Host Ira Glass surveys the effects DNA has had on the criminal justice landscape. He talks with Huy Dao, at the Innocence Project, where they are waist-deep in 2,000 letters from prisoners claiming DNA can prove them innocent.
This is the story of some teenagers who were wrongfully convicted of murder and served 15 years in prison. DNA set them free, then convicted the two men who really did the crime.
The story of how common and perfectly legal police interrogation procedures, procedures without violence or torture, were able to get an average fourteen-year-old suburban kid to confess to murdering his own sister...even though DNA evidence later proved that he hadn't done the crime.
An 18-year-old named Tito talks about how he didn't have a choice about certain things in his life, especially his feelings and dreams...and his feelings about Eminem.
Host Ira Glass goes to jail in Bristol County, Massachussetts, where there's a large Portuguese community, and where even a law-and-order sheriff named Tom Hodgson opposes this particular immigration law. He also talks with inmate Jorge Aruda, who's being deported for a crime he already served his sentence for.
Producer Blue Chevigny tells more of the story from Bristol County, where the immigration law of 1996 has a community of non-political people reluctantly going to protests, attending meetings at night, talking to politicians, and doing all sorts of other things most of us would do anything to avoid.
What happens if the immigration service wants to deport you, but the country you came from won't take you back? Under current law, usually, you stay in jail...indefinitely. Writer Alex Kotlowitz tells the story of one legal alien from Vietnam, Trung Tran, and the unusually close and friendly relationships he and his fellow deportees have with their captors in a jail in Victoria, Texas.
When Jessica Robinson was sent to adult prison at the age of 14, the state did such a terrible job taking care of her that several women—an embezzler, a convicted murderer, and some thieves—stepped in to mother her. Alex Kotlowitz reports.
This is the story of two people—one in his late teens, one in his late fifties. Both have good reasons to be mad at the world, but what they did with their anger—and what society did with them—are very different.
Host Ira Glass with former Congressman Daniel Rostenkowski. When Rostenkowski began a term in federal prison, he met for the first time people who'd been locked up under harsh drug laws that he'd voted for himself. "The whole thing's a sham," he declares.
The story of how a person could be sentenced to 19 years for drug possession—even if police found no drugs, drug money, residue or paraphrenalia—even if it's a first offense. Dorothy Gaines was an Alabama nurse with no prior record and no physical evidence of any drugs who was sentenced to 19 years.
Before this show ended we wanted to know—how typical are the horror stories? What happens in a typical drug case? To find out, reporter Nancy Updike spent nine hours in Night Narcotics Court in Chicago. What she discovers is that the system is working as fairly as one could hope or expect, with one caveat: Nearly all the defendants are African-American, even though the jurisdiction contains an equal number of white drug users.
Some criminals do not see themselves as basically good people getting away with something bad. Some people do not believe God is on their side when they commit their crimes.
Journalist Steve Bogira tells the story of Vincent Bogan, who said "no" to something once—a decade ago, when he was 21—and now has to live with that one decisive act. Bogan was arrested and charged with 17 counts of armed robbery.
Writer/performer Danny Hoch performs a monologue taken from his one man show, Jails, Hospitals and Hip-Hop. It's a story about a guy who's been locked up for doing the most American activity possible: Selling stuff on the street (in this case Bart Simpson/O.J. Simpson t-shirts).
When Anne Staggs started to fall for an inmate named Charles in the Texas prison system, she was up against odds as daunting as they ever get for two people. It was against the rules, possibly dangerous, and could have gotten her fired.
Host Ira Glass with jazz musician Ed Ryder, who was in prison in Pennsylvania for twenty years for a murder it was later proven he did not commit. Ryder played jazz in the pen and out of the pen.
Over two decades ago, not long after he got out of Texas prison for robbery, Ray Hill got a job at his local public radio station, KPFT in Houston. He started a weekly program about Texas prisons that's now the leading muckraking voice in the state when it comes to exposing graft and corruption in prison facilities there.
A reading of a pamphlet written by ex-con Stephen Donaldson for heterosexual men who are about to enter prison, about how to "hook up" with a stronger man —"daddy" or "jocker"—who'll provide protection in return for sex. He explains the rules and mores that govern this part of American prison culture.
What happens when you go into a place—in this case a prison—where there are all sorts of codes about what you're never supposed to say...and you say every one of them. Rick Reynolds tells a story from his one-man show (and CD) All Grown Up and No Place to Go, about performing stand-up comedy at a maximum security prison just before Christmas a few years ago.
Former South African political prisoner Breyten Breytenbach, on how prison changes all your perceptions in ways that last after you've been released. The painter and poet was interviewed by New Yorker writer Lawrence Weschler for a radio series called Territories of Art, for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 1986.