New Thinking, from the Center for Justice Innovation
224 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 month ago - ★★★★★ - 40 ratingsNew Thinking is a podcast about justice—and injustice—in America. It’s about the people working to fix a justice system that falls so short of our ideals, and the people organizing to build something new in its place. It’s hosted by Matt Watkins and produced by the Center for Justice Innovation (formerly Center for Court Innovation).
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Episodes
The War on Drugs Returns to Oregon
March 19, 2024 17:58 - 28 minutes - 65.9 MBThree years ago, Oregon broke with the War on Drugs, decriminalizing the possession of most illicit drugs. The measure promised instead a "health-based approach." But the legislature has just ended the short-lived experiment. The law met stiff headwinds from the start: from the arrival of fentanyl on the West Coast to a relentless opposition campaign. But part of what went wrong was a challenge for any legislation: implementation. How do you make a sweeping new approach work on the ground? ...
Oregon Recriminalizes Drug Possession
March 19, 2024 17:58 - 28 minutes - 65.9 MBThree years ago, Oregon broke with the War on Drugs, decriminalizing the possession of most illicit drugs. The measure promised instead a "health-based approach." But the legislature has just ended the short-lived experiment. The law met stiff headwinds from the start: from the arrival of fentanyl on the West Coast to a relentless opposition campaign. But part of what went wrong was a challenge for any legislation: implementation. How do you make a sweeping new approach work on the ground? ...
Gideon at 60: Deconstructing Mass Supervision
December 16, 2023 20:09 - 36 minutes - 58 MBVincent Schiraldi used to run probation in New York City; now he’s asking whether it should even exist. Schiraldi says some of the roots of mass supervision—and its connection to mass incarceration—can be found in a surprising place: the Supreme Court’s 1963 Gideon decision. It recognized, but failed to adequately support, a poor person’s right to a lawyer. Hear the final episode in our “Gideon at 60” series. Full show notes
Gideon at 60: Uncivil Justice
November 16, 2023 16:23 - 24 minutes - 38.6 MBA profile of the fight to secure lawyers for people facing eviction and the radical impact that is having in Housing Court. With its 1963 Gideon decision, the Supreme Court guaranteed a lawyer to any poor person facing prison time. For criminal cases, the decision was both sweeping and critically incomplete. On the civil side, the campaign for a right-to-counsel is taking a different approach—it's slow and piecemeal, but it's also working. This is the second episode in our series on the lega...
Gideon at 60: The Unfunded Mandate
April 04, 2023 10:42 - 38 minutes - 61.9 MBAs the legal scholar Paul Butler wrote ten years ago, "On every anniversary of Gideon, liberals bemoan the state of indigent defense." On this 60th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision granting a lawyer to every poor defendant facing prison time, there is much to bemoan. Yet as the harms of the criminal legal system come into sharper relief, there is a larger question: even if Gideon's promise was fulfilled, how much would that change who principally suffers under the current sy...
When Young People Go to Prison for Life
February 14, 2023 19:38 - 58 minutes - 94.5 MBApril Barber Scales was a pregnant 15-year-old when she received two life sentences; Anthony Willis was 16 when he was sent away for life. After more than 25 years behind bars, they each received something desperately rare: clemency. They describe how they fought against a prison system that "sets you up for failure." We also hear from an organization in Baltimore that works exclusively with young people at high risk of violence. Rather than arrests and incarceration, what do these young peop...
