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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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**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.

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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.

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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.)

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