As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights and arguably less respect than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow.

We have not ended racial caste in America, we have merely redesigned it.

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Welcome to the award winning best of left podcasts with clips today, including a speech in three parts by Michelle Alexander, the vlog brothers on YouTube, Clint Smith on all-death poetry, Jesse Williams speech from the BET Awards, Cat Black from YouTube, and a James Earl Jones reading of a Frederick Douglass speech.

It has been said by numerous philosophers and theologians that any society, any civilization, must be judged by how it treats its most vulnerable members and its prisoners.

King would no doubt agree with that assessment.

And in considering how we fare in that regard, I find myself thinking of people like Susan Burton, people who have cycled in and out of our nation's prison system in this era of mass incarceration, in this post-king, post-civil rights era, a time when our prison population has more than quintupled and millions of people.

Overwhelmingly poor people of color have been permanently locked up or locked out stripped of the very civil and human rights, Dr. King, and so many others risked their lives for and some even died for.

I think of Susan, whose son was killed by the police.

A police cruiser barreling down her street in Los Angeles ran over her five year old boy.

She received no apology, no real acknowledgement of her loss, and she fell into a deep, deep depression, racked with grief, and she ultimately became addicted to crack cocaine.

Now, if Susan had been wealthy, if she had even been solidly middle class with a good job and a good health care plan, she undoubtedly would have qualified for many, many hours of therapy and counseling.

She likely would have qualified for very good legal prescription drugs that would help her cope with her severe depression and grief, but no things were different for Susan.

Impoverished living in LA, she became addicted to crack cocaine and thus began her odyssey of cycling in and out of prison for 15 years.

Every time prosecutors said, just take the deal.

We'll give you three years rather than eight.

This time we'll give you five years rather than twelve.

This time we'll cut your brain, just take the deal. We'll give you two years rather than six.

One plea deal after another never offered drug treatment only shown to a prison cell.

Every time she was released pushed out onto the streets, unable to find work, no housing, often sleeping on the streets, cycling in and out of our prison system for 15 years until by no small miracle.

She was granted access to a private drug treatment facility. She got clean and was given a job.

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