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

People caught shoplifting can pay $400-$500 to a private company in return for a promise not to call the police and a "restorative justice" class. What?? We discuss the pros and cons of such private adjudication schemes with John Rappaport, Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Chicago.

Boston's Sept. 4 District Attorney elections for have the potential to change the criminal legal system in Boston and be a model for progressive change across the country. Shannon McAuliffe is running for District Attorney of Suffolk County, aka Boston. She is a former public defender and director at Roca, a program that disrupts the cycle of poverty and incarceration by helping high-risk young people transform their lives and avoid the criminal legal system. We talk about what a progressive campaign looks like and what a progressive DA.

Learn more at https://www.mcauliffeforda.com/

This is the second episode in which we feature student scholarship coming out of HLS. We interview Andrew Hanna about a recent Third Circuit case that could change the landscape of putting people with mental illness in solitary confinement. Then, we talk to Louis Fisher about cause lawyers who might engage in civil disobedience against legal ethics codes.

We reached out to all the criminal law professors at HLS and asked what student scholarship had really wowed them in the past year. In these special episodes, we bring you conversations with the Harvard Law students and recent alums whose work is helping to push criminal law scholarship forward.

First, Anneke Dunbar Gronke talks about her recent piece in the Harvard Law Review on Commonwealth v. Brangan, a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court case advancing bail reform. Then, Ben Gifford discusses how and why prison crime has been excluded from economic cost-benefit analyses of incarceration.

Restorative justice is a paradigm-shifting approach to criminal justice. Fania Davis is a long-time social justice activist, a restorative justice scholar and professor, and a civil rights attorney with a Ph.D. in indigenous knowledge. She is also the Founder of Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth. We'll discuss the restorative justice framework and what it actually looks like on the ground.

Brandon Garrett discusses the precipitous decline in death penalty sentences and executions and his new book, End of its Rope: How Killing the Death Penalty Can Revive Criminal Justice.

Pastor Donna Hubbard works with women who have been trafficked at her organization, the Women at the Well Transition Center, and helps train airline attendants to spot trafficking with Airline Ambassadors International.

Carl Route describes life after prison as “the life sentence on the outside.” We explore the difficulties of life after prison with activists and reformers Donna Hubbard and Carl Route and discuss their work helping folks return from prison in Atlanta, Georgia.

Nila Bala & Jesse Kelley of the R Street Institute help us understand the juvenile justice system and talk about their work to reform the system.

Nila Balan & Jesse Kelley of the free market think tank, the R Street Institute, talk about a conservative perspective on criminal justice reform.