Prison Reform
05 May 2018
Dan just moderated a discussion in Philadelphia with Senator Sanders, along with Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, scholar and frequent Dig guest Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and veteran defense lawyer and advocate Premal Dharia. Bernie came to...
28 Nov 2017
The drug war is a cause of, not solution to, the overdose crisis. Law and public health scholar @LeoBeletsky explains the origins of the opioid overdose crisis and how drug prohibition, policing, interdiction and incarceration...
14 Nov 2017
Historian Kelly Lytle Hernández tells the story of human caging in Los Angeles, from the Spanish Conquest to the mid-twentieth century, in her new book. It’s a story of indigenous exploitation and elimination, immigrant detention...
03 Nov 2017
Why have the size of American police departments grown so dramatically in recent decades, even as crime rates have fallen? One factor may have been the growing centrality of real estate for urban economies, according...
17 Oct 2017
In his new book The End of Policing Brooklyn College sociologist @avitale makes the case that technocratic reforms won’t fix American policing. In reality, we can only fix policing by ending the carceral state and...
06 Oct 2017
Prevailing debate obscures the fact that we already have a form of gun control in the United States. As legal scholar Ben Levin explains, the problem is that it’s a form of gun control that...
04 Oct 2017
Here’s Dan’s full interview with civil rights attorney and Democratic nominee for Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner. You heard some of it yesterdayon the first in a four-part series on mass incarceration that we are...
03 Oct 2017
In the late 1960s, criminologists like Todd Clear predicted America would soon start closing its prisons. They couldn’t have been more wrong. Interviews with Clear, formerly incarcerated poet and legal scholar Dwayne Betts, and civil...
20 Jun 2017
Mass incarceration controls poor people and populations that have been excluded from the labor market. Politically, tough-on-crime rhetoric has for decades been a tool for politicians to appeal to white voters’ racism. But what’s less...
18 Apr 2017
Prisons don’t just keep inmates in; they keep the public out. Even at a moment when mass incarceration is under unprecedented criticism it is quite hard for people on the outside to empathize with people...
28 Feb 2017
Mass incarceration should be central to any analysis of American political economy. It’s also a moral monstrosity. But before The New Jim Crow and anti-mass incarceration activists across the country loudly insisted this was the...