Aaron Bekemeyer: Thin Blue Line of Police Unions

Aaron Thomas Bekemeyer, Lecturer on History, Harvard University. Professor Aaron Bekemeyer discusses the complicated history of police unionization. How police balanced their role as union busters and political enforcers with their desire for higher wages and retirement/pensions led to contradictions in messaging. After both World Wars, American society changed in various ways and policing took on new meanings, in response to reformist challenges to political machine corruption and later the…

Adam Malka: Rise of Baltimore Police

Adam Malka is an Associate Professor of U.S. History at the University of Oklahoma. Professor Malka discusses his book "The Men of Mobtown" exploring how the free black population of the antebellum South came to be controlled and policed. We explore the roles and expectations of white citizens and how black freedom came to define criminal behavior.

Alex Reinert: 8th Amendment Debate

Alex Reinert is the Max Freund Professor Litigation and Advocacy at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. Prof. Reinert discusses his article "Reconceptualizing the Eighth Amendment: Slaves, Prisoners, and 'Cruel and Unusual' Punishment." Prof. Reinert talks about "the law of slavery" and how little we have travelled from the 1870s to today when it comes to the understanding of "cruel and unsual" punishment as the standard of imprisonment.

Alexandra Natapoff: Misdemeanor System

Alexandra Natapoff, Lee S. Kreindler Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, is an award-winning legal scholar and criminal justice expert. Professor Alexandra Natapoff discusses her book, Punishment without Crime. How America's Misdemeanor justice system targets the innocent, taxes the poor, and generates revenue for the public and private sector. We discuss why people plead guilty to low level infractions and how that impacts minority and at-risk populations.

Alexia Rauen: When Immigrants Call the Police

Alexia Rauen discusses the article she co-authored, "Experiences of immigrant survivors of violence with law enforcement." She explains how immigrant victims of domestic violence viewed their interactions with responding police officers. Based on interviews with survivors, she found that experiences with police varied widely based on factors such as immigration status, English proficiency, and gender. Alexia Rauen is the Co-Executive Director at Advocates for Immigrant Survivors…

Alexis Hoag: Race and the Death Penalty

Alexis Hoag, Practitioner in Residence at Columbia Law School’s Holder Initiative, discusses the systemic racial issues at the heart of our Judicial system. Professor Hoag is an anti-death penalty advocate who recently published, "Valuing Black Lives: A Case for Ending the Death Penalty" and argued before the Ohio Supreme Court advocating for Glen Bates.

Andrew Lawler: Lord Dunmore's Emancipation Proclamation

Andrew Lawler discusses his new book, “Perfect Frenzy: a Royal Governor, his Black Allies, and the Crisis That Spurred the American Revolution.” It is the story of the colony of Virginia on the eve of the American Revolution and Lord Dunmore, infamous British villain. But what is fact and what is fiction? Lord Dunmore issued the first Emancipation Proclamation and freed hundreds of slaves, but did he fire bomb Norfolk? What is certain is Dunmore ignited the passions of the Revolutionaries and…

Atiba Ellis: Polley V. Ratcliff

Atiba R. Ellis is a Professor of Law at Marquette University Law School. Professor Ellis discusses his essay "Polley V. Ratcliff: A New Way To Adress an Original Sin?" A fascinating court case, recently resolved, involving kidnapping, slavery, and freedom which might serve as a roadmap for a type of Truth and Reconciliation style reparation. Prof. Ellis explains how the past is still alive and able to be resolved today.

Ayesha Bell Hardaway: Rise of Police Unions

Ayesha Bell Hardaway is an Associate Professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law and the Director of the Criminal Clinic in the Milton A. Kramer Law Clinic. Professor Ayesha Bell Hardaway talks about her 2022 article, "The Rise of Police Unions on the Back of the Black Freedom Movement." Professor Bell Hardaway discusses how police unions developed slowly over time to their rapid growth in the 1960s. How police unions transitioned from advocating for labor and wages to…

Carissa Byrne Hessick: Plea Bargaining Bad Deals

Carissa Byrne Hessick, Anne Shea Ransdell and William Garland "Buck" Ransdell, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Law, University of North Carolina School of Law. Professor Carissa Byrne Hessick discusses her book, "Punishment Without Trial," and how plea bargaining has overtaken the criminal justice system. While our rights to a jury trial, evidence, and confronting our accusers are all written into the Constitution by the Framers, American criminal prosecution relies upon the…

