New Thinking, from the Center for Justice Innovation

The justice system is awash in purported AI solutions—for everything from prisons to courtrooms. But how do we separate AI’s real promise from the hype? And how do we ensure the technology helps, rather than sets back, the cause of fairness and justice? Roy Austin, Jr., is the former Vice President of Civil Rights at the tech giant, Meta. He was also a prominent official in the Department of Justice under President Obama. He now heads up the Howard Law Artificial Intelligence Initiative. “We have this fantasy that there is a neutral in this world and that’s what we are aiming for,” Austin says. “But there is no neutral.” Full show notes Follow the new AI and Justice Consortium Learn more about the Center for Justice Innovation’s work on AI and the justice system

Emily Galvin Almanza says, for the most part, the criminal justice system has only one setting: punishment. But punishment isn’t safety. It isn’t even accountability. Galvin Almanza makes that case in her new book, The Price of Mercy: Unfair Trials, a Violent System, and a Public Defender’s Search for Justice in America. But the book isn’t only about problems; it’s also about solutions. “We don’t have to fall prey to the worst aspects of our history,” contends Galvin Almanza. “We can build something better.” Full show notes

This is a story, not so much of forgiveness, but of something richer, more complicated, and even more deeply human. A story about moving forward after the worst loss imaginable, with the person who thrust that loss upon you. Hear from Jacob Dunne, whose one punch killed 28 year-old James Hodgkinson outside of a bar in Nottingham, England; from James’s parents, Joan Scourfield and David Hodgkinson; and from Nicola Fowler, the restorative justice facilitator who has been a part of their journey since its beginning. ‘Punch,’ the play based on their story, has just opened on Broadway. Full show notes (photos + transcript) Learn more about how the Center for Justice Innovation is using restorative justice to respond to instances of serious harm and violence. Learn more about the Manhattan Theatre Club production of ‘Punch.’ Learn more about the Common Ground Justice Project that Jacob, Joan, and David are collaborating on.

Vicarious trauma is the trauma you absorb working with traumatized people, especially when you’re both inside of already traumatizing systems. Treatment not jail, diversion from harmful system-contact… Making justice reform work on the ground relies on an abundance of frontline staff: from mental health counsellors to peer mentors. But many of those staff, at our organization and at others like us, are hurting: navigating human suffering—trauma—on all sides. Full show notes

Think of probation as an enormous testing period: will you be able to adhere to the thicket of conditions governing your daily life? Fail at any of them and you could be sent to prison. At the heart of this testing ethos is drug testing: almost all of the almost three million people on probation in the U.S. are drug tested—peeing in a cup, generally under the observation of a probation officer. The tests are time-consuming, expensive, and traumatic. There is also little evidence justifying their use. Full show notes Special issue of the Federal Sentencing Reporter on drug testing and supervision Hear our 12/23 episode: ex-NYC probation commissioner Vinnie Schiraldi calls for probation’s “incremental abolition”

A brief, moving excerpt from the recent award ceremony at the New York Public Library announcing the inaugural winner of the Inside Literary Prize, the first major U.S. book award to be judged exclusively by people who are incarcerated. Hear from Freedom Reads founder and CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts, and from this year’s winner… And please be sure to listen to our earlier episode, profiling the work of some of the judges for this prize: ‘Inside Literary Prize: Shakopee Women’s Prison.’

“They actually care. They want to hear about what we think, the ones that they have shut away.” The Inside Literary Prize is the first major U.S. book award to be judged exclusively by people who are incarcerated, some of the most prolific readers in the country. Yet the walls we erect around incarcerated people also disappear them from conversations about culture, politics, and history—conversations to which they can make vital contributions. In this special episode, hear a behind-the-scenes portrait of what a day of judging sounded like in Minnesota’s Shakopee women’s prison. Full show notes  

What would it mean to decriminalize mental health—to stop criminalizing the symptoms of what is very often untreated mental illness? And what would it mean to put racial justice at the center of that effort? The outcomes of the criminal legal system being what they are, those two questions are really inseparable. Full show notes

Three 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? Morgan Godvin was at the frontlines of Oregon’s decriminalization fight. “We have come to a fork in the road,” she says. For now, progress towards an evidence-based approach to drug use “has fallen prey to fear-based policy.” Full show notes

Vincent Schiraldi used to run probation in New York City; now he’s asking whether probation 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

A 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 legacy of the Gideon decision. Hear the first episode here. Full show notes

As 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 system: the poor and people of color? Full show notes

April 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 people need? Full show notes

A 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

Housing 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

Efforts 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 our series on Prosecutor Power

New 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

Eyal 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 collectively we’ve put them in a situation where it’s impossible to practice ethical care. Full show notes Hear a related New Thinking episode with Homer Venters, the former chief medical officer for NYC Jails.

Justice 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

An 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.”

Hurt 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 experienced.” Full show notes

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. Full show notes This episode was originally released in January 2020.

In 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. Hinton’s book is America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s. Full show notes

One 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

What’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 on New Thinking

Journalist 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 history of Texas, the epicenter of the American death penalty. In Texas, Chammah contends, a romantic myth about rough frontier justice has been used to obscure the extent to which state-sanctioned execution grew out of mob-driven lynchings, generally of Black men, common across the South after the Civil War until well into the twentieth century. Full show notes

Homer 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: those with lived experience of the conditions. Full show notes Listen back to Venters’s New Thinking interview, ‘Jail-Attributable Deaths’

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. Full show notes **This episode was originally released in January 2019**

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. Full show notes

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. Full show notes

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.) Full show notes

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!) Full show notes 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.

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. Full show notes

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. Episode page 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.

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? Episode page Interview recorded May 29 Hear the first episode in the ‘Justice and the Virus’ series with Rachel Barkow

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. Episode page Hear Barkow on New Thinking discuss her 2019 book, Prisoners of Politics: Breaking the Cycle of Mass Incarceration Interview recorded on May 19

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 Episode page See a summary of results from the Rikers Early Release Program Listen to a related New Thinking: ‘Jail-Attributable Deaths’

In 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 challenge, and the response. Full show notes Episode recorded on April 14

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. Full show notes

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. Full show notes

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)!

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. Full 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.” Full show notes Hear all of the episodes in our Prosecutor Power series.

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. Full show notes

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. Full show notes

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)

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. Full show notes (images, links, transcript, etc.)

**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)

In 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 in the Streets. Full show notes

With 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” they see running from the overt racial control in America’s past to the disparities and dehumanizing practices inside jails and prisons today. Full show notes