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I am Jonathan K.

Welcome to K-P-P-P-P-I.

When the Justice Department issued its report on the Ferguson Police Department in 2015,

the nation was shocked to learn that the Missouri town and courts were financing their operations by levying fines and jailing the poor for not being able to pay.

In her new book, Punishment Without Crime, How Our Massive Misdemeaner System traps the innocent and makes America more unequal.

Alexandra Natopov exposes this greatly mythologized yet little understood part of the criminal justice

system that's ensnared 13 million people.

As you will hear in this discussion recorded during an event with politics and prose

bookstore, the world of misdemeanors is sprawling. It criminalizes poverty and pleading guilty is not the end of the story. Thank you very much for asking me to moderate this discussion.

Once I saw the name, I didn't really care what the subject was

because Alexandra, I'm sorry, Sasha and I

have known each other for a long time now.

I even wrote a column based on a conversation that we had during

Thanksgiving I just rediscovered four years ago. This is right around the time of

Ferguson and misdemeanors people were talking about it and here I had this infinite font of wisdom talking about this and she said here let me send you something I've been working on this it became

a column and now it is a book the name of the book punishment without crime how

our massive misdemeanor system traps the innocent and makes America

more unequal.

...