A History of Human Caging with Kelly Lytle Hernández
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 City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, …
Don’t Criminalize Sex Work with Melissa Gira Grant
Journalist @melissagira eviscerates a newspaper investigation that conflates sex work with trafficking. She examines how reporters unwittingly fall into a savior complex, which ends up criminalizing workers in the name …
Policing for the Market with Brenden Beck
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 …
Bonus: Ending the War on Drug Dealers
Dan was on a panel last week on ending the war on drug dealers at the Drug Policy Alliance conference in Atlanta. The panel was moderated by asha bandele and …
We must end policing as we know it with Alex Vitale
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 …
Beware Carceral Gun Control
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 …
Bonus Episode: Larry Krasner’s Full Interview
Here’s Dan’s full interview with civil rights attorney and Democratic nominee for Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner. You heard some of it yesterday on the first in a four-part series …
Part One: The Story Behind America’s Mass Incarceration Experiment
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 …
An Olympic-Size Swindle in LA with Molly Lambert and Jules Boykoff
The so-called Olympic spirit doesn’t match the reality of a highly-corporatized Games that often leaves taxpayers picking up the tab, engenders abusive policing and justifies the remaking of cities for …
James Forman Jr.: Locking Up Our Own
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 …