Voir Dire: Conversations from the Criminal Justice Policy Program at Harvard Law School

Stacey Borden is the Founder and Executive Director of New Beginnings Reentry Services, Inc., which provides services to women coming home from prison. She talks about the unique experiences of women in prison and the challenges they face coming home.

Danielle Sered is the author of Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair. The book is based on her work as the founder and Director of Common Justice, an alternative-to-incarceration and victim-service program that focuses on violent felonies. We discuss violence, restorative justice, and the abject failure of the criminal legal system to do justice or create safety.

Human trafficking happens here in the United States. More needs to be done to prevent and address it. At the same time, the law of human trafficking, although young, is actually quite robust. And it's being applied in novel, complex, and (some would say) questionable ways. Julie Dahlstrom, Director of BU Law's Immigrants' Rights & Human Trafficking Program, discusses these trends.

Sarah Seo is the author of Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom. She explains how traffic enforcement fundamentally changed Fourth Amendment jurisprudence in the 20th century. Namely, it vastly expanded police discretion, creating the law enforcement regime that has presided over numerous high profile killings of unarmed black drivers by police in recent years. We rethink that regime. Then, we take a turn to ask what the 20th century's major technological disruption (cars) can teach us about how we in the 21st century can respond to new disruptive technologies like big data.

People with similar demographics, individual characteristics, and family and economic backgrounds have substantially different chances of getting arrested depending on the years during which they were 17 to 23 years old. Professor Robert Sampson outlines a groundbreaking new study showing the way that historical context predicts arrest rates.

Matthew Clair is the author of Privilege and Punishment: How Race and Class Matter in Criminal Court. In the book, he uncovers how privilege and inequality play out in criminal court interactions, especially in the attorney-client relationship. In this conversation, we explore the attorney-client relationship in greater detail and the ways that it exacerbates inequality and legitimates injustice in the courts.

Alec Karakatsanis is the author of Usual Cruelty: the Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System and the founder of Civil Rights Corps. We discuss why he calls it the criminal injustice system and the dangers of criminal justice "reform."

A national study commissioned by Public Rights Project revealed a massive enforcement gap in corporate abuse--with 54% of those surveyed saying they have experienced wage theft, predatory lending and debt collection, corporate pollution, and/or unsafe rental conditions at least once in the past 10 years. The criminal legal system could intervene. Hear how from Jenny Montoya Tansey, PRP's Policy Director.

Most agree that the police are asked to do far too much, including tasks that they are not trained to do and so are ill-equipped to do well. The CAHOOTS model is an exciting one. It relieves the police from undertaking tasks for which they are ill-equipped, especially those related to mental health crises, it does so effectively and without force/violence, and it does so far more cheaply. We invited Tim Black to learn more about CAHOOTS, how it got started, what they do and how they do it, and why this might be a critical option for other jurisdictions across the country that are trying to address public safety issues without such a heavy reliance on police.

Wendy Still has achieved remarkable reductions in the probation population while serving as Chief Probation Officer of San Francisco and Alameda Counties, California. She discusses what progressive probation looks like, including in the context of the defund movement, as well as her experiences during her long career.

We're back...with some updates and some new voices. Professor Sandra Susan Smith interviews Cat Brooks, founder of the Anti Police-Terror Project, about policing and reimagining community safety.

While we're on hiatus, we're replaying some of our most popular tracks to help people meet this moment of renewed interest in changing the criminal legal system. The use of big data in the criminal legal system raises some thorny legal, cultural, and ethical questions. What level of surveillance are we willing to tolerate? Is data actually objective? What will happen to legal standards like reasonable suspicion as our information changes? These are questions we need to ask and answer soon, because big data is already infiltrating law enforcement and the criminal legal system more broadly.

While we're on hiatus, we're replaying some of our most popular tracks to help people meet this moment of renewed interest in changing the criminal legal system. Jonathan Rapping is the founder of Gideon's Promise, an organization dedicated to changing the culture of public defense. He'll describe why the work of public defenders is important, what good public defense looks like, and what public defenders can do to change the criminal legal system.

While we're on hiatus, we're replaying some of our most popular tracks to help people meet this moment of renewed interest in changing the criminal legal system. Restorative justice is a paradigm-shifting approach to criminal justice. Fania Davis is a long-time social justice activist, a restorative justice scholar and professor, and a civil rights attorney with a Ph.D. in indigenous knowledge. She is also the Founder of Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth. We'll discuss the restorative justice framework and what it actually looks like on the ground.

While we're on hiatus, we're replaying some of our most popular tracks to help people meet this moment of renewed interest in changing the criminal legal system. Within three years of release, about two-thirds of people released from prison are rearrested. Wesley Caines, the Reentry and Community Outreach Coordinator at the Bronx Defenders, tells us about the traumas of going to prison and the ways in which we set people released from prison up for failure.

We discuss mental illness and the criminal system with Alisa Roth, author of Insane: America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness.

