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From KQED. Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal.

Perspective is everything, no.

Where you are in a system will let you see certain things that other people might not from where they're sitting.

Public defenders are uniquely positioned to see the day-to-day mechanics of the justice system.

They're sort of internal opponents of most of the rest of the institution,

and so they're both intimately familiar with how police officers, district attorneys, and judges act,

and they're often at odds with them.

It's a fascinating lens for a book on a system that, for many of us, our idea of it has been shaped more by television than real knowledge. So if you want one volume on all the many,

many things wrong with how the criminal legal system actually works, the price of mercy,

unfair trials, a violent system, and a public defender's search for justice in America is your book. It's author Emily Galvan Alman Ammanza joins us today. She's the co-founder and executive director of Partners for Justice, which supports and empowers public defenders. Welcome. Thank you so much for having me. So let's talk a little bit. I mean, this book is an indictment of the whole damn system, you know. And there's all these ways to fix it what we're going to talk about. There's all these problems. But let's just talk about some of the terminology. You call this the criminal legal system in the book. Why do you call it that instead of criminal justice? The book is the public defender's search for justice in America. I'm still looking, man. I call it the criminal legal system because I try to be very

careful with my language. This system is very full of what I think of as kind of like linguistic

anesthesia, where we use words that dehumanize some people like criminal, felon, con, ex-con, alien.

And we use other words that kind of erase harm. Like,

we're not putting a new mother in a fetid cold cell. We are sentencing the offender to custody.

And we use words like custody that otherwise implies sort of an embrace and a caregiving.

So I try to pick words that are as accurate as possible.

It is a legal system.

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