Justice Abandoned: Rachel Barkow on the Supreme Court’s Role in Mass Incarceration

Talking Feds

Harry Litman

News, Politics, Government

4.8 • 4.5K Ratings

🗓️ 24 July 2025

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

With just 5% of the world’s population, the United States holds nearly 25% of its prisoners. In this one-on-one, NYU Law Professor Rachel Barkow joins Harry to discuss her new book Justice Abandoned, which reveals how a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions helped enable the rise of mass incarceration. From pretrial detention to stop-and-frisk, Barkow explains how the Court’s embrace of “law and order” politics quietly gutted constitutional protections—and how today’s conservative majority could, ironically, be positioned to help reverse course. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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1:13.5	Welcome to Talking Fed's one-on-one, deep-dive discussions with national figures about the most fascinating and consequential issues defining our culture and shaping our lives. I'm your host,
1:21.1	Harry Littman. Among evolved democracies, the United States is in many ways surprisingly lackluster or middle of the pack.
1:30.3	We're in the mid-20s among countries for reported happiness, pretty low for infant mortality,
1:37.9	relatively low for life expectancy, high and fairly low in math and science scores.
1:43.8	But there's one index in which the country far
1:46.7	surpasses every developed country, and that is rates of incarceration. With less than 5% of the
1:55.0	world's population, the United States has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners. I just got to say that again,
2:03.0	with less than 5% of the world's population, the United States has almost a quarter of the world's
2:07.8	prisoners. That's five to 10 times higher than that of other industrialized Western democracies.
2:14.6	What in the world is going on and what can possibly be done about it? There's a standard
2:20.3	political analysis that legislators have every incentive to pass longer and longer sentences
	...

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