Us & Them: Rebuilding Justice In A Divided America

Just as America faces some of its most critical political divides, our criminal justice system suffers from a lack of public trust. How are these dual crises interwoven? 

In this episode of Us & Them, host Trey Kay talks with legal scholar David Sklansky, a Stanford professor who co-directs the school’s Criminal Justice Center. In his new book Criminal Justice in Divided America, Sklansky says reforming the nation’s justice system may be at the core of recovering our democracy. 

In fact, he says there are clear approaches and solutions to help reform what’s broken and that even the basic concept of the jury trial can re-educate us in the skills and habits required to work across differences in a pluralistic democracy. 

In the end, Sklansky says the criminal justice system is one of the few places where Americans of varying beliefs and persuasions engage with each other to make important decisions. 

This episode of Us & Them is presented with support from the CRC Foundation and the Just Trust.

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“I think that the relationship between democracy and criminal justice is very deep and also complicated … effective criminal justice policies rely on democracy, and democracy relies on effective criminal justice policies. You need to understand democracy as a system for allowing people with different commitments and different views to work together, to arrive at collective decisions and to leave room for dissent … not as a conveyor belt that simply delivers what the people want. That’s never been a particularly attractive view, and it’s become even less attractive as the country has splintered apart based on the idea that ‘the people’ want one thing — and if you don’t, you’re not really part of the people.”

— David Sklansky, Stanford Law professor

Learn more about David A. Sklanshy’s book Criminal Justice In Divided America.