In Rutherford County, Tennessee, kids as young as 7 years old were getting thrown in jail for incredibly minor offenses—stealing a football or pulling someone’s hair. Some kids were even jailed for acts that weren’t crimes at all, such as failing to stop an after-school fight. Worse still, the kids were frequently put in solitary confinement, even though that’s explicitly prohibited for children under Tennessee law.

Not only were these jailings illegal, but pretty much everyone working in the Rutherford County Juvenile Court knew it—including the county’s sole juvenile court judge, Donna Scott Davenport.

In The Kids of Rutherford County, a four-part podcast series from Serial Productions and The New York Times, Meribah Knight examines how so many kids could be unlawfully detained and why it took so long to stop the practice.

The podcast follows two public defenders, Wes Clark and Mark Downton, who eventually launched a successful lawsuit against the county after years of maddening attempts to convince Davenport that her practices were illegal.

Thanks to Clark and Downton’s suit, Rutherford County is no longer illegally detaining its children on minor offenses and Davenport is no longer on the bench. But the pair didn’t end up with an unalloyed victory. The $11 million payout that Clark and Downton won in court? Only 23 percent of the eligible recipients could be contacted to make claims, so just $2.2 million was distributed to the jailed kids.

The Kids of Rutherford County showcases just how difficult it is to force broken government systems to change, and how difficult it is to make the victims of injustice whole.

The post Review: Exposing a Broken Juvenile Court System appeared first on Reason.com.

This week’s featured article is “True Crime Distorts the Truth About Crime” by Kat Rosenfield.

This audio was generated using AI trained on the voice of Katherine Mangu-Ward.

Music Credits: “Deep in Thought” by CTRL S and “Sunsettling” by Man with Roses

The post <i>The Best of Reason</i>: True Crime Distorts the Truth About Crime appeared first on Reason.com.

You probably don’t think much about tin cans, even when you’re buying one. It’s the product inside the can—soup, beans, maybe hairspray or sunscreen—that seems to matter.

But the humble tin can is both a crucial component of modern, globe-spanning supply chains and a product of them: About half of the metal used to make tin cans in the U.S. is imported from abroad. And that’s why tin cans—more specifically, tinplate steel, the type of metal used to make those cans—are at the center of a behind-the-scenes fight over tariffs that illustrates so many of the problems with protectionist policies.

On one side of that fight is Cleveland-Cliffs, one of just two companies in the U.S. that produces tinplate steel. In a recent petition to the Commerce Department, Cleveland-Cliffs asked for tariffs of up to 300 percent against imported tinplate steel—the products that account for over half of the supply of tinplate in the American economy.

Those tariffs will translate into reduced supply and higher prices, says Tom Madrecki, vice president of supply chain and logistics for the Consumer Brands Association.

“When the tariffs go into effect, they raise the cost of steel, they raise the cost of the packaging,” says Madrecki. The can itself is often the most expensive element of a canned food item, so those prices quickly cause the overall price tag to rise. “You [will] see food prices go up 19 to 30 percent. That translates to 36 to 58 cents per can,” he says.

And while new tariffs might protect some tinplate-making jobs at Cleveland-Cliffs, research suggests the higher prices will cause far greater losses throughout the rest of the economy. The Trade Partnership, a think tank, estimates that the proposed tariffs could cause up to 40,000 jobs to be lost in downstream industries, including blue-collar jobs like can-making and food production. If the steel in their tin cans is suddenly more expensive, food production companies might simply purchase finished—and less-highly-tariffed—cans overseas.

“You’re going to go to the grocery store one day…and you’re going to look at the receipt in disbelief and say, ‘How did this happen?'” says Gerard Scimeca, vice president at Consumer Action for a Strong Economy, a free market group that opposes the tariff proposal. “Well, this is how that happened: You had a company trying to take advantage of our trade policy for personal gain.”

And here’s the real kicker: As a rule, the Department of Commerce doesn’t even consider the potential (and often obvious) consequences of these decisions. The tariff petition process is one-sided and skewed heavily in favor of companies seeking protectionism at the expense of consumers and workers throughout the economy.

Government policy, no surprise, is one of the big reasons why we can’t have nice things.

