College Incarcerated

Imagine a future when no one can become a prosecutor, a judge, a cop, without first sitting in a classroom to learn from the very people whose lives will be in their hands.

Other than incarcerating fewer people in the first place, what works to help people build lives outside of jail and prison? One answer has been proven again and again: education.

At 24, Jarrell Daniels was released from prison after spending six years—a quarter of his life—behind bars. It was a Thursday. The following Tuesday, to everyone's amazement but his own, he went back to the same Queens, New York, facility, this time in street clothes, to continue the college course he had started in a state-issued uniform. He got his credit—"it didn't make a difference if I had to climb up a volcano to complete the program"—and is now a sophomore at Columbia University.

The class that so inspired Daniels was an experiment in an already unorthodox setting: a college seminar behind bars taking the criminal justice system as its subject. Half of the students were people incarcerated in the facility; half were local prosecutors. Along with discussions and readings, the aim of the class was to produce jointly-authored policy proposals for improving the justice system—proposals presented at a graduation ceremony attended by the Manhattan District Attorney and other corrections officials (and Daniels's mom).

The class, 'Inside Criminal Justice,' is the focus of this episode of New Thinking. It was the brainchild of Lucy Lang, at the time an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, and now the executive director of the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution. The goal was to promote understanding across a seminar table for two groups more typically at odds. As Lang explains, "I started to realize how detached I had become from the consequences of my decision-making." For Daniels, discovering that not all prosecutors were white was itself a revelation. "They weren't there to just talk to us or talk at us,"  he says, "it was more of a conversation and we were included in that conversation."

'Inside Criminal Justice' has now expanded to more facilities, and to more district attorney's offices. And along with his studies at Columbia University, Daniels has launched his own variation: the Justice Ambassadors Youth Council, a seminar course bringing together young people who have had encounters with the justice system with New York City officials, drawn everywhere from the Mayor's Office to the Department of Homeless Services. It has just graduated its second cohort.

"Higher education, we really just have to drive home the fact that this is giving people hope," concludes Daniels. "You can't take away what I've learned and what I've acquired over time and what I've worked hard to achieve."
 

The following is an annotated transcript of the podcast:

MATT WATKINS: Welcome to New Thinking from the Center for Court Innovation. I’m Matt Watkins.

What works to help people build lives outside of jail and prison?  I mean, other than not sending them there in the first place. One answer has been proven again and again: education works. You can see proof of that right now in the remarkable documentary ‘College Behind Bars’ on PBS about the Bard Prison Initiative. You can also hear it in the words of Stanley Richards from a live episode about Rikers Island we recorded in March 2019. Richards spent time on Rikers and in state prison where he enrolled in college classes. He’s now the executive vice president of the Fortune Society. 

STANLEY RICHARDS: One of the elements, I know for me, that helped me change my life was education. When I thought all my life I was going to be cycling in and out of prison because I thought that was my destiny, that was my life. And then when I realized, through education, that all those messages I got about my worth, and all those messages I got about who I was because I come from the projects, were lies.

WATKINS: To talk about education behind bars we have a couple of guests on today's show. The first I'll introduce you to is Jarrell Daniels. Beginning at 18, he spent six years incarcerated. And here he is in a TED Talk explaining a transformative experience he had near the end of his sentence:

DANIELS: Imagine with me for a second, a future when no one can become a prosecutor, a judge, a cop, or even a parole officer, without first sitting in a classroom to learn from, and connect with, the very people whose lives will be in their hands.

WATKINS: That future Daniels is describing actually happened, an experiment in learning behind bars that set him on his current path as a sophomore at Columbia University. More than just a college seminar in prison, the class brought together prosecutors from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and a group of incarcerated men. The goal was to study the criminal justice system—together—and along with readings and discussion, to produce a set of policy proposals to present to the D.A. and other elected officials.

The class, called ‘Inside Criminal Justice,’ is now in its fourth semester and has expanded to other facilities and to other district attorney offices. It was the brainchild of Lucy Lang, at the time an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, and now the executive director of the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution at John Jay College.

Jarrell was in the first class Lucy helped teach, and I recently sat down with both of them to talk about the experience. I started by asking Jarrell to describe how the class was first greeted inside the prison:

DANIELS: During the orientation, it was tense. A lot of the men, they were basically, "How dare you come in here and try to ask us about criminal justice reform? You put us in here”— those kinds of comments. Lucy sat there poised and she was like, "I understand your challenges, but this is our opportunity to make a difference. This is our opportunity to work across whatever kind of differences we may have towards a solution, towards some of the challenges that you face to your community and some of the challenges within our own agency." I was sold from them even stepping foot inside the prison.

