spoke

Back in March, my colleagues at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University thought that it might be useful to begin thinking about “the day after coronavirus. Adil Najam, international relations professor at Boston University, interviewed 99 experts about what the post-pandemic future will bring. Pardee Center/Boston University, CC BY-SA For a research center dedicated to longer-term thinking, it made sense to ask what our post-COVID-19 world might look like. In the months that followed, I learned many things. Most importantly, I learned there is no “going back to normal.” My season of learning The project took on a life of its own. Over 190 days, we released 103 videos. Each was around five minutes long, with one simple question: How mig...

The United States incarcerates a larger proportion of its citizens than any other developed country in the world, with around 1.5 million people serving time in prison. But to anyone who doesn’t work or live in a facility, life behind bars largely remains a mystery. The public gets a glimpse of life on the inside only when there are riots, executions or scandals. As criminologists, we spent nine months interviewing over 800 prisoners in Texas in 2016. They told us about their lives before and during prison, as well as their impending return to the community, a journey shared by over 600,000 people each year. We also learned about a significant reality in prisons: gangs. Our new book pulls back the curtain on how gangs compete for control and structure prison life. Gangs wield power behi...

Tag: spoke

What Our ‘World After Coronavirus’ Might Look Like – I Spoke To 99 Big Thinkers – This Is What I Learned

What Hundreds Of Prison Gang Members Had To Say About Life Behind Bars