Rooted in history and the urgency of now, New Thinking talks to the people working to reform—or remake—the criminal legal system. It’s hosted by Matt Watkins.
Think of probation as an enormous testing period: will you be able to adhere to the thicket of conditions governing your daily life? Fail at any of them and you could be sent to prison. At the heart of this testing ethos is drug testing, affecting almost all of the 2.9 million people on probation in the U.S. The tests are time-consuming, expensive, and traumatic. There is also little evidence justifying their use.
A brief, moving excerpt from the recent award ceremony at the New York Public Library announcing the inaugural winner of the Inside Literary Prize, the first major U.S. book award to be judged exclusively by people who are incarcerated.
Hear from Freedom Reads founder and CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts, and from this year’s winner…
The Inside Literary Prize is the first major U.S. book award judged by people who are incarcerated, some of the most prolific readers in the country. Yet the walls we erect around incarcerated people also disappear them from conversations about culture, politics, history—conversations to which they can make vital contributions. On New Thinking, hear a behind-the-scenes portrait of a day of judging in Minnesota's Shakopee women's prison.
What would it mean to decriminalize mental health—to stop criminalizing the symptoms of what is very often untreated mental illness? And what would it mean to put racial justice at the center of that effort? The outcomes of the criminal legal system being what they are, those two questions are really one. Hear a lively discussion on our New Thinking podcast.
Oregon broke with the War on Drugs three years ago, decriminalizing the possession of most illicit drugs. The measure promised instead a "health-based approach." But the state has just ended the short-lived experiment. The law faced stiff headwinds from the start: from fentanyl's arrival to a relentless opposition campaign. But part of what went wrong was a challenge for any legislation: implementation. How do you make a sweeping new approach work on the ground?
Vincent Schiraldi used to run probation in New York City; now he’s questioning whether it should exist at all. Schiraldi says some of the roots of mass supervision—and its connection to mass incarceration—can be found in a surprising place: the Supreme Court’s 1963 Gideon decision. It recognized, but failed to adequately support, a poor person’s right to a lawyer. Hear the final episode in New Thinking’s “Gideon at 60” series.
New Thinking profiles the fight to secure lawyers for people facing eviction and the radical impact that is having in Housing Court. With its 1963 Gideon decision, the Supreme Court guaranteed a lawyer to any poor person facing prison time. For criminal cases, the decision was both sweeping and critically incomplete. On the civil side, the campaign for a right to counsel is taking a different approach—it's slow and piecemeal, but it's also working.
"On every anniversary of Gideon, liberals bemoan the state of indigent defense." On this 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision granting a lawyer to every poor defendant facing prison time, there is much to bemoan. Yet as the harms of the criminal legal system come into sharper relief, there is a larger question: even if Gideon's promise was fulfilled, how much would that change who principally suffers under the current system: the poor and people of color?
April Barber Scales was a pregnant 15-year-old when she received two life sentences; Anthony Willis was 16 when he was sent away for life. After more than 25 years behind bars, they each received something desperately rare: clemency. They describe how they fought against a prison system that "sets you up for failure." We also hear from an organization in Baltimore that works exclusively with young people at high risk of violence. Rather than arrests and incarceration, what do these young people need?
A recent two-day training for Manhattan prosecutors was a drumbeat on the harms of incarceration, part of a wider effort by D.A. Alvin Bragg to expand the use of alternatives such as treatment and restorative justice. But in a newly cramped climate for criminal justice reform, can that effort become a reality? New Thinking investigates.
