Hadar is the Thomas Miller Professor at UC Hastings College of the Law and an expert on criminal law. And the things she has discovered in the course of her research – for example, “pay to stay” schemes whereby prison inmates are forced to pay for their own incarceration, after they are released – have changed the way many view our system of criminal justice.

But while Hadar has exposed all manner of corruption and injustice, to me, she has been a source of hope. This is true of her personal life, where she’s managed to balance an incredibly intense academic job, risky activism, and raising a child in a historically difficult moment in human history. It’s true of her academic and legal work, which has provided crucial support to the movement of open rescue – and also quite possibly saved my own legal license, when the industry attempted to have me disbarred. The most important source of hope, however, comes from her philosophy on life – that human beings, at root, are good and decent beings, and that truth has the ability to correct our flaws to create a better world for everyone.

Hope should be a hard thing to maintain, when you’re in a position like Hadar’s – appreciating in deep detail the many injustices that our society ignores. But Hadar offers some tips in this podcast on how to do just that.

Hadar's most recent book (2020) - Yesterday's Monsters: The Manson Family Cases and the Illusion of Parole

Hadar's book (2019) - The Legal Process and the Promise of Justice

Hadar's first book (2015) - Cheap On Crime Recession: Era Politics and the Transformation of American Punishment

Music by Moby: Everything That Rises