The Appeal

Despite recent Supreme Court rulings curtailing the practice, the United States remains the only country on earth that enforces life without parole sentences for crimes committed when they were minors. Our guest, Victoria Law, explains efforts by prosecutors in Louisiana to continue keeping dozens of men, most of them Black, in state prison for crimes committed when they were 16, 17 years old in the 1960s and 1970s––typifying a prosecutorial ethos of punishment for punishment's sake.

Data corporations like Palantir are teaming up with police departments to create real time "probable offender" lists of thousands of mostly African American and Latino people. These lists, and other "predictive policing" tools, create a feedback loop, trapping people of color and the poor in a cycle of monitoring, arrests, and further monitoring. The result is a dystopian system of surveillance and pre-crime. Our guest, Appeal journalist George Joseph, got his hands on confidential LAPD documents detailing these efforts.

It's a tension that has existed in activists and political circles since there's been activism and politics: how to know the difference between healthy reform and cynical, watered-down reform. Or worse: so-called "reform" that is actually a step backwards. Our guests today, journalists Raven Rakia and Ashoka Jegroo, examine this debate among those working to close Rikers prison in New York and discuss the broader trend of establishment centers of power co-opting grassroots reform efforts.

Prosectors and law enforcement agencies have been bringing murder charges against people who supply friends and family with drugs. As the opioid epidemic marches on, efforts to curb heroin and prescription drug abuse through increased arrests and harsh sentencing look just as misguided as earlier phases of the so-called "war on drugs" that began in the 1970s. Journalist Zachary A. Siegel joins us to explain the disturbing evolution of the drug war in the era of opioid abuse.

Stopping the trafficking of exploited persons is something everyone agrees is important. But recent efforts by the federal government to exploit this good faith desire to protect the vulnerable by criminalizing consensual sex work––namely by passing of Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA)––has driven the business further underground, all while chilling speech and exposing sex workers to even greater harm. Our guest, senior reporter for The Appeal, Melissa Gira Grant.

District Attorneys wield the power of entire police departments but have been historically overlooked in efforts to reform the legal system. Recently that's changed, with bond reform and primary challenges upending the "tough on crime" status quo taking off in the past few years. Our guest Josie Duffy Rice, the host of our sister podcast Justice in America, will be joining us to explain why DA's are such an important––and often unseen––fulcrum of power.