Shades of Freedom
18 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 1 year ago -Welcome to Shades of Freedom, from The Aspen Institute Criminal Justice Reform Initiative. This podcast amplifies and uplifts promising efforts aimed at reducing mass incarceration, and examines the ecosystem of related inequalities that surrounds and perpetuates it. Fortunately, there’s a movement underway to re-imagine what the justice system could be. This podcast will feature many of the people working on changing this system, from policymakers to activists, and from returning citizens to systems leaders. Our discussions will be wide-ranging, from the school-to-confinement pipeline, to alternatives to incarceration, to policing, to sentencing, to prosecutorial reform to incarceration, to reentry and how all of this intersects with other community systems (such as education, health, housing and more). Today’s world seeks more than reform; it demands transformation. Our guests on Shades of Freedom personify this ideal.
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Episodes
Pushing Back on the Pushback to Justice Reform
December 15, 2022 00:38 - 33 minutes - 30.3 MBThe session, titled The Importance of Now: Maintaining Momentum in Criminal Justice Transformation, ranges from the personal to the national, covering how both these experts began in criminal justice change, and how to address the particular needs of women involved in the criminal legal system. The discussion also addresses how misinformation impacts reform strategies, the tendency to focus on wins and then move on—rather than maintaining those wins—and the need to reach wider audiences wi...
Beyond Crisis Response: Health and Justice
August 09, 2022 00:07 - 27 minutes - 24.9 MBGuest Biography Born and raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Tasha Blackmon is a dynamic, collaborative leader, mentor and coach who brings more than 20 years of business operations experience to her role as President and Chief Executive Officer of Cherry Health, Michigan’s largest Federally Qualified Health Center. Cherry Health provides integrated health care services to over 55,000 patients in Barry, Kent, Montcalm, Muskegon, Ottawa and Wayne counties in Michigan. During her 16 years wit...
Restoring Rights and Clearing Records
July 13, 2022 15:37 - 33 minutes - 30.5 MBSheena Meade talks about her beginnings in labor organizing, then helping to co-lead the successful fight to restore voting rights in Florida, and how that has led to a push, across the States, to automate the clearing of records, and other new collaborations, such as Next Chapter, to change employer approaches to hiring returned citizens. This episode is part of Rework Reentry, a partnership of The Aspen Institute and Slack supporting career options for returning citizens. Guest Biography...
Local Justice Journalism
June 13, 2022 20:59 - 25 minutes - 34.7 MBWhile federal criminal justice policy gets a lot of attention, arguably the most important reforms are occurring in local jurisdictions. And many of those efforts are led by elected local justice leaders – sheriffs, DAs and prosecutors – or are being advanced through local ballot measures. These thousands of crucial elections, however, aren’t getting much attention in the national press; even local press may pay only the most cursory attention, though the ramifications for local and national...
Turning Pain Into Purpose
May 12, 2022 14:36 - 27 minutes - 37.6 MBLaTonya A. Tate's journey started as a nurse, then, in a turn, as a parole officer, then to founding the Alabama Justice Initiative and running for and winning a seat on the Birmingham City Council. All along the way, her family and her community have been close to her heart, and their struggles have built her into a force for change across Alabama, including stopping, for now, a new prison. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, The Aspen Institute is nonpartisan and does not endorse, supp...
Can We Depolarize Justice Reform?
December 10, 2021 15:35 - 26 minutes - 24.7 MBGuest Bio An attorney and accomplished author, Marc Levin serves as Chief Policy Counsel to the Council on Criminal Justice, a membership organization that provides a center of gravity in the field for objective analyses of research and policies. He began the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s criminal justice program in 2005 and in 2010 developed the concept for its Right on Crime initiative. In 2014, Levin was named one of the “Politico 50” in the magazine’s annual “list of thinkers, doers,...
Survivors Choose Healing and Restoration
November 11, 2021 03:44 - 28 minutes - 26.5 MBDanielle Sered envisioned, launched, and directs the nonprofit organization Common Justice. She leads the project’s efforts locally and nationally to develop and advance practical and groundbreaking solutions to violence that advance racial equity, meet the needs of those harmed, and do not rely on incarceration. Before planning the launch of Common Justice, Sered served as the deputy director of the Vera Institute of Justice’s Adolescent Reentry Initiative, a program for young men returnin...
Distress Concentrated In Place: NYC Empowers Neighborhoods to Define Safety
October 19, 2021 15:51 - 25 minutes - 23.8 MBWhen Renita Francois, Executive Director of the NYC Mayor’s Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety (MAP), asks the residents of the city’s public housing developments how they define neighborhood safety, crime is not at the top of their lists. From going directly to the residents – the people best informed to define safety – Francois’ office can build better responses to community needs within neighborhoods, and also use the resident input to guide city-wide policy improvements. In this episod...
Must Prison Be Traumatic?
