When you hear the words "criminal justice system," what do you think about? In this episode, we'll dig into ideas around punishment, accountability, and justice, and how those show up or don't in our court and prison systems. First, we'll revisit a 2018 conversation with Bobbin Singh, executive director of Oregon Justice Resource Center; david rogers, a program officer for the Ford Foundation and former executive director of ACLU of Oregon; and Rene Denfeld, author and criminal investigator. Then we'll talk with Monica Mueller, a senior instructor of philosophy at Portland State University who also teaches in Oregon prisons.

This episode is dedicated to writer Barry Lopez, author of numerous books on travel, landscape, animals, and humanity and a longtime Oregon resident. Lopez passed away in December 2020, just three months after losing a significant portion of his property on the McKenzie River to the Holiday Farm Fire. We’ll listen to a conversation with Lopez from 2015 and hear from Debra Gwartney, Lopez's wife, reading from her essay "Fire and Ice," originally published in Granta, about Lopez's life and final days.

In this episode we talk with novelist and scholar David Treuer, author of "The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee," "Rez Life," and many other books, about land, possession, and his recent article in The Atlantic, "Return the National Parks to the Tribes." We’ll also hear from Christine Dupres, Portland author, therapist, and member of the Cowlitz tribe, reading from her 2016 essay "Between Ribbon and Root."

This episode explores democracy, especially how we can participate in governing ourselves as well as some of the challenges to doing so. We talk with people working on voting rights and democratic process about what democracy means to them: Desmond Meade, of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, who led the effort to end disenfranchisement of people with past felony convictions in Florida; Danielle Allen, a political ethicist and author of "Talking to Strangers," "Our Declaration," and "Cuz"; and Jesse Beason, president and CEO of the Northwest Health Foundation.