POLITICS/HISTORY
SAT/4/17 :: 3:00p
Criminal Justice in America
Bookseller: Vroman’s Bookstore
America’s broken criminal justice system and epidemic of mass incarceration is examined by these three writers whose important works focus on the the criminalization of mental illness, the human cost of America’s devastating war on drugs and how reform-minded D.A.s are innovating to increase fairness and reduce inequality in our prosecutorial system.
Sandy Banks
During more than three decades at the Los Angeles Times, Sandy Banks has served as reporter, editor, editorial writer and internship director. But she’s best known for her personal columns, which focus on private lives, public policy and people who inspire and infuriate us. She returned to The Times in 2019 after a four-year hiatus. A Cleveland native, Banks has three grown daughters and lives in Northridge.
Brittany K. Barnett
Barnett is an attorney and entrepreneur focused on social impact investing. She is dedicated to transforming the criminal justice system and has won freedom for numerous clients serving life sentences for federal drug offenses—seven of whom received executive clemency from President Barack Obama. She has been named one of America’s most Outstanding Young Lawyers by the American Bar Association and her memoir, “A Knock at Midnight: A Story of Hope, Justice, and Freedom,” is an L.A. Times Book Prize finalist in Current Interest.
Vroman’s Bookstore
Please support our local bookseller for this panel. Signed bookplates will be available from most authors. Purchase your books here.
Emily Bazelon
Emily Bazelon is a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine, the Truman Capote Fellow for Creative Writing and Law, and a lecturer at Yale Law School. Her latest book is Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration which was the winner 2019 L.A. Times Book Prize in Current Interest. She’s also a co-host of the Slate Political Gabfest, a weekly podcast. Before joining the Times Magazine, Bazelon was a writer and editor at Slate, where she co-founded the women’s section “DoubleX.” She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
Christine Montross, M.D.
Dr. Christine Montross, a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow in General Nonfiction, is an associate professor of psychiatry and human behavior at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University and a practicing inpatient psychiatrist. She is an award-winning poet and the author of “Body of Work,” “Falling into the Fire” and “Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration,” which is a finalist for an L.A. Times Book Prize in Current Interest.