Christina Aushana: Role-Playing in Police Trainings

Christina Aushana discusses her article “Inescapable Scripts: Role-Playing Feminist (re)visions and Rehearsing Racialize State Violence in Police Training Scenarios.” Professor Aushana talks about participating in Police Academy Scenario Training as an actor. By participating in the police role-play training, she was able to witness and document a genre of performance wherein training officers, patrol officers, and recruits' stage, rehearse, and revise racial (re)visions together, infusing…

Christopher Span: Book Learning and Slave Education

Christopher Span, Professor of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, discusses his work, “Sam’s Cottonfield Blues” and “Quest for Book Learning: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom.” He discusses why literacy was so feared by white enslavers and crucial to slaves. Detailing how slaves subverted the rules to learn to read while enslavers punished those who did. Prof. Span’s own family provides a powerful example of the rhythm and style of…

Christy Lopez: Police Reform and Carceral Logic

Christy Lopez draws on her work as a Deputy Chief in the Special Litigation Section of the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice to talk about Pattern or Practice Investigations with in police departments. How these investigations begin, how they work, and what their outcomes may be, are all unpacked by Professor Lopez. Additionally, Prof. Lopez describes her formulation of “carceral logic” and how it informs police reform efforts.

Cullen Sweeney: Race and the Justice System

The Cuyahoga County Office of the Public Defender has been led by Chief Public Defender Cullen Sweeney since January 2021. Chief Public Defender, Cullen Sweeney, discusses the role of the Public Defender’s role in advocating for systemic criminal justice reform. We discuss bail reform, race equity, police and prosecution discretion, and sentencing reform.

Dexter Voisin: Violence as Neighborhood Trauma

Dexter R. Voisin is the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Dean in Applied Social Sciences at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, Case Western Reserve University. Dean Dexter Voisin discusses his book "America the Beautiful and Violent: Black Youth and Neighborhood Trauma in Chicago." History and context play a huge role in how violence is processed by the residents of America's poorest, minority communities. Generations struggle to understand and…

Emily Widra: Police Contact and Disparity

Emily Widra discusses her article, "Despite fewer people experiencing police contact, racial disparities in arrests, police misconduct, and police use of force continue." By looking at the newly released Bureau of Justice Statistics report that collects data of police contact in 2022, she finds that even while fewer people interacted with police than in prior years troubling police behavior remains consistent. Emily Widra is a Senior Research Analyst at the Prison Policy…

Eric Foner: Reconstruction's Consititution

Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University, is one of this country's most prominent historians. Professor Foner discusses his book "The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution." By looking at the history of debate and aftermath of each Post-War Amendments, Prof. Foner examines how each sought to permanently end American Slavery.

Erica Meiners: Childhood and Carceral Society

Erica R. Meiners is a Professor of Education and Women’s and Gender Studies at Northeastern Illinois University. Professor Erica Meiners discusses her book, For the Children? Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State, in which the definition of childhood become an ideological state used to push back against resistance and reform. Childhood, Meiners states, depends on social constructions and differ based on the group it refers to - freed slaves were talked about as children, while white wealthy…

Frank Cooper: Cop Fragility and Blue Lives Matter

Frank Rudy Cooper is the William S. Boyd Professor of Law and Director, Program on Race, Gender & Policing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Professor Frank Rudy Cooper discusses his article, "Cop Fragility and Blue Lives Matter." Professor Cooper discusses how after the rise of Black Lives Matter protests and reform efforts, police responded with a varied and detailed list of their own grievances. Blue Lives Matter emerged as a way to reframe police reform efforts by…

Gian Maria Campedelli: Black Homicide Victims

Gian Maria Campedelli, research scientist at Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Italy, discusses his research article, “Homicides Involving Black Victims are less likely to be Cleared in the United States.” Drawing upon three databases the FBI’s national incident-based reporting system (NIBRS) and the Murder Accountability Project (MAP), Campedelli found that homicides with Black victims were between 3.4% and 4.8% less likely to be solved by police. Gian Maria Campedelli, a research scientist in…

