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The Political Scene | The New Yorker

What Would a World Without Prisons Be Like?

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

The New Yorker

Barack, Washington, Wickenden, News, Obama, Politics, Wnyc, Lizza, President

4.33.9K Ratings

🗓️ 27 January 2020

⏱️ 24 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Mass incarceration is now widely regarded as a prejudiced and deeply harmful set of policies. Bipartisan support exists for some degree of criminal-justice reform, and, in some circles, the idea of prison abolition is also gaining traction. Kai Wright, the host of the WNYC podcast “The United States of Anxiety,” spoke about the movement with Paul Butler, a law professor and former federal prosecutor who saw firsthand the damage that prosecution causes; and sujatha baliga, a MacArthur Foundation fellow who leads the Restorative Justice Project at the nonprofit Impact Justice and a survivor of sexual violence. “Prison abolition doesn’t mean that everybody who’s locked up gets to come home tomorrow,” Butler explains. Instead, activists envision a gradual process of “decarceration,” and the creation of alternative forms of justice and harm reduction. “Abolition, to my mind, isn’t just about ending the prisons,” baliga adds. “It’s about ending binary processes which pit us as ‘us, them,’ ‘right, wrong’; somebody has to be lying, somebody’s telling the truth. That is not the way that we get to healing.”

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Transcript

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I'm Dorothy Wickenden. On today's Politics and More podcast, WNYC's Kai Wright talks with two

1:19.6

self-identified prison abolitionists. Paul Butler, a former federal prosecutor who gave up that

1:25.7

work when he saw the harm it was causing communities

1:28.2

of color, and Sujatha Baliga, who leads an organization called the Restortive Justice Project

1:34.1

and received the MacArthur Genius Grant for her work.

1:42.4

Last week, we spent the full hour of our program on the topic of mass incarceration.

1:47.8

I was joined for that by Kai Wright, who's the host of WNYC's election podcast, the United States of Anxiety.

1:54.8

And we talked about how imprisonment soared during the war on drugs in the emerging consensus that mass incarceration,

2:01.9

whatever the intention, had caused incalculable harm, especially in black and Latino communities.

2:08.8

At the end of that episode, we touched on the future of prison reform, in particular the

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