Indypendent News Hour on WBAI // 29 March 2022

The story of the late Kalief Browder helped inspire the movement to dramatically reduce the use of cash bail for people charged with crime. In 2010, Kalief was thrown into Rikers for allegedly stealing a backpack at the age of 16. He refused to take a guilty plea and was held there for 3 years awaiting a trial. His case was eventually dismissed. But, he was so traumatized by his experience at Rikers that he took his own life after he was released. His older brother, Akeem Browder, has committed his life to incarceration reform from Rikers to Albany. Akeem is the founder of the Kalief Browder Foundation, which operates a youth program in the penal colony. The foundation also helps to organize city and state-wide campaigns for criminal justice reform and played a key role in winning a historic bail reform law in 2019. Akeem talks to us about what Rikers is like today and what Governor Kathy Hochul’s last-minute plan to gut some of New York’s landmark criminal-justice reforms. There’s not a lot of justice in our criminal justice system. And when it does come, it is often years in the making. In 2015, Saul Robles was convicted of killing Alex Santiago during a 20-person brawl that took place in Park Slope, Brooklyn. In 2019, an appeals court overturned the conviction finding numerous faults with how the Brooklyn DA’s office handled the case. Earlier this week, the DA’s office finally announced it would not try to retry Robles. The Indypendent’s Ted Hamm has been following this case closely and updates us on the recent good news. The U.S. is experiencing an inflation rate of almost 8%, the highest it’s been in 40 years. The cost of just about everything is going up, up and up. To rein in inflation, the Federal Reserve plans to steadily increase interest rates over the coming year. To help us better understand what the Federal Reserve is, why it’s doing what it’s doing and who the winners and losers, Paddy Quick joins us. Quick is a retired professor of economic at St. Francis College in New York, a member of the Union of Radical Political Economists and a contributing writer for The Indypendent. Her latest piece, is titled “Get Ready for a Government-Engineered Increase in Unemployment." Read it here: indypendent.org/2022/03/get-ready…-in-unemployment/