James Oakes: Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution

James Oakes is one of our foremost Civil War historians and a two-time winner of the Lincoln Prize for his works on the politics of abolition. He teaches at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He discusses his book, The Crooked Path to Abolition Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution. Beginning with the inclusion of the 3/5th clause and the fugitive slave clause in the Constitution there existed a tension between a proslavery and antislavery interpretation. How did…

Jennifer Morgan: Motherhood and Slavery

Jennifer L. Morgan is Professor of History in the department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University where she also serves as Chair. She is the author of Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic. Professor Morgan discusses recent journal article “Partus Sequitur Ventrem: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery." Exploring how Virginia laws developed to codify enslaved women's reproductive labor, by defining and…

Jessica Katzenstein: Problems in Police Training

Police reform advocates often push police departments to move from fear-laden “warrior” survival trainings and toward reality-based or scenario trainings, which involve immersive role-playing scenarios such as making an arrest. Scenario trainings promise to teach officers to suppress fear, counter racial bias, and calibrate “reasonable” uses of force. But these trainings often fall short of their promise and end up reinforcing the threats and survival mindset. Drawing on 16 months of…

Jessica Katzenstein: Scenario Training and Police Reform

Jessica Katzenstein completed her PhD in Anthropology at Brown University in 2022. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University's Inequality in America Initiative though 2024. Dr. Jessica Katzenstein discusses her research on how U.S. police officers absorb and resist reforms during a mounting legitimacy crisis. She explores why reforms fail to realize their promises to curb racialized violence. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with officers and reformers in Maryland, she…

Jessica Pishko: Constitutional Sheriffs

Jessica Pishko is a journalist and lawyer who graduated from Harvard Law School and Columbia University’s MFA program. Jessica Pishko, journalist and lawyer, discusses her book, "The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy," in which she walks through the long history of the American Sheriff. Since the 1960s, sheriffs have consistently moved to the right, claiming to be the final and only authority to enforce and defend the Constitution. Since…

Joanna Schwartz: Unaccountable Policing

Joanna Schwartz is a professor of law at UCLA. Professor Joanna Schwartz discusses her new book, Shielded: How The Police Became Untouchable. Prof. Schwartz draws on her experience as a civil rights attorney and law professor to explain how Section 1 of the Klu Klux Klan Act of 1871, known as Section 1983, set the groundwork for protections for state employees, most notably police officers, when they violate a citizen's civil rights. As civil cases against police violence reached the…

Jocelyn Simonson: Radical Acts of Justice

Professor Jocelyn Simonson talks about her book, Radical Acts of Justice: How Ordinary People Are Dismantling Mass Incarceration. Beginning with a close look at the ideological meaning behind calling the prosecution, “The People,” Prof. Simonson points out how the criminal justice systems defines “community.” By looking at several ways activists and volunteers engage in organized efforts centered around bail, court watching, and participatory defense, Prof. Simonson shows how justice is changing…

Jonathan Witmer-Rich: Cuyahoga County Bail Reform

Jonathan Witmer-Rich discusses his work on the ”Cuyahoga County Bail Task Force: Report and Recommendations.” Professor Witmer-Rich explains the bail situation in Cuyahoga County. Looking at cash bail as a means to secure future appearances and reduce risk, courts are actually preemptively incarcerating and punishing citizens who are presumed innocent. We talk about how the Ohio Supreme Court and Ohio voters responded to recommendations for felony bail reform. Jonathan Witmer-Rich is the…

Kali Gross: Vengeance Feminism

Kali Gross discusses her book, Vengeance Feminism: The Power of Black Women's Fury in Lawless Times. Prof. Gross looks at the stories of Black women who hit back—not always figuratively, and not always legally either. Reckoning with women who lied, robbed, and cheated a racist, misogynistic world, these women's stories illustrate how they grappled with the daily violence of their lives. Kali Gross is the National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of African American Studies at…

Kate Weisburd: The Carceral Home

Kate Weisburd discusses her article, The Carceral Home. As prison walls are replaced with parole and probation rules that govern every aspect of private life, invasive surveillance technologies are used to monitor intimate information. Where does that leave the private home's primacy as first among equals? Data collection, audio recording, and GPS technologies are expanded to punish people in open society. Professor Wesiburd explores how these issues interact with each other and complicate…