Further reading for this week’s episode:

“Biden Administration Considering New Tariffs That Will Hike Prices for Canned Goods,” by Eric Boehm, Reason.

“U.S. Plans New Tariffs on Food-Can Metal From China, Germany, and Canada,” by Yuka Hayashi, The Wall Street Journal

“Tinplate Steel Tariffs Will Harm American Consumers and Manufacturing Jobs,” by the Consumer Brands Association

“Four Areas for Congress To Exercise Trade Policy Oversight,” by Tori Smith, American Action Forum

Written by Eric Boehm; produced and edited by Hunt Beaty; mixing by Ian Keyser; fact-checking by Katherine Sypher.

The post <em>Why We Can't Have Nice Things</em>: Can You Afford Tariffs on Tin Cans? appeared first on Reason.com.

By the time Josie Duffy Rice graduated from Harvard Law School, she knew she didn’t want to be a lawyer. Instead, she became a journalist sitting at the intersection of politics and the criminal legal system. Her latest story—Unreformed: The Story of the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children—is a podcast delving into Mt. Meigs, a state-run institution where black children suffered “physical and sexual violence, unlivable facilities, and grueling labor in the fields surrounding the school.” That history had largely gone unreported. Centered around a moment in the 1960s when five girls escaped and tried to blow the whistle, the podcast is filled with uncomfortable truths that too many people would prefer to ignore. In February, Reason‘s Billy Binion interviewed Duffy Rice by phone.

Q: Why do you think these stories went untold for so long, despite being pretty shocking?

A: We make a lot of excuses for the way we treat people who we deem bad. I think this stuff also snowballs. If people got out—sometimes they didn’t—they never spoke about it again. They never told their families. They were so traumatized. Some of it is just seeing someone else being willing to speak out. One of the things you also realize is how many victims weren’t sure if they could trust their memory. They’re so young when they go to these places. What has been kind of amazing is seeing people’s experiences and memories validated. They’ve gone 50 years wondering what actually happened. And then you find other people who have the exact same story, who remember the exact same thing.

Q: There are some people who may say, “That’s in the past.” Why do you think it’s important these stories be told?

A: We really like this idea that there was a bad thing, something happened that fixed it, and now we don’t need to worry about it because that’s not who we are anymore. It’s cliché, but those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it. I have no reason to think what was happening back then is still happening at Mt. Meigs, but I haven’t heard good things. It’s really comforting to think that was unimaginably long ago when it wasn’t.

Q: A premise of the podcast seems to be that the injustices of the past bleed into the present and future.

A: What made me interested in this story is that exact thing. Many people who went to Mt. Meigs in the 1960s for loitering or breaking curfew, or because their parents died, are now serving life without parole or are on death row for murder. We allow institutions to shape people, and we like to imagine we wouldn’t be shaped the same way—and maybe we wouldn’t. Not everybody did those things. But a lot of people did.

This podcast is about the specter of state violence. Because what you see are tragic stories of kids who went in as children, got out as children, and it shaped the rest of their lives. They value life according to how much their life is valued. And a lot of people, their lives are just not valued by the state.

Q: Was there anything that surprised you as you were reporting?

A: A lot surprised me in the sense that it was so much worse than I would’ve imagined. But I am eternally surprised by people’s resilience. I think that gets manipulated a lot because the conversation becomes, “People are resilient so you can put them through whatever.” That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is the resilience of the human spirit is more remarkable than it gets credit for. People manage to make it through such hellish conditions without totally losing their humanity, and there’s always the chance they can find that humanity again.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

The post Josie Duffy Rice Investigates Gruesome State Violence at an Alabama 'Reform School' appeared first on Reason.com.

Forty years ago, the National Commission on Excellence in Education published A Nation At Risk: The Imperative For Educational Reform, a scathing indictment of public K-12 schools in America. “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war,” announced the report’s authors, who included Nobel Prize–winning chemist Glenn T. Seaborg and Yale University President A. Bartlett Giamatti. The report catalyzed massive increases in per-pupil spending, standardized testing, and “common core” style curricula. Yet by almost every measure, educational outcomes are no better than they were in 1983.

