Mass Supervision with Vincent Schiraldi and special guest Renaldo Hudson
Listeners of Under the Tree are well aware of the fact that the US is a Prison Nation, with over 2,000,000 people locked inside cages every day, aware, as well, that we are abolitionists involved in the movement-making and world-building work that will one day make prisons obsolete. But the carceral state is a many-legged monster with dangerous tentacles stretching out in every direction—there are now over 4,000,000 people under state supervision, on parole or probation. It’s an enormously expensive enterprise that does nothing to reduce risk to society while creating enormous hazards for anyone coming home or caught in its web. One in four people caged today is locked up for a violation (curfew, association, failure to report, and more). This episode—a conversation with Vinnie Schiraldi, author of Mass Supervision: Probation, Parole, and the Illusion of Safety and Freedom, and friend-of the-pod Renaldo Hudson—was recorded at the intrepid, worker-owned bookstore, Pilsen Community Books, a familiar and favorite haunt of ours.