152 | Charis Kubrin on Criminology, Incarceration, and Hip-Hop

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 21 June 2021

⏱️ 80 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It’s all well and good to talk abstractly about morality and justice, but at some point you have to sit down and figure out what to do about people who break the rules. In our modern legal system, mostly that involves incarceration, especially for so-called “street crimes.” Here in the US, we’ve taken that strategy to extremes, leading the world in the number of incarcerated people per capita. How do we decide who goes to prison, and how should we decide? I talk with criminologist Charis Kubrin on how the justice system distinguishes guilt from innocence. We discuss one interesting issue at length: the use of rap lyrics written by defendants as evidence of guilt. What role should artistic creations play in deciding someone’s culpability of a crime?

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Charis Kubrin received her Ph.D. from the University of Washington. She is currently a professor of Criminology and Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine. She is co-author of the textbook Introduction to Criminal Justice: a Sociological Perspective. Among her awards are the Ruth Shonie Cavan Award and the Coramae Richey Mann Award from the American Society of Criminology, and the W.E.B. DuBois Award and the Paul Tappan Award from the Western Society of Criminology.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.
0:03.2	I'm your host, Sean Carroll.
0:05.1	On the podcast, we've occasionally talked about moral philosophy.
0:08.8	What is right?
0:09.8	What is wrong?
0:10.8	How do we decide these things?
0:11.8	In fact, I'm kind of more interested and knowledgeable about meta-ethics than I am about
0:16.4	ethics.
0:17.4	So meta-ethics being, how do we decide what is right and wrong versus ethics, which is
0:21.6	what is right and what is wrong?
0:24.0	But no matter what your choices are, but how to decide what is right and what is wrong,
0:27.6	as a society, there will be people who don't listen to you, right, who violate the rules,
0:34.4	who break the laws, who act in ways that you've decided were wrong.
0:38.6	What do you do about those people?
0:40.4	And generally speaking, whether it's a dictatorship or a democracy or whatever, generally speaking,
0:45.7	the end result is we throw them in jail.
0:47.9	Sometimes there's a death penalty or financial things, but throwing people in either jail
0:53.3	or prison, incarcerating them, in other words, is the most common way to punish people for
0:58.5	serious crimes in the modern world.
1:00.8	So that raises questions, who should be incarcerated?
1:05.1	What should be the process by which we decide who is incarcerated?
1:09.1	And it's very interesting that here in the United States, where I live, we are completely
	...

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