Voir Dire: Conversations from the Harvard Kennedy School Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management

Holistic defenders in the Bronx saved their clients 1.1 million days of incarceration and saved taxpayers $165 million on housing costs alone, relative to the traditional public defenders practicing in the same court house. This week, we talk to Maya Buenaventura of the Rand Corporation about the Rand Corporation’s study of the holistic defense model and its implications for public defense as a whole. Maya Buenaventura is an attorney and public policy researcher at the RAND Corporation.

By 2030, 1 in 3 people in prison will be 55 or older. We’ll discuss reform to address this trend and what the response to this trend tells us about the role of rehabilitation in the system.

Darryl & Darnell Epps are brothers. Darnell is a student at Cornell who works for the Center on the Death Penalty. He recently published an op-ed in the NY Times entitled “The Prison ‘Old-Timers’ Who Gave Me Life: Aging inmates, some serving life sentences, helped me turn my life around. They could do even more good on the outside.” His brother, Darryl, is a Columbia Justice in Education Scholar who also works for the Fortune Society assisting formerly incarcerated people transition back from prison.

States provide money to people who have been victims of crime to reimburse them for the costs of their victimization—things like therapy, funerals, etc. But Alysia Santo, an investigative reporter for the Marshall Project, finds that only some people count as victims.

We discuss the need to abolish sex offense registries with Emily Horowitz, a professor of sociology & criminal justice and the author of Protecting Our Kids? How Sex Offender Laws Are Failing Us Opens a New Window.

Andrea Ritchie is an attorney, organizer, and author of Invisible No More, a recent book about how Black women, Indigenous women, and women of color experience racial profiling, police brutality, and immigration enforcement .

Rahsaan Hall is the Director of the ACLU of Massachusetts’s What A Difference a DA Makes Campaign. We discuss progressive prosecution and the ACLU’s campaign to hold prosecutors accountable through public awareness.

Trials are supposed to be a fundamental constitutional right. But in today’s criminal legal system, only 3% of federal cases are resolved at trial. I discuss why the endangerment of the American trial is so problematic with Norman Reimer, Executive Director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and Elisa Klein, Associate at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.

383,000 young people were placed on formal or informal probation supervision in 2014. Stephen Bishop, of the Annie E Casey Foundation, thinks that supervision needs to look different. He argues something basic, but powerful: less probation. Putting fewer young people on probation will free up probation resources to turn away from surveillance-based supervision to more constructive and therapeutic probation. We talk about that vision.

The criminalization of cannabis was a foundational pillar of the New Jim Crow. Now, the decriminalization of cannabis might just make a small number of white and privileged folks really rich. Shaleen Title is working to make sure that the burgeoning cannabis market in Massachusetts is one that accounts for and corrects that inequity.

Arch City Defenders advocates for poor people and people of color who are exploited by the municipal court system in St. Louis. Its Director, Blake Strode, will discuss their aggressively holistic approach and the ways they use direct services and impact litigation to serve their community.