There's been a lot of social science research about how election pressures impact judges decision

makings and judges they sentence more harshly in election years.

There's evidence that as criminal justice issues become a bigger part of election,

so if there's a lot of television advertisements, for example, judges are more likely to rule against criminal defendants. What's up everybody? I'm Clint Smith and I am Josie Duffy Rice and this is

Justice in America. Each show we discuss a topic in the American criminal

justice system and we try to explain what it is and how it works.

Thank you so much everybody for joining us today.

You can find us on Twitter at Justice Underscore Podcast.

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We'd love to hear from you.

We open the show with a clip from our guest, Alicia Bannon, who runs the Fair Courts Program at the Brennan

Center.

Alicia has done a ton of work around today's topic, which is judges.

Yes, judges, and not just judges in general, but judicial elections. And not just judicial elections but how judicial elections contribute to

mass incarceration yes but first every episode we talk about a word or

a phrase related to the criminal justice system

that we think is misused or misunderstood or just bad.

The goal is to make you think twice when you hear it, and we're basically trying to make you

more skeptical and more

critically interrogate some of the language and nomenclature you hear out in public.

Yes today's phrase is diversion program.

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