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.

We Put Innocent People Behind Bars with Lisa Kavanaugh

Voir Dire is an interview-based podcast about criminal justice reform. Sometimes, we share the conversations taking place on Harvard’s campus; other times, we start conversations outside of those small classrooms. Working or living in the criminal legal system can habituate you to the cruelty and wastefulness of the whole thing. In this podcast, we try to contextualize these systems, pick the brains of the most thoughtful people in criminal justice reform, and think big about how to ameliorate the mass incarceration crisis. Hosted by Schuyler Daum.

Government

Stacey Borden is the  Founder and Executive Director of New Beginnings Reentry Services, Inc., which provides services to women coming home from prison. She talks about the unique experiences of women in prison and the challenges they face coming home.

Women Coming Home from Prison with Stacey Borden

Danielle Sered is the author of Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair. The book is based on her work as the founder and Director of Common Justice, an alternative-to-incarceration and victim-service program that focuses on violent felonies. We discuss violence, restorative justice, and the abject failure of the criminal legal system to do justice or create safety.

Violence & Restorative Justice with Danielle Sered

Human trafficking happens here in the United States. More needs to be done to prevent and address it. At the same time, the law of human trafficking, although young, is actually quite robust. And it’s being applied in novel, complex, and (some would say) questionable ways. Julie Dahlstrom, Director of BU Law’s Immigrants’ Rights & Human Trafficking Program, discusses these trends.

Law of Human Trafficking with Julie Dahlstrom

Sarah Seo is the author of Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom. She explains how traffic enforcement fundamentally changed Fourth Amendment jurisprudence in the 20th century. Namely, it vastly expanded police discretion, creating the law enforcement regime that has presided over numerous high profile killings of unarmed black drivers by police in recent years. We rethink that regime. Then, we take a turn to ask what the 20th century’s major technological disruption (cars) can teach us about how we in the 21st century can respond to new disruptive technologies like big data.

A Wrong Turn: How the Law of Cars Expanded Police Power with Sarah Seo

People with similar demographics, individual characteristics, and family and economic backgrounds have substantially different chances of getting arrested depending on the years during which they were 17 to 23 years old. Professor Robert Sampson outlines a groundbreaking new study showing the way that historical context predicts arrest rates.

We Put Innocent People Behind Bars with Lisa Kavanaugh

Download our free app to listen on your phone