The simple fact that the prosecutor wanted to come inside of a facility to see what some of the conditions were like was enough for me to say: whatever they're going to do, I want to be a part of it moving forward. So, I would say the first day of the classroom, I assumed it would be mostly white Caucasian people in a room, whether male or female, and I was actually surprised to see there were black, Hispanic, different ethnicity prosecutors in the room.

And it wasn't a standoffish environment. We weren't sitting across from one another: they on one side, us on the other side. That was helpful for me to see that they weren't scared of us. They weren't there to just talk to us or talk at us, but it was more of a conversation and we were included in that conversation.

WATKINS: You signed up for this class, right? This was a voluntary experience. What do you think led you to signing up for it in the first place?

DANIELS: That’s a good question. My simplest answer is that I saw “power” and then I saw “powerful” in two names. The first name was Columbia University. The second name was the Manhattan District Attorney's Office. My case was prosecuted in the Office of Special Narcotics, which has residency inside of the Manhattan D.A.'s Office.

So, I saw this as an opportunity for me to redeem myself to society and prove to the district attorneys in the room, and also who represented the Manhattan D.A.'s office, that I wasn't this person whose life was discarded—as if it was meaningless, I had no potential—but more of a person who can be in a room with people, not just holding my experiences, but also offering solutions to some of the challenges so that we can work together to fix our communities because at the end of the day, even though I am somebody who is formerly incarcerated, I don't want to live in a community with gun and gang violence in it and I wouldn't want anybody else to as well.

WATKINS: Then Lucy, what led to the idea for this class? It's kind of a unique model, where you're not just teaching a college class in a correctional facility, but you're also bringing together prosecutors and people who are incarcerated in one room.

LUCY LANG: I had been a prosecutor for more than a decade when I started to realize how detached I had become from the consequences of my decision-making. One example stands out in particular, which is that at the conclusion of a very lengthy homicide trial in which two young men killed another young man, I called the mother of the man who had been killed the following morning and said, "How do you feel?" And she said, "I slept all night for the first time since my son was killed, but when I woke up this morning, all I could think about were the moms of those two boys."

I really thought then: if she's able to think this way, why am I not? What I wanted to do was to find a way to encourage the culture of the District Attorney's Office to include the experiences of everyone who touches the system—not just the victims and witnesses with whom prosecutors are rightly always concerned, but also people who are charged with crimes.

I did a landscape analysis to see what was out there and learned that really there weren't any programs for prosecutors, or other criminal justice system actors, to repeatedly go inside of prisons and get to know people on the inside. I coincidentally was reading an article about the Columbia Center for Justice and saw the name professor Geraldine Downey, who is the director there, and I cold-called her and said, "I have this crazy idea, can we explore it?" And she said, "Yes." Then I started looking for the right correctional partner, and there are only a limited number of state prison facilities in New York City. It happens that the leadership at Queensboro Correctional Facility, which is the state's reentry facility in Long Island City–

WATKINS: So that's for people at the end of their sentences, often long sentences.

LANG: That's right. It's where many people, in particular from New York City, come through on their way home from lengthy sentences. It happens that the leadership of Queensboro is really creative and thoughtful and committed to programming. So, myself and a colleague from the D.A.'s office and Professor Downey went in and met with, as Jarrell described, a group of men from the facility, some of whom had been intentionally invited by the leadership.

There were also people in the room who had never had any interest in talking to a district attorney, didn't have any college background, and were just thrown into the mix. So, we presented it and we heard people out and encouraged people to let the superintendent know if they were interested in participating. I'm so fortunate that, not only did Jarrell volunteer to participate, I've since learned that he became an advocate on the inside, encouraging people to take advantage of the opportunity and see what it was we were trying to do.

DANIELS: What I did on the inside with the men is like, "Do you want to be a part of history? This is your opportunity to be in a position where you can actually make change. It's one thing to go out and advocate and protest and have all of these critiques of the system, but it's another thing to be in a position to make the actual change you would like to see—not just for yourself, but for other people who are having these kinds of interactions with the justice system."