Emphasizing the Harms
November 04, 2022 18:56 - 27 minutes - 62.4 MBA recent two-day training for Manhattan prosecutors was a drumbeat on the harms of incarceration; hardly the typical message prosecutors receive. The training was part of a wider effort by D.A. Alvin Bragg to expand the use of alternatives such as treatment and restorative justice. But in a newly cramped climate for criminal justice reform, can that effort become a reality? Full show notes
Evicting Evictions
June 28, 2022 20:06 - 20 minutes - 36.7 MBHousing is a human right. What if we designed our systems—beginning with Housing Court—to embody that? Given the current eviction crisis, it's a far-off concept, but there's work to make it a reality in pockets across the country. In this special episode, hear a profile of one of those efforts in a Brooklyn neighborhood. Full show notes
Reform and Its Discontents
May 09, 2022 15:41 - 34 minutes - 47.3 MBNominated for a Media for a Just Society award, revisit New Thinking's conversation with activists Victoria Law and Maya Schenwar. In their book, Prison By Any Other Name, Law and 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? Full show notes
Why Data Doesn’t Stick
March 24, 2022 17:54 - 37 minutes - 51.6 MBEfforts to reform the justice system often tout they're "evidence-based" or "data-driven." But at a moment when a national increase in crime, likely triggered by the pandemic, seems to have put the reform movement on its heels, why do arguments based on data rarely seem to win the day? Guests Christina Greer and John Pfaff are both scholars and frequent media commentators working at the intersection of criminal justice data and politics. Full show notes Hear Pfaff on New Thinking as part of...
Can We Close Rikers?
January 25, 2022 21:54 - 34 minutes - 55.9 MBNew York City has committed to closing its notorious Rikers Island jail facility by 2027. That could dramatically reorient the city's approach to incarceration. The plan envisions a citywide jail population of just over 3,000 people. But the population at Rikers has been growing for months, and Rikers itself is engulfed in crisis amidst a historic spike in deaths. What are the prospects for finally getting Rikers closed? Full show notes
The Question of Dirty Work
November 22, 2021 20:08 - 39 minutes - 54.3 MBEyal Press contends there are entire areas of life we've delegated to "dirty workers"—functions we've declared necessary, but that we strive to keep hidden. In his new book, Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America, Press points to the transformation of jails and prisons into the country's largest mental health institutions. He calls the people struggling to offer treatment in those settings "dirty workers"—not because their work isn't noble, but because collect...
Taking Reform Out of Its Comfort Zone
October 25, 2021 05:00 - 34 minutes - 54.9 MBJustice reforms often exclude people with charges involving violence, even though these are the same people most likely to be incarcerated and to be in the most need of the programs and treatment reform can bring. But a felony court in Manhattan is offering alternatives to incarceration, regardless of charge. Can a treatment-first approach be brought to scale inside of the same system responsible for mass incarceration in the first place? Full show notes
The Crisis on Rikers Island
September 22, 2021 15:18 - 3 BytesAn audio snapshot from an emergency rally demanding immediate measures to release people from New York City's Rikers Island jail. Eleven people have died in the custody of the city's jail system this year as Rikers' chief medical officer warns of "a collapse in basic jail operations."
Cages Don’t Help Us Heal
August 10, 2021 05:30 - 30 minutes - 42.4 MBHurt people hurt people. That's not an excuse for harm, but it fuels much of the criminal legal system. At 19, Marlon Peterson was the unarmed lookout on a robbery where two people were killed. Peterson spent a decade behind bars. He writes about those years, and the childhood in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, that preceded them, in his new memoir, Bird Uncaged: An Abolitionist's Freedom Song. I made my own choices, Peterson says, “but I also did not choose to experience the type of things I experi...
One of These Days We Might Find Us Some Free: Reginald Dwayne Betts
July 20, 2021 15:47 - 42 minutes - 59.1 MBIn 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. Full show notes This episode...
The Cycle: Police Violence, Black Rebellion
June 30, 2021 18:39 - 37 minutes - 51.7 MBIn her new book, historian Elizabeth Hinton highlights a "crucible period" of often violent rebellions in the name of the Black freedom struggle beginning in 1968. Initiated in almost every instance by police violence, the rebellions—dismissed as "riots"—have been largely written out of the history of the civil rights era. Hinton contends the period is critical for understanding the roots of mass incarceration and contains important lessons today for people organizing against police violence....
Policing, Race, and a Crisis in Mental Health
June 01, 2021 05:45 - 38 minutes - 52.3 MBOne of every four people killed by police is experiencing a mental health emergency. Changing how we respond to crisis in the moment, and to widespread, ongoing mental health needs, means deferring to the leadership of people with lived experience and putting racial equity at the center of every reform. On today's episode, listening to the people who know how to fix systems, because they’re surviving those systems' harms. Full show notes
Does the Criminal Justice System Cause Crime?
