August 19, 2020 Justice on the Trail: The Future of Justice and Democracy

In recent years, “criminal justice reform” has gained support across the political spectrum. But reform has usually meant small tweaks to the current system’s structure and practice: shortening some sentences, diverting some people out of jail, providing some types of treatment. These hardly make a dent in our overwhelming levels of mass incarceration — and they don’t address the poverty, violence, and historic structural racism that drive our towering criminal justice system.

During the 2020 Democratic Convention, Bruce Western, Emily Wang, Sukyi McMahon, Matthew Desmond, Danielle Allen, and Vivian Nixon joined The Raben Group and the Square One Project to consider what reimagining justice looks like in real life.