It didn't really take much convincing, but it was a reassurance for them. This is something that your family's going to be forever proud of you for. This is something that whoever's impacted by a policy change is going to forever be grateful to whoever was a part of the conversation that led to this policy development and implementation.

LANG: It's interesting to think about it as historic—I appreciate Jarrell talking about it that way. But in some ways, once we started doing it, it was totally obvious that it would work. And it's been interesting to see the reception at other district attorney's offices as we have both been traveling around and advocating for this new model of legal education for prosecutors in partnership with local universities.

There is a real hunger for this kind of community engagement amongst prosecutors. And invariably people say: “why don't you include defense attorneys? why don't you include judges? why don't you include parole boards?” And, of course, all of these are criminal justice system actors who might benefit from the kind of community building that we're seeking to do through the very basic liberal arts college education model.

WATKINS: Well, so a question for either one of you: what made it so obvious that it was going to work?

DANIELS: We often, in American society, rely on trainings and seminars and forums to educate people on how to best be prepared for a job. If we think about the military, we think about the extensive training that they go through and they're still not prepared for war. Nothing prepares you until you're actually in combat. But relating this to the ‘Inside Criminal Justice’ program, we're asking district attorneys to go through so many years of law school, for them who already had undergraduate degrees before going into law school. But we're saying that you're now qualified because a degree made you qualified to make these decisions around human lives, but they're really not really prepared as best as we will hope for them to be, to have that kind of power over somebody's life.

WATKINS: To appreciate just how powerful that power is.

DANIELS: Exactly. Paraphrasing some of the words of one of the district attorneys, he said, “this was the most meaningful educational experience I've ever had,” learning from the very people whose lives were in his hands for years. What are we doing to prepare these individuals for life after incarceration? And on the front end, what are we doing, to hopefully prevent some of the challenges that lead to them committing crimes in the first place.

LANG: The system is structured in a way that all the system actors can separate themselves from the end result. And traditionally, prosecutors closed a case as soon as someone was sentenced. So there was no looking back. And that's by design within the system.

WATKINS: No looking forward either to post-conviction.

LANG: That's right. And it's part of what's very inspiring about this moment in criminal justice, that prosecutors are starting to think about their obligation to reentry. They're thinking about their mandate as supporters of public safety being, not just detaining people for a period of time so that they can't commit crimes in the public during that time, but also bearing in mind that folks are almost invariably coming home and we want them to come home better off and not likely to enter the system again.

WATKINS: And so, Jarrell, what is it like doing a college course behind bars?

DANIELS: I was in a medium security prison. There are no cells, there's just what they call dormitory units.

WATKINS: This is at Queensboro, at the reentry facility.

DANIELS: Yes, at Queensboro, and also the one I was in prior to Queensboro, and they're all dormitories, so it is no locking-in-a-cell, privacy, quiet time, lights going off. There's a count at different points throughout the day where you have to go back to your bed area, the bed areas where you would try to do some studying. But again there's no privacy.

There's people walking back and forth past your bed. There's people talking who might be a few beds down from you. You can hear them talk and they may be up late at night talking or having conversations, laughing and joking, and nothing that you can really do but try to block out the noise and focus in on the study. I've seen people go inside of the bathroom and take their books inside of the stall and study inside of a stall, to seclude themselves.

I've seen people going to shower area, close the door, and try to seclude themselves. I've seen people even go as far as the slop-sink area, which is like a janitor's closet, and close themselves in there just to study with the lamp that you can plug into the wall. I think that you should never have to go to that extreme to try to focus on putting yourself in a better position for your own release.

But I think that it's a necessary step that people are willing to take because they know that, if I don't plan for my release right now, I know that the system is not set up to plan for my release. And I know that if I depend on that $40 and a Metrocard and the push for parole to maintain employment, that it's not going to be enough because they don't really actually set me up to lead a healthy and productive life with all of the restrictions that come with post-release supervision.

LANG: Notwithstanding the abysmal study conditions inside, almost categorically the incarcerated students were better prepared for class than the prosecutor students.

WATKINS: That comes up too in this ‘College Behind Bars’ documentary, same thing, that the incarcerated students were actually better prepared than the students at Bard College. Professors were saying, "I can't use the multimedia stuff and tricks I can use in the college because I'm in a prison facility, but I don't need them because these students are just so engaged and so prepared."

