17 episodes
Move It Forward Amistad Law Project
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We are the Amistad Law Project, a small grassroots public interest law center and organizing project in the city of Philadelphia. We advocate for the human rights of people adversely impacted by the system, including people behind prison walls. Welcome to our monthly podcast where we’ll be lifting up the voices of our community members in the struggle for healthier and safer communities. By sharing perspectives you won’t normally hear on mainstream media platforms, we’re building our own platforms, raising our own voices, and telling our own stories, the way they need to be told. The plot thickens constantly in our struggle, and we have to push through the thickness, to move the plot forward towards change. We hope you’ll join us in moving it forward.
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Alternatives Pt 2: Getting to the Roots of Violence
In this final episode of Move It Forward, we’ll conclude our conversation on community violence prevention, exploring alternatives to policing and prosecution that are focused on addressing the systemic factors which give rise to violence. Throughout this season, we’ve heard from people impacted by gun violence and homicide about the influences of the overlapping crises of poverty and wealth inequality. Decades of divestment from education, health care, and public spaces has gone ...
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Alternatives Part 1: Mediation and Mentorship
Throughout this season, we have shared a quite a bit of political history and a number of personal stories that have illustrated the failures of policing and incarceration. Today we’re kicking off a two part conversation on the alternatives, delving even deeper into the work of the violence prevention projects we have featured consistently throughout this season. In this episode, we’ll learn more about the leaders in this work and the processes of mentorship and mediation that the...
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The Limits of American Criminal Justice Part 2: Prisons and Prosecution
We’re back again with more exploration of our criminal justice system. In the first part of this conversation, we looked at policing. In this episode, we’re focusing on prisons and prosecution. There has been a lot of attention given in the past several years to police reform but there has been less focus on how we can change prosecution and incarceration.In this episode, you’ll hear from Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner on some of the approaches his office has taken to reduce sys...
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The Limits of American Criminal Justice Part 1: Police
The recent resurgence of gun violence and homicide shows the deep failures in our approach to criminal justice. But instead of investing in new strategies, politicians are pushing us to respond with the same methods of policing and incarceration that we’ve been using for decades. In the first part of this conversation on our justice system’s approach to this crisis, we’ll take a close look at policing. We’ll explore its history, from the connections to slavery to the lineage...
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Drugs and Guns: How Violence Intersects with the Drug Economy
US media and policymakers have long focused on the connection between violence and the drug economy. Since the 70s, the War On Drugs has shaped our approach to these overlapping crises, putting millions of people behind bars and tripling the number of Americans in prison. Today, cities like Philadelphia are facing levels of gun violence we haven’t seen since the crack cocaine epidemic of the 80s and early 90s.In this episode, we’re looking at the economic and political factors that have shape...
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Aftermath: Grief and Life After Losing a Loved One to Gun Violence
This episode, we’re talking to people who have lost loved ones to homicide about those experiences and what happened afterwards, both immediately and over a longer period of time. There’s a lot of pain and grief here. For every person who is murdered, there is a family, a friend group, a community who feel that loss. The numbers – over 500 people murdered in 2021 alone – can make it hard to think about the individual stories of those victims. In this episode, we’re taking some time to s...