Alexandra Natapoff talks about her new book, Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal. This book is absolutely essential for understanding the criminal system in America. We discuss the misdemeanor system’s role as a system of social control, revenue generation, racial oppression, etc.–but certainly not as a system of justice.

Emily Baxter is the founder of We Are All Criminals. In this episode, we examine the ways in which privilege serves to define criminality. You can see more about the project at https://www.weareallcriminals.org/

Prison officials regularly block access to huge amounts of reading material for incarcerated people—and they do it in troublingly arbitrary ways. We discuss the written word’s ability to highlight and amplify the humanity of people in prison and the power of information. James Tager is the Deputy Director of Free Expression Research at PEN America and Robert Pollock is the Prison Writing Program Coordinator at PEN America.

This week we talk to Anand Swaminathan, an attorney at Loevy and Loevy—a national firm that does civil rights work adjacent to the criminal legal system. We discuss the role of civil litigators in changing the criminal legal system.

Holistic defenders in the Bronx saved their clients 1.1 million days of incarceration and saved taxpayers $165 million on housing costs alone, relative to the traditional public defenders practicing in the same court house. This week, we talk to Maya Buenaventura of the Rand Corporation about the Rand Corporation’s study of the holistic defense model and its implications for public defense as a whole. Maya Buenaventura is an attorney and public policy researcher at the RAND Corporation.

By 2030, 1 in 3 people in prison will be 55 or older. We’ll discuss reform to address this trend and what the response to this trend tells us about the role of rehabilitation in the system. Darryl & Darnell Epps are brothers. Darnell is a student at Cornell who works for the Center on the Death Penalty. He recently published an op-ed in the NY Times entitled “The Prison ‘Old-Timers’ Who Gave Me Life: Aging inmates, some serving life sentences, helped me turn my life around. They could do even more good on the outside.” His brother, Darryl, is a Columbia Justice in Education Scholar who also works for the Fortune Society assisting formerly incarcerated people transition back from prison.

States provide money to people who have been victims of crime to reimburse them for the costs of their victimization—things like therapy, funerals, etc. But Alysia Santo, an investigative reporter for the Marshall Project, finds that only some people count as victims.

We discuss the need to abolish sex offense registries with Emily Horowitz, a professor of sociology & criminal justice and the author of Protecting Our Kids? How Sex Offender Laws Are Failing Us Opens a New Window.

Andrea Ritchie is an attorney, organizer, and author of Invisible No More, a recent book about how Black women, Indigenous women, and women of color experience racial profiling, police brutality, and immigration enforcement .

Rahsaan Hall is the Director of the ACLU of Massachusetts’s What A Difference a DA Makes Campaign. We discuss progressive prosecution and the ACLU’s campaign to hold prosecutors accountable through public awareness.

Trials are supposed to be a fundamental constitutional right. But in today’s criminal legal system, only 3% of federal cases are resolved at trial. I discuss why the endangerment of the American trial is so problematic with Norman Reimer, Executive Director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and Elisa Klein, Associate at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.

383,000 young people were placed on formal or informal probation supervision in 2014. Stephen Bishop, of the Annie E Casey Foundation, thinks that supervision needs to look different. He argues something basic, but powerful: less probation. Putting fewer young people on probation will free up probation resources to turn away from surveillance-based supervision to more constructive and therapeutic probation. We talk about that vision.

The criminalization of cannabis was a foundational pillar of the New Jim Crow. Now, the decriminalization of cannabis might just make a small number of white and privileged folks really rich. Shaleen Title is working to make sure that the burgeoning cannabis market in Massachusetts is one that accounts for and corrects that inequity.

Arch City Defenders advocates for poor people and people of color who are exploited by the municipal court system in St. Louis. Its Director, Blake Strode, will discuss their aggressively holistic approach and the ways they use direct services and impact litigation to serve their community.

People caught shoplifting can pay $400-$500 to a private company in return for a promise not to call the police and a "restorative justice" class. What?? We discuss the pros and cons of such private adjudication schemes with John Rappaport, Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Chicago.

Boston's Sept. 4 District Attorney elections for have the potential to change the criminal legal system in Boston and be a model for progressive change across the country. Shannon McAuliffe is running for District Attorney of Suffolk County, aka Boston. She is a former public defender and director at Roca, a program that disrupts the cycle of poverty and incarceration by helping high-risk young people transform their lives and avoid the criminal legal system. We talk about what a progressive campaign looks like and what a progressive DA. Learn more at https://www.mcauliffeforda.com/

This is the second episode in which we feature student scholarship coming out of HLS. We interview Andrew Hanna about a recent Third Circuit case that could change the landscape of putting people with mental illness in solitary confinement. Then, we talk to Louis Fisher about cause lawyers who might engage in civil disobedience against legal ethics codes.