DANIELS: I think the reading materials is, it's interesting. And I say interesting because you're dealing with what they consider non-traditional students—so students who've had gaps in the educational journey for some time, but now the curiosity has been spiked and they want to learn something different, as opposed to life inside an impoverished community. We know that all too well. And I think, when I was presented, just to give you an example, one of the readings in ‘Inside Criminal Justice’ course was Judge Underhill and he wrote, the name of the article was, ‘Did the Man I Sentenced to 18 Years Deserve It?’

And in that op-ed, he talked about how—I believe he was a federal judge. He talked about how he was losing sleep, he said this case just stood out to him. He said he was losing so much sleep that he actually went to the prison after a few years, after this person was convicted, and went to go see how he was doing, and just as his intuition was telling him this person had changed their life despite the long sentence that he gave him.

And he realized that there was nothing that he could do, or that that person could do, to get him out before his 18-year mark. He said that's what led him to start thinking differently about his job as a judge and is he fully taking into consideration this person's potential to change and evolve into a different person as opposed to the person they were when they committed that crime to begin with?

WATKINS: I had a look at the most recent syllabus for the course and you guys are... I mean there's some really interesting reading on there. There's Michelle Alexander, there's John Pfaff, who both have views that are pretty critical of prosecutors. There's Viktor Frankl and his experience in a concentration camp. You're dealing with some pretty heavy themes: restorative justice, trauma, the roots of mass incarceration. How does it work presenting these readings and these themes to what could be in some ways a divided audience of prosecutors and people who are currently incarcerated? How do we present these ideas?

LANG: It functions like a proper seminar where everyone is given the readings in advance and has the opportunity to process them on their own and then we come together and have guided conversations—sometimes in small groups or partners, sometimes as a collective.

It is critically important that the class understands from the beginning that all of the work we're doing together is geared toward developing jointly-authored policy proposals which ultimately are presented to the District Attorney, the Commissioner of Corrections, and other local elected officials. There is a shared goal from the beginning, even if there is a divergence of views, and it would perhaps be surprising to someone on the outside to see how quickly people gel around the ideas that we're taking on.

The people who are closest to the problems include people who go through the system and frontline prosecutors. So, it's not as though we're throwing into a room together people who don't have anything in common. They just come at it from very different perspectives, and what reading together in a seminar format allows to happen is for the personal and emotional to be kind of channeled through a text in furtherance of a shared goal.

So, the conversations will often start with, "I agree with what John Pfaff says in chapter six because here's my experience." But then very quickly it turns into a conversation about what people know based on their own experience.

I think that it's important to note that the class is very much a college class. There have been no concessions made to the fact that some people have different educational backgrounds in the room. It's a very rigorous course because the inside students have the opportunity to receive college credits for their participation and the prosecutor students receive continuing legal education credits towards their maintenance of their bar membership.

WATKINS: So, when we talk about these different perspectives, since you have this focus on producing policy proposals at the end, what have some of those proposals looked like? Can we see their evidence of something that neither side, if I can put it that way, could have come up with on their own?

LANG: Well, Jarrell can give a shining example of one that is very relevant right at this moment.

DANIELS: The group that I broke up into featured two assistant district attorneys and one other incarcerated man. So it was four of us in a group, and one of the proposals that we came up with was to actually implement a computer lab with internet access, not exactly internet but intranet. The restricted form of internet service for incarcerated residents at Queensboro Correctional Facility and that policy was passed.

They actually put about 20 computers in Queensboro that had internet service. And the purpose of this proposal was so that incarcerated men would have the opportunity to apply for vital documentation, like a birth certificate or social security card, and also reentry programs and services before they're released from the prison.

The problem is that most of the time people are bounced around throughout their incarceration from facility to facility and their property gets lost, and sometimes it's the fault of the administration. So, if Queensboro is going to serve as a reentry facility, they should be the place where you apply for this.

LANG: Thinking about the policy proposals, I'm particularly looking forward to the upcoming graduation in January of the current cohort of students because for the first time we have had a class in a women's facility in upper Manhattan and it has been interesting to see how there are different areas of interest amongst the women, the policy ideas that they're coming up with are often quite different and more tailored to women's population.

Of course, that's a population in the criminal justice system that, one, seems to be rising and, two, that does not get the same amount of attention as the male prison population.