April 26, 2021 07:37 - 36 minutes - 49.8 MBWhat's the most effective way to reduce the chance of an arrest in the future? A new study suggests it's shrinking the size of the justice system in the here and now. Boston D.A. Rachael Rollins and the director of NYU's Public Safety Lab, Anna Harvey, talk about the benefits of not prosecuting low-level charges—an almost 60 percent reduction in recidivism—and the challenges, even with data in hand, of bucking the conventional wisdom. Full show notes Hear Rachael Rollins's 2019 appearance o...
How Will the Death Penalty End?
March 25, 2021 22:44 - 36 minutes - 50.6 MBJournalist Maurice Chammah says the federal execution spree during the final weeks of the Trump presidency is evidence of the death penalty's continued decline, not its resurgence. Chammah is the author of the new book, Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty. Chammah tracks the long arc of the death penalty—its use and its symbolism—alongside the evolution of the criminal justice system as a whole. And he grounds his discussion in American history, particularly the hi...
COVID-19 Behind Bars: A Pandemic of Neglect
February 02, 2021 23:08 - 38 minutes - 53.2 MBHomer Venters has been inspecting prisons, jails, and ICE detention centers for COVID-compliance almost since the start of the pandemic. The former chief medical officer for New York City jails says what were already substandard health systems and abusive environments have deteriorated sharply, where even people positive for the virus can languish unseen for days. Any fix to health care behind bars, he says, has to start with listening to the people these facilities have worked to silence: th...
Heal and Punish? Treatment and Trauma Inside a Coercive System
January 19, 2021 18:06 - 33 minutes - 76.6 MBHow 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. Full show notes **This episode was ...
Josie Duffy Rice: Fighting a Big Fight
December 17, 2020 21:36 - 41 minutes - 56.8 MBJosie 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. Full show notes
Guns, Young People, Hidden Networks
November 30, 2020 08:28 - 48 minutes - 67.2 MBWhy 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 remarkabl...
What We All Get Wrong About Gun Violence
October 05, 2020 17:57 - 30 minutes - 41.5 MBWhile 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...
Misdemeanors, Race, and a History of Injustice
August 20, 2020 16:11 - 37 minutes - 43.3 MBThe 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 ya...
Restorative Justice is Racial Justice
July 06, 2020 21:52 - 1 hour - 88.3 MBRestorative 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. Episode page The episode features music from Zanny London, a student at one of the high...
Adam Foss: Prosecution and Black Lives Matter
June 24, 2020 04:42 - 24 minutes - 34.3 MBAdam Foss wants to transform the justice system—from within. A former Boston prosecutor who rose to prominence on a TED Talk criticizing his colleagues for using their power more often to jail than to help people, Foss is the executive director of Prosecutor Impact. It trains prosecutors across the country in line with Foss’s vision for … Continue reading Adam Foss: Prosecution and Black Lives Matter →
Justice and the Virus: Racial Patterns
June 03, 2020 15:43 - 20 minutes - 27.7 MBThe 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, af...
Justice and the Virus: Rachel Barkow
May 22, 2020 19:16 - 28 minutes - 39 MBWith 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. Episode page Hear Barkow on New Thinking discuss her 201...
Justice and the Virus with Rachel Barkow
May 22, 2020 19:16 - 28 minutes - 39 MBWith 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 … Continue reading Justice and the Virus with Rachel Barkow →
Getting People Off Rikers Island in a Pandemic
May 05, 2020 04:02 - 26 minutes - 36 MBThe 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 Inequities of COVID-19: A Focus on Public Housing
April 17, 2020 04:30 - 17 minutes - 23.8 MBIn cities across the United States, the effects of the coronavirus are not being experienced equally. Whether it’s infection rates, deaths, or job losses, people of low income and people of color are being hit hardest. In New York City, many of those effects are concentrated in communities where public housing is located. The Center for Court Innovation's Neighborhood Safety Initiatives program works with public housing residents. On New Thinking, the program's Alicia Arrington explains the c...
Criminal Justice as Social Justice: Bruce Western
February 12, 2020 23:50 - 34 minutes - 47.4 MBBruce 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 p...