We reached out to all the criminal law professors at HLS and asked what student scholarship had really wowed them in the past year. In these special episodes, we bring you conversations with the Harvard Law students and recent alums whose work is helping to push criminal law scholarship forward. First, Anneke Dunbar Gronke talks about her recent piece in the Harvard Law Review on Commonwealth v. Brangan, a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court case advancing bail reform. Then, Ben Gifford discusses how and why prison crime has been excluded from economic cost-benefit analyses of incarceration.

Restorative justice is a paradigm-shifting approach to criminal justice. Fania Davis is a long-time social justice activist, a restorative justice scholar and professor, and a civil rights attorney with a Ph.D. in indigenous knowledge. She is also the Founder of Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth. We'll discuss the restorative justice framework and what it actually looks like on the ground.

Brandon Garrett discusses the precipitous decline in death penalty sentences and executions and his new book, End of its Rope: How Killing the Death Penalty Can Revive Criminal Justice.

Pastor Donna Hubbard works with women who have been trafficked at her organization, the Women at the Well Transition Center, and helps train airline attendants to spot trafficking with Airline Ambassadors International.

Carl Route describes life after prison as “the life sentence on the outside.” We explore the difficulties of life after prison with activists and reformers Donna Hubbard and Carl Route and discuss their work helping folks return from prison in Atlanta, Georgia.

Nila Bala & Jesse Kelley of the R Street Institute help us understand the juvenile justice system and talk about their work to reform the system.

Nila Balan & Jesse Kelley of the free market think tank, the R Street Institute, talk about a conservative perspective on criminal justice reform.

Mayor Bill de Blasio has committed to close Rikers Island, NYC's primary jail. But how exactly do you do that? Elizabeth Glazer, Director of the NYC Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice, talks to us about the gargantuan project that touches just about every corner of the criminal legal system.

Women are the fastest growing population in US prisons and jails. At the same time, drug courts are proliferating and new emphasis is being placed on the potential rehabilitative functions of the criminal justice system. Our guest this week, Allison McKim examines two rehab facilities for women--one for women referred by the criminal justice system and one for private payers--and finds fascinating and problematic differences between the two. Her work and our conversation explores the intersection of punishment, gender, and social control in the criminal legal system.

Community bail funds pool community resources to pay the bail of people who can't afford to post bail while awaiting trial. They make an important impact in the individual lives of people accused of crimes, but they're also helping to take down the money bail system as we know it in this country. This week, I talk to Pilar Weiss, the Project Director of the National Bail Fund Network, about her work and this movement.

In this episode, we look again at the collateral consequences of involvement with the criminal legal system. "Crimmigration" is the complex field of law that deals with the intersection of the immigration and criminal legal systems. Phil Torrey, Managing Attorney of the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program, a Lecturer on Law, and the Supervising Attorney for the Harvard Immigration Project, will be our guide.

Jonathan Rapping is the founder of Gideon's Promise, an organization dedicated to changing the culture of public defense. He'll describe why the work of public defenders is important, what good public defense looks like, and what public defenders can do to change the criminal legal system.

The use of big data in the criminal legal system raises some thorny legal, cultural, and ethical questions. What level of surveillance are we willing to tolerate? Is data actually objective? What will happen to legal standards like reasonable suspicion as our information changes? These are questions we need to ask and answer soon, because big data is already infiltrating law enforcement and the criminal legal system more broadly.

Beth McCann, the newly elected District Attorney of Denver talks to us about her work, what it means to be a progressive prosecutor, and the role of prosecutors as reformers.

A small group of men at Sing Sing Correctional Facility fundraised nearly $8,000 from other men in the facility for a gun buyback. Bianca Tylek, founder of the Corrections Accountability Project, tells us about her involvement with the project and discusses rehabilitation and the Second Amendment for communities of color.

Have you ever thought about what it means to make money off of caging other people? You should. Vanguard owns 19% of Core Civic, a company with $1.7 billion in revenue that owns, manages, and operates private prisons and detention centers. So millions of Americans are unknowingly invested in Core Civic through Vanguard’s extremely popular retirement accounts and mutual fund products. But private prison companies are only the tip of a much larger iceberg. Prisons and prison services are being commercialized at alarming rates. Bianca Tylek, our guest this week & the Founder of the Corrections Accountability Project, invites us not only to decide how we want our money to be invested, but more importantly to ask whether or not we’re ok with some people profiting off of the caging of others.

Emma Ketteringham, Managing Director of the Family Defense Practice at the Bronx Defenders, tells us how her clients fear the knock of of a child protective services case worker far more than stop and frisk by the police.

Debtors prisons were banned in the US in the 1830's. But almost two centuries later, the criminal legal system is still punishing people for being poor. This week, we talk to Sara Zampierin, a Staff Attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center. She will lay out for us an array of constitutionally and morally questionable practices that trap poor people in the criminal legal system, including excessive cash bail, onerous fines and fees, and self-interested private probation services.