In Mediocrity: 40 Ways Government Schools Are Failing Today’s Students, the Libertas Institute’s Connor Boyack and the American Federation for Children’s Corey DeAngelis outline what’s wrong with the ways our public schools function—and they offer concrete solutions to improve outcomes for children.

In this podcast version of The Reason Live Stream, I talk with Boyack and DeAngelis about why they support maximizing parental rights through education savings accounts (ESAs), disagree with conservative Republicans who want to ban critical race theory and other controversial concepts, and believe that the end of “factory schooling” will vastly improve the civic life of the United States of America.

The post Connor Boyack and Corey DeAngelis: Why K-12 Education Sucks and How To Fix It appeared first on Reason.com.

Our cherished listeners of The Reason Roundtable delivered yet another batch of both thoughtful and off-the-wall questions for editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie to consider during this special ask-me-anything-style podcast episode.

This is all in service of the annual Reason Webathon, during which we attempt to casually coax you into making a tax-deductible donation to the nonprofit foundation that publishes our work.

Is there any hope for transitioning to a fully market-oriented health system? What are the editors’ favorite four-dimensional platonic solids? Will Peter make a Star Wars: Andor–themed cocktail at 1.5x speed? And will Katherine have to fire her co-hosts already?

All this and more on a rollicking episode of The Reason Roundtable that’s both “earball” and eyeball friendly. Donate now and help us continue to bring that much-needed “Free Minds and Free Markets” perspective to your weekly media consumption!

Videography by Jim Epstein, Isaac Reese, and Justin Zuckerman; Edited by Adam Czarnecki; Sound editing by Ian Keyser

The post You Asked, We Answered With Libertarian Explanations, Animals, and…Cookie Dough? appeared first on Reason.com.

William Faulkner once famously wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”  I’ve been thinking a lot about that quote, which comes from his 1951 novel Requiem for a Nun, in regards to today’s guest, George Dawes Green.

George is the creator of the massively popular event series, radio show, and podcast The Moth, which has redefined personal storytelling in the digital age. George is also a novelist, and his new book, the best-selling murder mystery The Kingdoms of Savannah, is set in his native Georgia and features a great contemporary update of Faulkner’s themes.

What Faulkner, the great neo-Gothic chronicler of the pre–civil rights movement South, was getting at is the idea that if you don’t deal with history honestly and truthfully, it keeps getting in the way of your present and future, like the ghost of the murdered king in Hamlet. Individuals and societies alike can’t move forward until some form of acknowledgment and justice for past crimes has taken place. That’s at the heart of Gothic literature, which is filled with ruins and ghosts and secrets from the past irrupting into the present. It’s why the characters in Faulkner’s work are literally and figuratively haunted by race relations that they haven’t honestly accounted for. That focus on the unaccounted-for past is the reason that Faulkner, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949, is one of the most influential figures not just for American authors like Toni Morrison (herself a Nobelist) but also for writers across the globe—the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez called him “my master“ in his Nobel acceptance speech. In too many parts of the world, the past isn’t past.

This brings me back to George Dawes Green. The Kingdoms of Savannah is set in the contemporary South and features an old-line aristocratic family whose fortunes and members have dissipated over the years, in part because of hidden secrets and an inability to move on. At the start of the novel, there’s a murder that implicates the power structure of Savannah, and the result is a page-turning thriller about race, class, and American history that I simply couldn’t put down.

I talked with George at a recent Reason Speakeasy, a live, monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an era of conformity and groupthink. We talk about his experiences on the frontier of creative expression and the ways in which the past doggedly informs the present, whether in his native Georgia or post-COVID New York.

We also talk about how he came to create The Moth, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary and has become nothing less than a global phenomenon. Not surprisingly, George is himself a masterful storyteller, and his own past reads like something out of a novel: He lived in a cemetery for a while, and he created a company that sold clothes made from rare fabrics handwoven in Guatemala. It was only after all that that he became a novelist whose first two books were turned into movies and a cultural entrepreneur whose biggest project is still going strong. 

The post George Dawes Green: Why the Past—and Storytelling—Is Never Dead appeared first on Reason.com.