Criminal Justice & Public Safety

We discuss the main goals of copaganda: narrowing our conception of safety and threat, constantly warning us that those harms are increasing, and telling us that the solution to our fears is more investment in the punishment bureaucracy.

We discuss the complexity of gun violence in the United States and the reality that strong gun laws save lives with Emma Brown, the executive director of GIFFORDS, an organization whose mission is to save lives from gun violence in America.

We discuss how certain radical acts of justice by everyday people challenge the legitimacy of the criminal system and form the underpinning of a new collective legal thought, demosprudence. Collective understanding of justice and safety is changing away from the concept that justice equals cages.

We discuss the main goals of copaganda: narrowing our conception of safety and threat, constantly warning us that those harms are increasing, and telling us that the solution to our fears is more investment in the punishment bureaucracy.

Robert L. Tsai is the author of Demand the Impossible: One Lawyer’s Pursuit of Equal Justice for All and Professor of Law and Harry Elwood Warren Memorial Scholar at Boston University School of Law. We discuss the death penalty, legal representation for the indigent, and equality under law.

Jonathan M. Metzl is the Frederick B. Rentschler II Professor of Sociology and Psychiatry and the Director of the Department of Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University. His most recent book is What We’ve Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms. We discuss how lax gun laws and gun ownership as an identity.

Phillip Atiba Solomon is the chair and Carl I. Hovland Professor of African American Studies, Professor of Psychology at Yale University, and co-founder of the Center for Policing Equity. We discuss policing equity, investing in communities, and taking police out of the mental health crisis business.