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

Debtors prisons were banned in the US in the 1830's. But almost two centuries later, the criminal legal system is still punishing people for being poor. This week, we talk to Sara Zampierin, a Staff Attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center. She will lay out for us an array of constitutionally and morally questionable practices that trap poor people in the criminal legal system, including excessive cash bail, onerous fines and fees, and self-interested private probation services.

Sexual assault is widespread in prison. And sometimes it may feel like nobody cares. But our guest, Dave Rini, runs a collaboration between the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center and the Massachusetts Department of Corrections. He tells us what is happening to people behind bars and what we can do to improve our response to trauma in prison.

It’s an ugly truth: our criminal legal system sends innocent people to prison. We talk to Lisa Kavanaugh, Director of the Committee for Public Counsel’s Innocence Program, about wrongful convictions, bad forensic science (spoiler alert: there’s a lot), and the ways in which the plight of innocent defendants can highlight the injustices that all defendants face.

Within three years of release, about two-thirds of people released from prison are rearrested. Wesley Caines, the Reentry and Community Outreach Coordinator at the Bronx Defenders, tells us about the traumas of going to prison and the ways in which we set people released from prison up for failure.

What is Voir Dire? And what can you expect from this podcast?