The Long Tail | Charged: A True Punishment Story
Slate Presents
Slate Podcasts
4.3 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 15 May 2019
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A standalone episode about one of the voices featured in our series who is introduced to listeners as an expert but who goes through his own harrowing experience with the system when he’s sent to Rikers a few days shy of completing his parole. We document his ordeal and its surprising aftermath.
Additional music for this episode by Lee Rosevere.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is a co-production of Slate and the Appeal, a new publication about the justice system. |
| 0:05.6 | And it's a companion to my new book, also called Charged, and available wherever you buy books. |
| 0:11.0 | Okay, thanks for listening. Here's the show. |
| 0:13.8 | Tell me a little bit more about your milkshake experience. |
| 0:16.5 | So the milkshake was good. It was like an orange cream one. |
| 0:21.9 | So I like the flavor. Okay. I'm starting in a kind of weird place today. I'm going to tell you a little bit about putting together this show. |
| 0:28.4 | To do a podcast like this one, you do lots and lots of interviews. You start out looking for people with stories to tell, like Terrari or Eric Gonzalez. |
| 0:37.5 | Once you've got your story, then you have to find another type of person. |
| 0:41.7 | Someone who's outside the story and who can explain the things you don't quite get about it. |
| 0:46.4 | That second type of person is an expert. |
| 0:48.8 | If the people your story is about get to be complicated and messy, your expert isn't those |
| 0:53.2 | things. |
| 0:54.9 | They're the voice of calm authority. You don't dig into who they are deep down. For this podcast, our expert has |
| 1:00.7 | been Khadim Gibbs. He's shown up in nearly every episode of this series because he's familiar |
| 1:05.6 | with all sides of the stories in gun court. Kadim works with kids in Brooklyn. He's affiliated with the Children's Defense Fund, and he was in a recent documentary about Rikers. But he was also locked up five times when he was a teenager. He was in a gang, and he sold drugs. He had a gun and more. I was shot when I was a kid, and I had a gun on me when I was shot. You know what I mean? |
| 1:27.7 | It's like, it didn't make me bulletproof. |
| 1:29.5 | It's like I still got shot. |
| 1:31.9 | Last July, we were in the early phase of figuring out just how to tell the story of how easily the system can drag you back in when our producer of Ehrlichlin got a text. |
| 1:41.2 | July 26, I'm on the train, and I get a text saying, hi, I'm Safia Kadim's fiance. |
| 1:49.7 | He's incarcerated on a parole violation. |
| 1:53.9 | Marilyn and I were both about to go away on summer trips. |
| 1:57.4 | But we felt an immediate sense of catastrophe. |
... |
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