“One of These Days We Might Find Us Some Free”: Reginald Dwayne Betts
January 16, 2020 21:16 - 42 minutes - 59.1 MBIn 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. Full show notes
Introducing ‘In Practice’
January 02, 2020 18:50 - 1 minute - 3.09 MBIn 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
December 19, 2019 23:00 - 30 minutes - 42.3 MBAt 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 justic...
Kim Foxx: Rooted in Humanity
December 04, 2019 20:45 - 45 minutes - 63.1 MBWith 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 a...
What Do We Know About Community Service?
November 08, 2019 22:13 - 31 minutes - 43.3 MBCommunity 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 o...
Ending Bail, Closing Rikers: How Change Happens
October 15, 2019 21:16 - 36 minutes - 50.5 MBThe 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 he...
‘Jail-Attributable Deaths’
September 25, 2019 16:05 - 43 minutes - 60 MBAs 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 track 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....
Jail-Attributable Deaths
September 25, 2019 16:05 - 43 minutes - 60 MBAs 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 facilit...
Art vs. Mass Incarceration
September 04, 2019 18:39 - 41 minutes - 56.5 MBCan 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. Full show notes (images, lin...
Beyond the Algorithm: Risk and Race
August 14, 2019 17:12 - 31 minutes - 42.8 MB**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 th...
The Art and Science of Reducing Violence
July 10, 2019 18:20 - 30 minutes - 41.5 MBIn 2017, more than 17,000 people were murdered in the United States, most of them in cities. Thomas Abt, a long-time policy-maker and researcher, says that far from intractable, there are proven ways to reduce the violence, but he worries the urgency of acting now is being ignored. And when it comes to how we think about violence, he has a bone to pick with both the right and the left. Abt’s new book is Bleeding Out: The Devastating Consequences of Urban Violence and a Bold New Plan for Peace...
Marilyn Mosby, Karl Racine: “We’re Talking About Humans”
June 21, 2019 20:29 - 31 minutes - 43.5 MBWith so much of the focus now on keeping people out of jail and prison, it can feel like there is a reluctance among criminal justice reformers to work on improving life for the more than two million people already there. But one group beginning to mobilize on the issue is prosecutors—or at least "progressive" prosecutors. Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby and Washington, D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine explain what they learned on a tour of European prisons, and the “bright line” th...
Prosecutor Power: Scott Hechinger on the Urgency of Reform
June 06, 2019 20:47 - 27 minutes - 43.7 MBIf you're not following Scott Hechinger on Twitter, you're missing something important. A public defender and the director of policy at Brooklyn Defender Services, Hechinger is a fantastic explainer and participant-witness at the frontlines of the justice system. In May 2018, he joined our series on prosecutors, outlining how prosecutor power is exerted at key decision-points in his clients' cases, mostly to their detriment. Chosen by the Vera Institute of Justice for its 'Best of 2018' award...
The Pathological Politics of Criminal Justice
May 22, 2019 19:46 - 35 minutes - 48.9 MBRachel Barkow contends criminal justice policy is a “prisoner of politics,” driven by appeals to voters’ worst instincts and an aversion to evidence of what actually works. Defined by its severity and unfairness, the criminal justice system, she says, is counterproductive to the goal of public safety it claims as its justification. In her new book, the NYU law professor makes a provocative case for “freeing” criminal justice from the political imperative in order to achieve real reform. Full...
Emily Bazelon: When Power Shifts
May 01, 2019 20:44 - 37 minutes - 51.6 MBThe well-known journalist and commentator Emily Bazelon talks about her new book, Charged, on the "movement to transform American prosecution," and where she thinks power might be shifting in the criminal justice system. So-called progressive prosecutors are very much a minority among elected D.A.s, but what if they could be the model for dismantling what she calls America's "giant machine of punishment"? Full show notes
Misdemeanors Matter #3: Rachael Rollins Reboots Low-Level Justice
April 17, 2019 16:32 - 42 minutes - 58.3 MBRachael Rollins says she has seen the criminal justice system from "almost every angle." Now, as Boston's first female African-American district attorney, she's setting the agenda. She explains her new approach of "services not sentences" as a response to low-level "crimes of poverty" and the urgency of changing the traditional role of the prosecutor. Full show notes