Hey and welcome back to the Jack of In Show.

I'm Jen Pan and I'm here with Aurela Thornehill, Aurela, how's it going?

Good!

Yeah, how are you, Jen?

I'm good.

I'm good.

I'm, like, 80 degrees in New York today, which comes after, like, a weird cold spell, but

I'm definitely excited for today's show.

We, of course, have Adon or Usmani coming on a little later to talk about his catalyst

essay, the economic origins of mass incarceration.

He's also going to talk about, you know, some of the developments of the last year in regards

to policing and incarceration and the fight to roll back those things.

But I guess just to kind of start off, you know, Aurela, you and I, you know, prior to

the show had been talking about just the problem of crime in general.

I feel like this is not an issue that often is sort of talked about on the left, precisely

because crime and criminals have so often in the past been used as a racist dog whistle

by the right and by many liberals as well.

Now that said, I do want to mention, you know, during the pandemic in 2020, we did see in

the US an increase in violent, in violent crime, a pretty significant increase.

So murders in particular, shot up, I think, around 25% across the country last year, and

are now at a level that we really haven't seen since the 90s.

We've also seen an increase in other sorts of violent crime, including aggravated assaults,

...