Hosts Celeste Carey and Cecil Prescod interview Charles Shaw about his new book Exile Nation.

Charles Shaw is an award-winning journalist and editor, author of the memoir, Exile Nation: Drugs, Prisons, Politics & Spirituality (2012, Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press), and Director of the documentary, The Exile Nation Project: An Oral History of the War on Drugs & The American Criminal Justice System.

Charles serves as Editor for the openDemocracy Drug & Criminal Justice Policy Forum and the Dictionary of Ethical Politics, both collaborative projects of Resurgence, openDemocracy, and the Tedworth Charitable Trust.

Charles’ work has appeared in Alternet, Alternative Press Review, Conscious Choice, Common Ground, Grist, Guardian UK, Huffington Post, In These Times, Newtopia, The New York Times, openDemocracy, Planetizen, Punk Planet, Reality Sandwich, San Diego Uptown News, Scoop, Shift, Truthout, The Witness, YES!, and Znet. He was a Contributing Author to the 2008 Shift Report from the Institute for Noetic Sciences, and in Planetizen’s Contemporary Debates in Urban Planning (2007, Island Press). In 2009 he was recognized by the San Diego Press Club for excellence in journalism.

Email Charles: ( cshaw [at] exilenation [dot] org )

www.exilenation.org/

Hosts Cecil Prescod and Celeste Carey speak with Daniel Medwed, author of "Prosecution Complex: America’s Race to Convict and Its Impact on the Innocent."

American prosecutors are asked to play two roles within the criminal justice system: they are supposed to be ministers of justice whose only goals are to ensure fair trials, whatever the outcomes of those trials might be—and they are also advocates of the government whose success rates are measured by how many convictions they get. Because of this second role, sometimes prosecutors suppress evidence in order to establish a defendant’s guilt and safeguard that conviction over time.

Daniel S. Medwed, a nationally-recognized authority on wrongful convictions, has wrestled with these issues for nearly fifteen years, ever since he accepted a job as a public defender with the Legal Aid Society of New York City. Combining his hands-on experience in the courtroom and his role as a teacher and scholar in the classroom, Medwed shows how prosecutors are told to lock up criminals and protect the rights of defendants. This double role creates an institutional “prosecution complex” that animates how district attorneys’ offices treat potentially innocent defendants at all stages of the process—and that can cause prosecutors to aid in the conviction of the innocent. Ultimately, Prosecution Complex is not intended to portray prosecutors as rogue officials indifferent to the conviction of the innocent, but rather to explain why, while most prosecutors aim to do justice, only some hit that target consistently.

Hosts Celeste Carey and Cecil Prescod speak with human rights and social justice activist Kelvin Hazangwi about linkages between the global south and countries such as Greece, Spain and Ireland around the economic justice issues of debt, banks and who is impacted by our current financial systems. Who has global power and why? What can we do about these injustices?

Currently, Kelvin Hazangwi is the Executive Director of PADARE / ENKUNDLENI / Men’s Forum on Gender. He has organized national campaigns on trade justice, anti – privatization and has participated actively in the national, regional and international social forum processes. He also participated and presented at
the Annual United Nations Commission on the Status of Women and Girls at the UN headquarters in New York, USA.

Also Bob Brown of Jubilee Oregon will talk about their work on debt cancellation.

Join Celeste and Cecil this Monday, April 16, as we discuss this 
presidential campaign's controversial focus on women and women's issues:
reproductive rights, access to health care, wages, jobs and working vs 
stay at home mothers. 

How will this attention affect the roles and status of women in US society?
Share your thoughts