The Beginnings of Things

A few words on what I hope this newsletter will be

Every time I write anything, I obsess over the introduction. I assume most writers are like this, but I don’t really know. I have no idea how other writers do anything, really, including my friends. In other professions, maybe you get a glimpse into how your colleagues work. But developing that insight becomes more logistically complicated in a venture as solitary as this one. So anyway, it’s possible the rest of them have figured out how not to spend half their day on the first paragraph. I have not.

But this is the nice thing about this first newsletter! The beginning is predetermined! The intro is, “Thanks for being here.” The intro is, “Welcome.” And, I guess, “Onward.”

For those who don’t know me, I’m Josie. I’m a writer and a journalist who focuses mostly on criminal justice. I live with Zak and our two young kids in Atlanta. I graduated from law school, though the closest I’ve gotten to being a traditional lawyer is the few years I spent doing policy work. I used to be president of The Appeal, and am still on their advisory board (sign up for their newsletter, too!) I’ve written for publications like The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Slate, and others. I wrote an essay about prison abolition for Vanity Fair in 2020. Last year I also wrote for a television show called The Premise.

I created and co-hosted a podcast called Justice in America with Clint Smith, where we covered everything from bail to prosecutors to felony murder to junk science to abolition. Currently, I spend a couple evenings a week co-hosting the daily news podcast What A Day. I’m also writing and hosting a new podcast that wraps this week and comes out in the fall. It’s called Unreformed, and it’s about a reform school for black children in Alabama. Recently I reported a story on Tennessee’s barbaric sentences for juveniles for Al Jazeera’s documentary tv series Fault Lines. I’m also working on a book, though I must say I’m taking the very scenic route to getting it done.

When I’m not doing these things, I help criminal justice orgs, foundations, and the film and TV industry think about narrative and story telling. I spend a lot of time asking “What is it that you’re trying to do?” and then pushing them to take it a bit further.

As for the non-professional stuff — I read a lot of fiction, I watch plenty of bad TV, I’m slowly trying to get rid of all the clutter in my house. I don’t know? It’s weird to summarize yourself. I hope you can discover the interesting things organically, or as organically as possible in newsletter form.

Ok, now that that’s over, I’ll tell you a bit about what you can expect from this endeavor. I guess you could say this is a newsletter about the criminal legal system, but that’s only partially true. Given how much I think about crime and punishment (some may use the term “obsessively”) the system is certainly going to be a regular topic of conversation. There will also be a lot of talk about the media landscape, and the South more generally.

But this isn’t a round-up, or a campaign newsletter, or an explainer. Instead, I’m hoping to use this space to think through some big questions — big questions to which I do not have answers. Questions about harm and justice. Questions about mercy and freedom. Questions about the unsettled horizon — what suffering awaits us? What joy? What could the future look like?

If these questions sound vague and intangible….they are! I don’t think they’re inquiries pretty much anyone spends day after day pondering, because who has the time and what is the point? But I get the uneasy sense that, though we are not constantly asking these questions, we are always answering them. Each of us is shaping the collective conscience around these ideas, albeit unwittingly. And that’s why I want to think through some of them here.

So this newsletter will have a few things. It’ll include reading recommendations - recent and past, short news stories and longer features and even books. I’ll also include random artifacts from my research that I find interesting or funny or ridiculous. There will be other stuff, too: I will ask for your recommendations and surely include plenty of unrelated asides.

But mostly I’ll talk through ideas. Like, how much surveillance is too much? Should we reject the concept of a hate crime? What does it mean to be violent? Where did your local cops get that military vehicle? How can our media infrastructure respond to an increase in crime? How do we assess risk? How good are all these “progressive prosecutors” really? Which elected officials do we go after, and why? Should Amy Cooper have gone to prison? What about George Zimmerman? What about Donald Trump? Is an abolitionist future more or less risky than the alternative?

Here’s a quick list of what this newsletter will not be doing: explaining the ins and outs of the federal court system, outlining the various constructions of statutory analysis, arguing about originalism, tracking electoral polls, explaining the technical difference between different crimes or different laws or different punishments. I won’t be reporting the latest Trump or Biden stories or whoever. I’m not here to break news or talk policy or partisan politics — there are way better people to go to for that.

