooted in Humanity Dec 04, 2019

Show notes

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.

What Do We Know About Community Service? Nov 08, 2019

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Community service has long been a staple of sentencing in the U.S., and has long enjoyed a sunny, mostly uninterrogated, reputation as a more restorative and humane alternative to fines and fees or short-term jail. But two new reports—one from the Center for Court Innovation and one from the UCLA Labor Center—suggest many of the ways courts are actually using community service is undercutting its potential to act as a genuine alternative sentence.

The episode is in two acts. In Act One, an on-location snapshot of community service at the Center for Court Innovation. In Act Two, Joanna Weiss of the Fines and Fees Justice Center runs through some of the troubling recent findings, and outlines recommendations for making an alternative sentence work.

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Ending Bail, Closing Rikers: How Change Happens Oct 15, 2019

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The movements to end cash bail and close jails are connected, and gabriel sayegh has been in the thick of organizing both fights. The co-executive director of the Katal Center for Health, Equity, and Justice explains why he thinks New York’s impending reforms to bail are potentially the most sweeping in the country. And in a critical week for the campaign to close New York City’s notorious Rikers Island jail facility, sayegh, one of the founders of the #CLOSErikers effort, outlines why the heated debate on the left over what is to come after Rikers, is a split organizers have long known was coming.

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Jail-Attributable Deaths Sep 25, 2019

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As chief medical officer for New York City jails, Homer Venters realized early in his tenure that for many people dying in jail, the primary cause of death was jail itself. To document these deaths, Venters and his team created a statistical category no one had dared to compile before: “jail-attributable deaths.” His work led him into frequent opposition with the security services. It also led to his book, Life and Death in Rikers Island, about New York City’s notoriously violent jail facility.

Full show notes (transcript, images, resources & references)

Art vs. Mass Incarceration Sep 04, 2019

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Can art transform the criminal justice system? On this special edition of New Thinking, host Matt Watkins sits down with two New York City artists on the rise—Derek Fordjour and Shaun Leonardo—who both work with our Project Reset to provide an arts-based alternative to court and a criminal record for people arrested on a low-level charge. With the program set to expand city-wide, the three discuss art’s potential to help heal a racialized criminal justice system.

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Beyond the Algorithm: Risk and Race Aug 14, 2019

Show notes

**episode originally aired in October 2018**

About two out of three people in local jails are being held awaiting trial, often because they can’t afford bail. What if a mathematical formula could do a more objective job of identifying who could be safely released? That’s the promise of risk assessments. But critics call them “justice by algorithm,” and contend they’re reproducing the bias inherent to the justice system, only this time under the guise of science.

UPDATE August 2019: Since this episode aired, the report covering much of the same ground as the podcast has been published. You can read ‘Beyond the Algorithm’ here. The study was also covered by The Marshall Project and The Appeal, among others.

Full show notes (includes episode transcript and our famed resources & references section)