Whenever the news turns to criminal justice, social justice, and reform, I turn to

Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleave.

She's a professor of sociology at Brown University.

She's written two books about race, the law, and criminal justice.

And she is just really gifted at breaking down complex systems and concepts in a way that

always keeps the focus on the people who are most impacted.

We talk about what it will take to reform the justice system, biases in our own communities,

and the very personal ties that for Nicole make this work much more than theoretical.

One of the reasons that you and I have spent so much time talking in the past few weeks and

months is because the issue that you study has been front and center

in our national discourse. While police reform is not actually the thing that you study,

I would say tangential to the thing you study, I wonder what you think police reform

and policing can tell us about the broader criminal justice system?

Setting policing actually was somewhat accidental to the larger project that I was exploring,

which is as a young person, I walked into the criminal courthouse in Chicago.

It's the largest unified court system in America. And I became

embedded with the prosecutors, the public defenders, the judges, and really began a decade-long

study of this space, really focused on the lawyers. I didn't really have any intention to think

about policing until I realized that the police were everywhere in the court system.

They controlled and somewhat intimidated judges who stood up against them.

The prosecutors talked in these kind of clandestant ways about be careful around the police.

If they harassed you, you know, as a young woman in the prosecutor's office,

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