Welcome to Democracy-ish.

I'm Danielle Moody.

And I'm a jihadli.

And we are very excited to be joined by our guest today,

who is a journalist from Chicago and author

of the acclaimed novel High Rises, Cabrini Green and the fate of American Public Housing,

and the author of the new book, Parole Prison and the Possibility of Change, Ben Austin,

joins us on Democracy-ish today.

Ben, we will jump right in with you and say that prison system in the United States

and talking about the prison industrial complex and what prisons are actually supposed to do,

we don't really ever have a conversation about parole and what happens to people

once they leave the system or, and I say leave and I'm using like quotation marks.

So first off, you know, what made you want to focus on parole and corrections as a part of this larger prison industrial complex?

Yeah, yeah. Thanks so much for that question and thanks for having me on the show.

You're exactly right. I mean, and this is partly why I got into this, that I learned,

somebody that I had written about before was coming up for parole before a parole board.

And I was like, what do I know about parole boards? Like I hadn't really heard much,

you know, conversation about it. You hear like, you might think of like Shawshank Redemption, that movie of like the

parole board scenes there.

So I drove to Springfield.

I'm in Illinois and I just started sitting in these parole hearings.

And they raised all these questions that I thought were critical for our understanding of prisons.

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