Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs magazine. My guest today is Professor Iyer Gruber of the University of Colorado Law School. She is the author of the book The Feminist War on Crime, the unexpected role of women's liberation in mass incarceration available from the University of California

Press. Professor Gruber, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you. It's great to be here.

Okay, so this book is bold and provocative. This book challenges, not just receive wisdom,

this book challenges a number of quite mainstream beliefs

held among many contemporary feminists. I think that a lot of what you say here is quite

controversial, so I would like to hear your defense of some of the positions in this book.

Let's begin here. One of the

things that your book does is it challenges what is often known as carceral feminism. That is the

strain of feminist thought, of pro-women's rights thought that ends up veering towards

criminalization and the use of criminal law as a tool for advancing

women's rights or combating patriarchy.

But I think one of the places to begin to understand the nuance that drives many feminists like

yourself to the critique of this carceral feminist

set of ideas is at the public defender's office. You've worked as a public defender. I've

worked at a public defender's office before. What I saw certainly there is that you see firsthand the various ways in which a system set up to prosecute sex crimes,

to prosecute domestic violence, to prosecute rape, doesn't end up serving the interests of anyone.

And so perhaps we could start with what you observed and what people need to understand

about the real world of sex crime prosecution that can begin to open them up to the fact

that there is a, there is, there are a lot of

difficulties and complexities in what may seem initially like something quite simple,

which is, well, sex crimes aren't prosecuted sufficiently. We need to prosecute them more and

harder. Yeah. So I think I'm just beginning with the end of your question

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