Shades of Freedom

10 Episodes
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By: The Aspen Institute Criminal Justice Reform Initiative

Welcome to Shades of Freedom, from The Aspen Institute Criminal Justice Reform Initiative. This podcast amplifies and uplifts promising efforts aimed at reducing mass incarceration, and examines the ecosystem of related inequalities that surrounds and perpetuates it. Fortunately, there’s a movement underway to re-imagine what the justice system could be. This podcast will feature many of the people working on changing this system, from policymakers to activists, and from returning citizens to systems leaders. Our discussions will be wide-ranging, from the school-to-confinement pipeline, to alternatives to incarceration, to policing, to sentencing, to prosecutorial reform to incarceration, to reentry and ho...

Pushing Back on the Pushback to Justice Reform
12/15/2022

The session, titled The Importance of Now: Maintaining Momentum in Criminal Justice Transformation, ranges from the personal to the national, covering how both these experts began in criminal justice change, and how to address the particular needs of women involved in the criminal legal system. 

The discussion also addresses how misinformation impacts reform strategies, the tendency to focus on wins and then move on—rather than maintaining those wins—and the need to reach wider audiences with our messages.

Guest Bios

Erica Bond
Vice-President, Social Justice Initiatives, John Jay College of Criminal Justi...


Beyond Crisis Response: Health and Justice
#16
08/09/2022

Guest Biography

Born and raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Tasha Blackmon is a dynamic, collaborative leader, mentor and coach who brings more than 20 years of business operations experience to her role as President and Chief Executive Officer of Cherry Health, Michigan’s largest Federally Qualified Health Center. Cherry Health provides integrated health care services to over 55,000 patients in Barry, Kent, Montcalm, Muskegon, Ottawa and Wayne counties in Michigan. 

During her 16 years with Cherry Health, Blackmon has championed health justice through aggressively disrupting healthcare disparities. Her experience comes from an operational perspective, having established high standards of...


Restoring Rights and Clearing Records
#15
07/13/2022

Sheena Meade talks about her beginnings in labor organizing, then helping to co-lead the successful fight to restore voting rights in Florida, and how that has led to a push, across the States, to automate the clearing of records, and other new collaborations, such as Next Chapter, to change employer approaches to hiring returned citizens.

This episode is part of Rework Reentry, a partnership of The Aspen Institute and Slack supporting career options for returning citizens.

Guest Biography

Sheena Meade is the Executive Director of the Clean Slate Initiative (CSI). CSI is a...


Local Justice Journalism
#14
06/13/2022

While federal criminal justice policy gets a lot of attention, arguably the most important reforms are occurring in local jurisdictions. And many of those efforts are led by elected local justice leaders – sheriffs, DAs and prosecutors – or are being advanced through local ballot measures. These thousands of crucial elections, however, aren’t getting much attention in the national press; even local press may pay only the most cursory attention, though the ramifications for local and national justice reform may be immense.

Journalist and editor Daniel Nichanian has been focused on these races and issues his whole career. Former...


Turning Pain Into Purpose
#13
05/12/2022

LaTonya A. Tate's journey started as a nurse, then, in a turn, as a parole officer, then to founding the Alabama Justice Initiative and running for and winning a seat on the Birmingham City Council. All along the way, her family and her community have been close to her heart, and their struggles have built her into a force for change across Alabama, including stopping, for now, a new prison.

As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, The Aspen Institute is nonpartisan and does not endorse, support, or oppose political candidates or parties. Further, the views and opinions of...


Can We Depolarize Justice Reform?
#12
12/10/2021

Guest Bio

An attorney and accomplished author, Marc Levin serves as Chief Policy Counsel to the Council on Criminal Justice, a membership organization that provides a center of gravity in the field for objective analyses of research and policies. He began the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s criminal justice program in 2005 and in 2010 developed the concept for its Right on Crime initiative. In 2014, Levin was named one of the “Politico 50” in the magazine’s annual “list of thinkers, doers, and dreamers who really matter in this age of gridlock and dysfunction.”  Levin has authored numerous book chapters, policy papers...


Survivors Choose Healing and Restoration
#11
11/11/2021

Danielle Sered envisioned, launched, and directs the nonprofit organization Common Justice. She leads the project’s efforts locally and nationally to develop and advance practical and groundbreaking solutions to violence that advance racial equity, meet the needs of those harmed, and do not rely on incarceration.  Before planning the launch of Common Justice, Sered served as the deputy director of the Vera Institute of Justice’s Adolescent Reentry Initiative, a program for young men returning from incarceration on Rikers Island. Prior to joining Vera, she worked at the Center for Court Innovation's Harlem Community Justice Center, where she led its p...


Distress Concentrated In Place: NYC Empowers Neighborhoods to Define Safety
#10
10/19/2021

When Renita Francois, Executive Director of the NYC Mayor’s Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety (MAP), asks the residents of the city’s public housing developments how they define neighborhood safety, crime is not at the top of their lists. From going directly to the residents – the people best informed to define safety – Francois’ office can build better responses to community needs within neighborhoods, and also use the resident input to guide city-wide policy improvements.

In this episode of Shades of Freedom, Francois walks us through some innovative approaches to neighborhood safety and justice reform underway in New York C...


Must Prison Be Traumatic?
#9
09/07/2021

Prisons in the U.S. are, by design and operation, focused on punishment. But does punishment have to be traumatizing? Could prisons and jails be places of healing? While healing-centered and restorative approaches are being looked at in pre- and post-incarceration programs, less focus has been on trauma and harm reduction for those currently incarcerated.

In this episode of Shades of Freedom, our guest Nneka Jones Tapia, Managing Director for Justice Initiatives at Chicago Beyond and a former warden of the Cook County Jail, joins us to discuss the new Square One Project report, Harm Reduction at t...


Parsimony v. The Justice System
#8
08/17/2021

While there may be relatively few underlying concepts that liberals and conservatives might agree upon related to the justice system, perhaps one of them could be that justice should be parsimonious – defined as the government being authorized to exercise the lightest intrusion possible on a person’s liberty that is necessary to achieve a legitimate social purpose. In this light, maybe there could be broad agreement that, for example, excessively long sentences for relatively minor crimes might fail this test.

In this episode of Shades of Freedom, guests Daryl Atkinson (of Forward Justice) and Jeremy Travis (of Arnol...