WATKINS: Jarrell, you have this great TED Talk where you talk about your experience in this ‘Inside Criminal Justice' program. Everybody should watch that—I'll link to it on the episode page for this. In that TED Talk, you said there was a moment in one of the seminars where some of the incarcerated students complained, they felt that the prosecutors were tiptoeing too much around the issue of race. That must have been an interesting moment in the room. Could you talk a bit about what led to that moment, and what came out of it?

DANIELS: What was unique about the Queensboro course was that we had real deep and meaningful conversations. And of course—as the student highlighted and paraphrasing him—you can’t read things like Michelle Alexander's book or John Pfaff’s book, Locked In, without getting to the core of this problem, which is race, and this social construction in America, and how we reinforce it in different institutions.

It doesn't just happen in the criminal justice system, it happens in the education system and other systems that have these kinds of racial disparities in them as well. But I think that what was important about what he said was that it was a moment for us to dive deeper as a team. And when he raised those points about us tiptoeing around these things, these issues, that it was a call to action for us. Not just for the prosecutors, but us as incarcerated men, it was meaningful because at that point we actually began to have those more challenging conversations and people voiced their real, sincere and deepest, honest opinions about the system.

One of the things that was, as Lucy mentioned, was that there was a disconnect in the level of education between the incarcerated men and the district attorneys. District attorneys weren't as informed on those people's experiences, what led to them committing those kinds of acts. And us as you know, people starting to get, for lack of better words, getting our feet wet in criminal justice reform, there were things that we just didn't know about what it takes to make policy and institutional, and actual cultural, change, inside of agencies like this.

I did talk a lot as I'm doing now, but I did sit back and take a lot of notes too. And Lucy can probably attest to this, that I actually came to class with all of my notebooks one day from things I've acquired over the years and different thoughts that I had in mind.

But it was a phenomenal class. The meaningful part of it was us having those real raw conversations and getting completely off track and you know, talking about... And even if we were venting, we just needed that space to vent and it was good for the prosecutors to hear and it was good for us to get it off our chest.

WATKINS: You told me you liked the class so much that you actually kept attending it after your release. What was that like?

DANIELS: I was so committed. I was sold from orientation. I just knew that this was something that was going to be bigger than me. And once we were actually in the class and they said, well, we'd be developing policy recommendations, then I knew this was my chance to prove to society, prove to my community, to my family, that I can be more than what I am currently as an incarcerated man. I haven't completed much, I didn't get to complete high school on the outside. I had to go to the Rikers Island and complete my general education diploma. I wasn't able-

WATKINS: You went to Rikers when you're 17 or...?

DANIELS: Eighteen. So, a lot of when I was given opportunities to do something right, I just wasn't able to complete them. If I have the chance and opportunity to complete anything, I would want to complete this and I want my mom to be there on the completion day, which was our graduation ceremony that she was able to make. For me, it didn't make a difference if I had to climb up a volcano to complete the program, I would've did it. That's how serious I was about it.

LANG: It was amazing, after our second class and Jarrell said, "I'm getting out next week before the next class. Can I come back?" And I said, "Well, I don't know."

WATKINS: We hadn't planned on that scenario…

LANG: I don't think that Corrections is going to be down with it, but thankfully they were, because they were so committed to the project. And then I still thought, well, who knows if he's really going to show? And, lo and behold, I showed up at Queensboro and there was Jarrell in his street clothes waiting for us outside the facility. And so 10 prosecutors, two professors, and Jarrell, all in our street clothes, walked into the facility together. And that was a really remarkable experience.

WATKINS: And then Jarrell, can you talk a little bit about what you're doing now? You're running a program that's I think sort of similar to ‘Inside Criminal Justice.’ You're also in college.

DANIELS: Yes, I'm a sophomore at the School of General Studies at Columbia University. And I just had hope, as I had talked about in our graduation speeches, we got to do something for people who are having these minor interactions with the justice system, who are at risk to being incarcerated for a long period of time. And particularly we got to focus on young people, not because I'm young myself, but because young people are known to have the most–

WATKINS: You're fairly young!

DANIELS: Yes. And it's not because of my age, but it's more so behind the statistics that show that young people are more likely to have negative interactions with law enforcement. They're more likely to be stopped and frisked, and they're more likely to commit the most serious and violent crimes—particularly between the ages of 18 and 24.

And I thought that it was important for anything that I would hope to do would be to focus on that population and people. And because of my own personal experiences of being incarcerated at the age of 18. But I thought that young people offer a different critique of the system that's different from older men, which were most of the men in the Queensboro course were older than me.