And, crucially — I do not want to make you feel worse. I don’t want to submerge you even further in our shared rip current of dread.

This is not a self-help book disguised as a newsletter, and though the questions I listed above about harm and mercy and freedom are reminiscent of the syllabus from the one philosophy class I took in college, I assure you I’m not interested in hashing out philosophical arguments here. I’m more interested in asking questions that, hopefully, make you ask questions. I’m interested in telling stories. I’m interested in grappling with how deeply incoherent everything is.

Most importantly, I’m interested in what you have to say. Know I love feedback and love pushback and love when people say “Well, what about this?” Again, I’m trying to untangle a deeply knotted web, as so many others are, too. What I’ve learned from so many writers and thinkers and practitioners I admire is that we’re still a ways off from answers. Just parsing the questions are a lifetime’s worth of work.

So let’s go. Thank you, welcome, onward.

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I almost sent you all a 4000 word first issue but my husband was tactfully like “maybe split this up?” So I’m sending this introduction and some reading recommendations. Tomorrow or Wednesday I’ll send out something I wrote about the fight to close the Atlanta jail.

There’s a lot of other stuff I want to discuss soon, too - these tweets from some of the Young Turks brigade, longtermism, the man accused of assault who had already been arrested 41 times before, how family court relates to abolition, the cable television prosecutor punditry, punishing parents of trans children, the new San Francisco DA, voter fraud in Florida, pregnant people and prosecution, book banning, etc. If you want to read it all, I suggest you subscribe! I will try very hard to make your $5 a month worth it.

If there are things you think I should write about, let me know. Also if there’s interesting news about your local legal system — notable cases, outrageous behavior by your elected officials, controversy over a new jail or prison, anything — please please let me know that as well. You can always leave a comment or email me.

SOME THINGS I THINK YOU’LL ENJOY

This thread about mending.

This incredible— and incredibly disturbing— The Atlantic article on the execution of Joe Nathan James. Elizabeth even goes to the private autopsy. It’s such a great piece and also deeply infuriating.

This story about a Republican County Executive who “opposed the state's bail reform law since taking office, calling the policy ‘woke’ and saying it has led to more crimes.” He commissioned a study to prove his point. You’ll never guess what happens next!

Almost 40% of law enforcement agencies failed to report data to the federal government last year. This is really ominous - we already have so little insight to these offices, and this means we’ll have even less. You can see how your local agencies did here.

My friend Robell is a Black woodworker here in Atlanta, and his instagram is the best thing on the internet. So is his furniture. Someone please buy it for me.

This New York Magazine piece about two crypto guys who seemed to have a major hand in crashing the market. We were apparently the same year at Columbia, though I have no memory of them/they blend in with all the other guys who were exactly like this.

I was quoted in Alissa Walker’s Curbed piece, “Should It Be Easier to Take Away a Driver’s License?” I think about driving culture a lot, and have been thinking about punishment and prevention around cars a lot lately, especially after that harrowing Los Angeles crash a few weeks ago.

This unintentionally hilarious and infuriating FT piece about the 20 year old who made $110 million when he sold off his Bed Bath and Beyond stock. (Going through Google may allow you to avoid the paywall.) Check out the part about raising 25 million from friends and family, and also the letter he wrote BBB which basically said “you should make more money and spend less.” Even I could give that advice and I think I got a 2 on my AP Econ exam.

Chris Geidner’s newsletter LawDork. Tana Ganeva’s newsletter, Substance. Also, the Balls and Strikes newsletter is very funny - this one is about bad SCOTUS facial hair.

I was very sad to hear Melissa Banks recently passed away. I reread The Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing last week, which I hadn’t read since I found a copy in a used book store in Durham back in high school. I loved it the first time around and it pretty much still held up this time, too.

I also just finished Jennifer Egan’s new book, Candy House, which I loved. The Guardian described it as the “fraternal twin” of her previous novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, which I also loved. If you didn’t like that book, I bet you won’t like this one either. But if you did, read this! It’s great!

That’s it for today. More later this week! Thanks for reading.