September 07, 2021 20:57 - 24 minutes - 22.7 MBPrisons in the U.S. are, by design and operation, focused on punishment. But does punishment have to be traumatizing? Could prisons and jails be places of healing? While healing-centered and restorative approaches are being looked at in pre- and post-incarceration programs, less focus has been on trauma and harm reduction for those currently incarcerated. In this episode of Shades of Freedom, our guest Nneka Jones Tapia, Managing Director for Justice Initiatives at Chicago Beyond and a form...
Parsimony v. The Justice System
August 17, 2021 18:20 - 26 minutes - 24.5 MBWhile there may be relatively few underlying concepts that liberals and conservatives might agree upon related to the justice system, perhaps one of them could be that justice should be parsimonious – defined as the government being authorized to exercise the lightest intrusion possible on a person’s liberty that is necessary to achieve a legitimate social purpose. In this light, maybe there could be broad agreement that, for example, excessively long sentences for relatively minor crimes mi...
Black Liberation and Justice in Detroit
July 08, 2021 00:11 - 29 minutes - 26.8 MBWhat would it take to make Detroit a “just city” – an actual sanctuary of justice for its residents? Amanda Alexander, founder and Executive Director of the Detroit Justice Center is working on exactly that. Based on a wide range of experiences – from learning alongside ACT-UP AIDS activists, to spending time in newly post-apartheid South Africa, to the Movement for Black Lives – Alexander combines her background as a historian and an attorney to reimagine safety and justice in Detroit. In ...
Mapping (In)Justice
June 01, 2021 23:19 - 26 minutes - 24.6 MBFor Eric Cadora, Director of the Justice Mapping Center, the map is just the beginning of the process. In this episode of Shades of Freedom, he walks us through his youth in Lebanon, and on to his work in the US (and elsewhere around the globe) helping communities to understand their justice-related data, and turn that information into new ways to transform the justice system and enhance community safety. Cadora speaks to the critical role he played in helping communities to understand, t...
Walking Philly’s Tightrope of Youth Justice
May 04, 2021 16:22 - 25 minutes - 23.3 MBChekemma J. Fulmore-Townsend, President and CEO of the Philadelphia Youth Network, joins us to discuss the evolution of youth justice work in Philadelphia, and her own personal journey from working directly with youth and families, to running Philadelphia’s major youth-serving nonprofit. Weaving together progress in the community, creating effective programs for youth, and the City of Philadelphia’s youth justice reforms, this episode focuses on the many different sectors and partners (incl...
Beyond Policing: Creating Safe and Just Communities
March 12, 2021 00:17 - 31 minutes - 28.8 MBThis episode features: Art Acevedo, Chief of Police, Houston Police Department. Roy L. Austin, Vice President of Civil Rights, Facebook. Karol Mason, President, John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Bill Whitaker, of CBS News and a 60 Minutes correspondent. (moderator) This bonus episode of Shades of Freedom is drawn from a February 2021 online event of the same name created by the Aspen Institute’s Criminal Justice Reform Initiative, and the Conversations with Great Leaders Series, in ...
Knowledge, Power and Freedom: The Past and Future of College-In-Prison
February 15, 2021 20:58 - 25 minutes - 23.8 MBFor decades, prisoners have been denied access to college educations. Recent bipartisan federal legislation will remove one key barrier, but much remains to be done. The Reverend Vivian D. Nixon, Executive Director of College & Community Fellowship – an organization that helps the women and families most harmed by mass criminalization gain access to opportunity – joins our podcast to explore her own journeys through both prison and college. Reverend Nixon calls out the power of education ...
Transforming Justice in Oregon: Racism, Protests and COVID-19
October 28, 2020 20:05 - 26 minutes - 24.1 MBThe path to justice will be different in each community. Founded in the late 1800s with a state constitution that specifically excluded Black Americans, Oregon’s current criminal justice system’s struggles are built on that legacy. Our guest in this episode is Bobbin Singh, founding Executive Director of the Oregon Justice Resource Center. He discusses Oregon’s past and how that history influences its current policing response to protests and the prison system’s response to COVID-19, as w...
Freedom Libraries: The Million Book Project
September 21, 2020 22:39 - 27 minutes - 24.7 MBDwayne Betts’ story is one of tribulation and triumph. At 16, he was tried as an adult and spent eight years in prison. He discovered a love for literature while incarcerated and decided to become a writer. Since his release in 2005, Betts has published three books of poetry and one memoir and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in law. Most recently, Betts and acclaimed poet and essayist Elizabeth Alexander announced The Million Book Project—an initiative that will establish 1000 "Freedom Librar...
The Criminalization of Black Girls
August 12, 2020 22:56 - 24 minutes - 22.6 MBOne piece of dismantling and rebuilding the justice system starts with our schools, which can be an onramp to the criminal justice system for Black girls, who in increasing numbers are subject to criminalization starting in our schools. How did we end up with schools that are based in fear, rather than love, and how is that leading towards the adultification and criminalization of Black girls in particular? Dr. Monique Morris joins us to look into these questions, as well as the paths forwa...