Social And Criminal Justice Playlist

Introduction and Context

This is a playlist of media items that were in my feeds while I was taking Social Justice and Criminal Justice. I collected several podcasts because I listen to a lot of podcasts and it was the media that was relevant of the class. However, I then discovered that variety of media was an importance piece of the work. As a result I have created a large honorable mentions category that mostly covers the podcasts which didn’t make the cut.

The Playlist

Abortion Was Illegal. This Secret Group Defied the Law | Retro Report

Abortion is the only medical treatment in which done properly and by a doctor in accordance to the best known medical knowledge at the time is just as likely to land the doctor and patient in trouble with the criminal justice system. This video covers a group of women who in spite of not being doctors and abortion being illegal preformed safe abortions at great risk to themselves. This is increasingly important in a world where Roe v. Wade was overturned. Once again there are many risks and states are trying to block loopholes like leaving the state by declaring abortion murder. As a result in some states, women are even worse off than when Jane was active.

The Radiolab podcast has a couple episodes about abortion, one being a two parter about how safe pill abortion is now and another being a two parter about the work to bring abortion pills to the front lines of the ukraine-russia war including smuggling them through poland.

Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System

Innocence Project attorney M. Chris Fabricant presents an insider’s journey into the heart of a broken, racist system of justice and the role junk science plays in maintaining the status quo.

This book covers a lot of the ways our criminal justice relies on experts and fake science to convict people. I’m still in the middle of reading this one. I heard about it on this podcast where the Author talked about it with Cara Santa Maria. This is an extremely important topic because it’s calls into the question how we determine that people are guilty or innocent. It is the job of the judge to permit an expert on the witness stand. The jury is given no context the legitimacy of what the speaker is an expert in. So if an expert declares that the fingerprints are 100% the accused then jury will most likely believe the expert. Except the fingerprint analysis like many other forensics “sciences” is a deeply flawed art. In the worst cases, an expert is given free range to fall into their biases about whether the suspect did it or not and let that bias the result. If an expert is told by a police officer that the suspect did it the expert is more likely to come to the conclusion that the suspect did it. If the police officer thought the suspect did it because the suspect was black, then the police officer’s explicit or implicit bias is rewarded by the agreement of the expert.

This is a great introduction to the problem which I first heard about on another Cara Santa Maria podcast Sceptic’s Guide to the Universe in which there was a segment debunking micro expressions as a tool to detect lies.

Listen to “Junk Science w/ M. Chris Fabricant” on Spreaker.

No Special Duty

This is Radiolab’s episode about what in the world the police are good for. About how they have no special duty to protect even though they write “Protect and Serve” on everything. What good is a police that doesn’t protect. What good is a court order that a mother can’t use to protect her childern. This goes back to what we covered in class about how the police are born from slave catchers and poor laws. For all the ways that the police don’t serve minorities, it also just doesn’t serve anyone the way it should.

Calling the Atlanta Shootings a Hate Crime Isn’t Nearly Enough

This article covers hate crime laws. Hate crimes laws are intended to protect minorities, the article going to as far as to call anti lynching bills a sort of grandfather to the modern day hate crime bills. The problem is that they don’t actually protect minority communities. Hate Crime Bills are amendments to existing sentences. That means the person being convicted of a hate crime must first commit another crime. This limits the language of hate crimes to things that are illegal to do. This extremely limits the usefulness of hate crime laws because an extended sentence is merely more punishment, and when the options are no punishment or some there isn’t a big difference. It is up to the prosecutor to apply the hate crime label, which because of biases can certainly be applied to minorities committing a crime against a white person or a white person might be sentenced with the hate crime because of persecutor discretion. The reporter also converted the research for this article into the podcast episode below.

The Pretrial Fairness Act

I did my policy brief on getting rid of cash bail in Illinois. Loyola’s Center for Criminal Justice Research provided a ton of helpful research into the predicted effects of the policy and the actual effects of the policy including the creating data view’s like the one below. Cash bail is system in which the guilty and innocent are both sentenced to jail based on their ability to pay to get free. As a result, it is part of a poverty spiral in which a person who can’t pay bail must either sit in jail and lose their job, take on additional debt that they might not be able to pay off or take plea deal regardless of innocence. Considering income inequality is not weighted fairly this heavily impacts the most disavtanged. So projects like this are extremely important in evaluating whether or not the intended solution is actually improving outcomes. In this Illinois has according the data from Loyola’s Center for Criminal Justice Research, dropped their jail population by huge percentages across most counties.

Honorable Mentions

Prison Uniforms (With Ear Hustle)

This episode is a special collaboration between Articles Of Interest and Ear Hustle

This episode is a podcast about the impact of clothing on the incarcerated. Expression in a place that strips expression from you.

405- Freedom House Ambulance Service: American Sirens

This is podcast by 99% invisble covering the first ambulance service which was run by black people for an area of town that cops and other rescue services refused to go. It describes altercations and complications running a black majority service that was competing partially with the police. One of the interviewees describes seeing a freedom house paramedic as the black person shown respect at the hospital and thus decided to become a paramedic.

What Makes a Murderer?

Another podcast from the experiment about federal murder rule, which converts accomplices to crimes where a murder takes place to murders themselves. This disproportionality affects women compared to men and is often not what the accomplices agreed to.

Where There’s Woke John Stennis Series

This series of episodes covers John Stennis including coverage of Brown v Mississippi. The supreme court case about whether the court should allow a mob based confession to be laundered through a second clean confession.