The Appeal

You've likely heard of the school-to-prison pipeline, but what you likely haven't heard is the prison-to-school pipeline––efforts in recent years to help the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated receive a quality education. Our guest, activist and educator Danny Murillo, has been spearheading such initiatives for over five years. After spending 14 years in Pelican Bay supermax prison he co-founded the Underground Scholars Initiative at University California Berkeley which is dedicated to making education accessible to everyone regardless of their carceral status.

'He was a straight-A student', 'a loving husband', 'she worked 60 hours a week'––we often hear how victims of police and white supremacist violence didn't deserve to be killed due to their shiny records. But what if this is the totally wrong approach to discussing violence visited upon oppressed communities? Our guest, Appeal contributor Zoé Samudzi, argues that the notion of "innocence" as a condition for empathy is an outdated, puritan mode of thinking that implies those with messy, so-called "criminal pasts" are somehow not deserving of our compassion.

As prison reform efforts begin to have an effect on how many people end up behind bars, a reliance on electronic monitoring increasingly serves as a pseudo-solution to keep people out of cement and steel cages––by putting them into electronic ones. Our guest, Appeal contributor Kira Lerner, talks about the moral hazards presented by this approach and why it's important prison reform efforts expand beyond cement walls to include those composed of house arrest and monitoring technologies.

State child protective courts are an under-reported element of our criminal legal system, but their impact on communities of color and the poor is felt as much, if not more, than other aspects of it. One case, that of the Hart family, caught national attention after a seemingly "normal" white couple adopted African-American children taken from the mother by a corrupt and likely racist judge in Texas––only to end in a grisly murder-suicide. Our guest, Appeal contributor Roxanna Asgarian, joins us to talk about this case and the broader social and racial aspects of the state taking children away from their parents.

1 in 5 people incarcerated in this country have not been convicted of any wrongdoing. Their crime? Being poor in a country that tethers pre-trial freedom to one's wealth. In this episode we discuss with journalist Bryce Covert emerging efforts––from New York to New Orleans to Chicago––to bond people out of jail as both a temporary form of relief, and a long term strategy of undoing the cash bail system entirely.

By now you've probably heard of the family separation crisis at the US-Mexico border. What you may not know is how exactly we got to this tipping point. On today's show we talk with Appeal writer Max Rivlin-Nadler, who's been following President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions's ramped up "zero tolerance" approach to immigration. While President Obama had harsh immigration policies as well, Trump's approach goes much further––animated by a toxic mixture of racism, for-profit incarceration, and summary punishment.

We didn't always have police and prisons as we know them today—in fact, they're fairly recent inventions. Abolitionists like William C. Anderson ask us to radically rethink the necessity of police, and our practice of throwing people in cages. Anderson traces the origins of modern punishment from slavery to debt peonage to Jim Crow to the co-called War on Drugs.