But I wanted to take the same structure. I want it to have 10 young people, 10 city officials, for a seminar course working across their own differences, going over some of these challenging readings. And I asked the young people when I recruited them from ATI [Alternative to Incarceration] programs and traditional high schools, I asked them would they be willing to come in on Saturdays and develop a curriculum with me. And I asked them to choose readings—choose a theme for each week, and to choose editorial articles that they would like to cover that will help inform and guide those discussions in the classroom.

And I think the one thing that was just slightly different in the Justice Ambassadors Youth Council that's different from ‘Inside Criminal Justice’ is that, instead of just having all district attorneys, we tried to expand it to different city agencies, so that they all have an opportunity. Because we know that sometimes these agencies and institutions work in silos.

So, it's things like that. While we thought it was important to have not just district attorneys, but also people from the Mayor's Office, from City Council, from the Department of Education, Administration of Child Services, the Department of Homeless Services, which are some of the people who participated. But people in a position that can actually inform policy recommendations for the agency, or who are in a position themselves to actually pass a policy, and we just graduated our second cohort. We're just hoping to have some of the success as ‘Inside Criminal Justice’ has.

WATKINS: So Lucy, one thing I'm curious about: where does the funding come for this program?

LANG: We ran it out of the Manhattan District Attorney's Office as part of their legal training apparatus. My ultimate aspiration is that D.A.'s offices will undertake this and incorporate it into their legal training as a new way of encouraging their prosecutors to think about their work. And I think that the ideal way to do that is to form a partnership with a local university or community college. That being the model, it's not an expensive operation. It basically is printing educational materials, which can be done in-house, and then going out to the facility after hours.

That said, as we look to scale it and create replication materials, I am definitely looking for funding on the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution side so that we can help get the message out and provide adequate support to other offices nationwide who are undertaking this model for legal education. So if you have anyone in mind, send them my way.

WATKINS: Well, I have the government in mind, I guess. It seems like we know that education, it works. So, it just seems like there is an opportunity there for more public investment in this kind of work taking place behind bars. We also know that every dollar you spend on education behind bars saves more than that dollar in other areas.

LANG: And imagine that in this case, unlike college behind bars in general, you have the added dividends of an improved relationship between traditionally adversarial parties.

DANIELS: I think, just to really home in on a point of higher education and the significance towards rehabilitation, and only thing I really see that would rehabilitate somebody in prison, but I think higher education, we really just got to drive home the fact that this is giving people hope. This is giving people desires and aspirations in life that they otherwise might not have had. And it's given me something that's worth me living for.

And I think that education, for me, it's more than me just giving a TED Talk. It's more than me having an opportunity to work and do things that I've been privileged to be a part of in New York City. It's more than the work. It's actually given me something that I can have and that nobody else can take away from me—an employment opportunity, people can take away from me. You can't take away what I've learned and what I've acquired over time and that I've worked hard to achieve.

And I think that from my conditions that I grew up in my neighborhood, there wasn't anything that was worthwhile. There was a cloud of hopelessness and despair over my community. And education has been that thing that's been my shining light in my corner. And even though I don't possess a degree at the time, as a student, that's what drives me to finish out my higher education because I know that this is something that I know I've worked hard for, and it's something that I know can’t be taken away from me.

I know that I grew up and things have been taken away, and I felt like I'd been cast out of society long before I was even sent to prison. I just didn't feel like I had opportunities or resources to be more than an underprivileged, under-resourced minority person in America. So I think obtaining that college degree for me, is the only way that I see myself sustaining a healthy and successful adult life.

WATKINS: That was my conversation with Jarrell Daniels and Lucy Lang. Lucy is the executive director of the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution. Jarrell is a research assistant at the Center for Justice at Columbia University and the program manager of the Justice Ambassadors Youth Council. For more information about what you heard in today’s episode, click the link in your show notes or visit courtinnovation.org/newthinking.

For their help with this episode, my thanks to Shanakay Salmon and Julius Lang. Today’s show was edited and produced by me, with technical support from the unswervable Bill Harkins. Samiha Meah is our director of design. Emma Dayton is our vice president of outreach. Our theme music is by Michael Aharon at quivernyc.com. And our show’s founder is Rob Wolf. This has been New Thinking from the Center for Court Innovation. I’m Matt Watkins. Thanks for listening.