It's Wednesday, March 20, 2024 from Peach Fish Productions.

It's the gist, I'm Mike Pesca.

This is Crime Week, and today we have two different and very disparate conversations.

First, when we talk about crime in the United States,

murder is always something I talk about and it's the worst crime and it's a signature crime and a lot of criminologists study murder because it tells us where crime is going and also it tends to get reported so with some crimes there's a lot of

folk information about it or anecdotal information or information that you might see on social media or the evening news,

but is that really indicative of if those particular types of crime are up?

A big category of crime are up, a big category of crime that often does not track the statistics as much

as it tracks what people feel about the statistics is shoplifting. So I wanted to do a

segment where I talked to Adam Gelb, who's the CEO of the Council on Criminal

Justice and also on the show I'm going to be of the Council on Criminal Justice.

And also on the show, I'm going to be joined by Ben Austin,

who is the author of Correction Parole Prison

and the Possibility of Change.

This is why I called it disparate interviews. Ben, along with Johnny

Ville, who is a formerly incarcerated individual, who is one of the main subjects of Ben's book, they'll join me to talk about the prison system,

the parole system, the societal costs, and in Johnny's case, the costs that he was made to bear,

Ben Austin, Johnny Veal, on the show,

but first Adam Gill. shoplifting we have heard and we have felt has become a scourge in America, but maybe, you know, you question all the parts of that sentence.

Scrooge, become, the question is, is shoplifting on the rise? Is the type of shoplifting

different from what we've always experienced? What are the facts? What can we do

about it? I'm joined by Adam Gelb,

...