Shades of Freedom

Shades of Freedom is a podcast from the Aspen Institute’s Criminal Justice Reform Initiative. Our podcast amplifies and uplifts promising efforts aimed at reducing mass incarceration, and examines the ecosystem of related inequalities that surrounds and perpetuates it.

Our podcast features many of the people working on changing the justice system, from policymakers to activists, and from returning citizens to systems leaders. Our discussions are wide-ranging, from the school-to-confinement pipeline, to alternatives to incarceration, to policing, to sentencing, to prosecutorial reform to incarceration, to reentry and how all of this intersects with other community systems (such as education, health, housing and more). Today’s world seeks more than reform; it demands transformation. Our guests on Shades of Freedom personify this ideal.

The podcast can be found on all the major platforms, including Apple, Google, and Spotify. You can also listen to individual episodes at the links below.

The Shades of Freedom podcast, hosted by Dr. Douglas E. Wood, Director of the Criminal Justice Reform Initiative, is named after and inspired by the book Shades of Freedom: Racial Politics and Presumptions of the American Legal Process, by Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr.