The legacy of racial injustice in the US criminal legal system | Nick Turner and Whitney Pennington Rodgers

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 2 February 2022

⏱️ 16 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In an engaging, insightful conversation, criminal justice reformer Nick Turner breaks down the ways the US criminal legal system perpetuates centuries-old racial and economic inequality. He joins TED current affairs curator Whitney Pennington Rodgers to outline why the best way to actually deliver justice and safety is to shrink the system and recognize the humanity of those caught in it.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Elise Hugh. You're listening to TED Talks Daily. Two of the thorniest and arguably most broken systems in America are one, immigration and two, criminal justice. The Vera Institute of Justice works on fixing both. In a conversation with Ted's current affairs curator, Whitney Pennington
0:22.5	Rogers, the Institute's president, Nick Turner, outlines the way these American systems
0:27.9	underscore generations-long racial disparities and what to do about it. Hi, Nick. Thanks so much for
0:36.1	being here with us tonight. Hey, Whitney. Thank you.
0:38.7	Well, so for those who I'm familiar, could you start by just telling us a little bit about Vera and the work you do?
0:43.1	The Vera Institute of Justice is a leading justice reform organization.
0:48.5	We seek to transform the criminal legal system and the immigration system.
0:53.0	We call it the criminal legal system because to call
0:55.5	it a criminal justice system is a little bit of a misnomer. It doesn't deliver justice. And we work to
1:01.9	transform the immigration system because many of the problems that we see in the criminal legal system
1:06.4	are just the same in the immigration system. And by transform, what I mean is to shrink both of those systems,
1:13.6	to make sure that they are less brutal than they are right now,
1:18.6	and that there's some modicum of justice that's provided.
1:22.6	We work on some of the biggest problems that are facing the country in these two realms
1:28.8	and try to provide solutions.
1:31.1	So I'll just give you an example of that.
1:32.5	One of the things that we did over the last years was to participate in a campaign that ended up overturning
1:40.4	the congressionally imposed ban on Pell grants, which is federal financial aid for
1:47.3	low-income students. In 1994, Congress said that those were no longer going to be available
1:52.7	to incarcerated students, and we were able to win that back at the end of 2020. And it makes a remarkable, it makes a remarkable difference to close to
2:03.9	20,000 people right now who have an opportunity to earn a degree, find a pathway to employment,
2:09.9	to higher income, to end intergenerational incarceration, and for people who are concerned
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