The Bale system is one of those ways in which the processing of human beings has become

so corrupt that we now have 450,000 human beings every single night in this country in

jail cells just because they can't make a monetary pay.

Hey everyone, I'm Clint Smith and I'm Josie Duffy Rice and this is justice in America.

Each show we discuss a topic in the American criminal justice system and try to explain

what it is and how it works.

So I'm a senior strategist with the Justice Collaborative and a senior reporter with

the appeal and I'm a lawyer and writer living in Atlanta and most of my work focuses on

the impact that prosecutors have on communities in America particularly for poor people and

people of color.

And I'm a writer, a teacher and a PhD student living in DC who has spent a lot of time teaching

in prisons and my research is centered on putting the system of criminal justice in its

larger historical context.

And something we've both found is that in academia and in the media and in politics people

sometimes talk about criminal justice with the assumption that everybody is familiar

with the terminology or the historical context or the specific details in ways that can make

it tough for people to actually understand what's going on.

Right, I mean criminal justice is an issue that so many people care about and mass incarceration

as a popular buzzword but there's a wide chasm between the experiences of those involved

in the system and the perceptions of those on the outside.

So this podcast is for everyone from the people who care about criminal justice reform

but don't know a lot about it, to the experts that just want to know more about some of

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