Criminal Records Podcast Demetria Spinrad and Isaac Meyer

Hello listeners! Isaac is entering final paper grading/rec letter writing season on top of planning an international exchange school trip for some of his students in May. I've also got plans to visit family on the east coast this month. 
Instead of rushing out episodes to cover the time we'll be too busy to record, we decided to hit pause on Criminal Records Podcast for a month. If you're a patron, we've paused billing for the month of May so you won't be hit with charges for content we're not putting out. We'll be back in June with some new weird cases!

If the obscene material you're distributing is so avant-garde that most readers can't tell it's actually obscene, did you commit a crime or not? This week, we're getting into the trial of the scandalous literary magazine editors who brought the work of James Joyce to America.
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Not all scam artists prey on suckers’ desire to get rich quick or cheat the system. Some of them prey on their marks’ better impulses, like their love for their pet dogs or their willingness to help a stranger in an emergency.
Content note: This episode contains discussion of animal cruelty and inhumane and misguided medical practices. It contains some outdated language about epilepsy.
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With options for getting rid of its convicts drying up, Britain started thinking about reforming both its prisons and the prisoners inside them. The intention behind these prison reforms was great. But attempts to create a better prison system involved wild philosophy experiments in real life, a lot of Bibles, a lot of time to think in silence, and... treadmills?
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Is abortion legal in Japan? No, but also yes. Join us on a journey through history to learn about how modern abortion law developed in a legal system that didn't treat fetuses as legal persons but did want to count them as future taxpayers.
 
Content note: This episode is about abortion. It contains discussions of miscarriages, the complications of improper administration of abortifacients, forced sterilization, sexually transmitted diseases, and sex work.
 
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We're out of the country for a family memorial service and didn't have time to record a Criminal Records episode for the week. But that doesn't mean we're out of crime content! This week, we've cleaned up and cut together some of Isaac's very, very old History of Japan audio to bring you the history of Japanese organized crime.