How to fix two of the most broken systems in the US

Ava DuVernay's 2016 documentary is a necessary primer for anyone who wants to understand how the modern criminal legal system and the mass incarceration it has produced is rooted in the country's long history of white supremacy.

Rudy Valdez's unflinching documentary shows the collateral costs of our nation's commitment to incarceration and punitiveness, and how they are borne not just by people who are locked up, but by their families and loved ones.

A sociological work that tells the stories of people living in the depths of poverty in America, surfacing the deprivation and desperation that people live in and the choices they have to make. The criminal legal system unnecessarily sweeps into its grasp many people who are living in poverty, and this work provides a portrait of their challenges and makes you ask why we've invested in systems of control rather than systems of support.

A true-to-life work of fiction that speaks to the lifelong scars left by brutality of a 1950s juvenile work camp in Florida.

In episode two ("European Prisons vs. American Prisons") of this podcast, Harvard Professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad and journalist Ben Austen discuss how the American criminal legal system is internationally aberrational in terms of its thirst for retribution and punitiveness by describing their experiences visiting prisons in Europe. In episode 13 ("Crime, Fear and Alternatives to Policing"), Muhammad and Austen reflect on the spike in shootings and homicides in Chicago, where they grew up together; the power of the fear it's instilled; the political response; and offer prescriptions for how we might think about delivering public safety through means other than law enforcement.

Bazelon follows two young people facing prosecution in two different cities to explain not only the power of prosecutors (the most powerful actors in the justice system) have historically wielded, which has led to our system of mass incarceration, but how a nascent movement of a new breed of prosecutors offers a path out of our addiction to imprisonment.