Best of 2019

Host: Kai Wright
Caught: The Lives of Juvenile Justice offers listeners a chance to hear from kids about their experiences with law and order and how these experiences changed them forever. In this episode, Caught teams up with The Marshall Project to investigate how widespread the practice of solitary confinement remains. Listeners also learn about the lasting impacts of being placed in solitary from a teenager named Imani, who spent more than a month in solitary after she was accused of shoplifting.

Host: Joshua B. Hoe
Decarceration Nation, a podcast about radically reimagining America’s criminal justice system, helps bring attention to the need for criminal justice reform. In this episode, host Joshua Hoe interviews James Forman Jr., the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America and cofounder of an alternative school for youth who have been previously arrested, about his life, work, and hopes for the future.

Host: Laura Arnold
In Deep Dive, host Laura Arnold shares the mic with leading data-driven experts to explore market failures in health care, criminal justice, education, and public finance—and how to fix them. This episode explores the economic and racial bias inherent in fines and fees, examines their use as a source of funding for cities and counties, and discusses alternative approaches to the imposition of these “financial sentences.”

Hosts: Earlonne Woods and Nigel Poor
Ear Hustle is a podcast narrating the daily realities of life inside prison, shared by those living it, as well as stories from those who are outside, post-incarceration. In this episode, four people share stories about how their time inside prison both helped prepare them for jobs on release and impacted their return to work.

Hosts: Josie Duffy Rice and Clint Smith
Justice in America explores how criminal justice works and its impact on people, particularly poor people and people of color. This episode features Kim Foxx, head prosecutor of Cook County in Illinois, who is also the first Black woman to run the prosecutor’s office in Cook County. She discusses what’s been successful, the obstacles she’s faced, and how her perspectives on criminal justice reform have changed.

Host: Alejo Rodriguez
Reentry Radio is a podcast hosted by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and is dedicated to its College-in-Prison Reentry Program. This episode features former College Initiative mentoring coordinator Alejo Rodriguez and discusses the mentor–mentee relationship aspect of the Prison Reentry Program.

Host: Susan Howley
Tell Us About It: Victim Research Convos is a twice-monthly podcast produced by the Center for Victim Research featuring interviews with victim services experts on the work they do in their field. This episode examines the relationship between gender, victimization, and the need for victim services among defendants in courts that are designed to address chronic, low-level offenses that occur as a result of social problems, including homelessness, mental illness, and alcohol and drug addiction.

Host: Adam Johnson
The Appeal hosts a weekly podcast about criminal justice reform, prison abolition, and everything in between. It features in-depth interviews with those covering, working in, and most affected by the American criminal justice system. In this episode, The Appeal contributors Julia Rock and Harry August discuss the practice of police officers who are permitted to act as prosecutors and arraign people for misdemeanor charges, and how reformers hope to change a system allowing this practice, which they view as unfair and undemocratic.

Host: David Crosby
The Voices of Youth Justice podcast uplifts the stories of youth who have been charged for crimes as adults or spent time in adult facilities. In this episode, guest Eddy Zheng, who became involved in the justice system by getting entangled in the “migration to school to prison and deportation pipeline,” discusses how he uses these experiences in his role as an advocate for youth justice.

Host: Mitzi Miller
The 70 Million podcast documents how locals are addressing the role of jails in the broader criminal justice system. In this episode, the host interviews two rural county sheriffs in Colorado to discuss and compare their jail populations and the challenges they face in their communities. Both counties have been drastically affected by the opioid epidemic: drug felony charges have tripled, and 92 percent of their intake is heroin related.