It's not easy being a kid. Especially when the state thinks you don't have any constitutional rights. Thank goodness for this week's case, In re Gault, where the Court decides you can have a little rights, as a treat.
A podcast where we dissect and analyze the Supreme Court cases that have left our nation fatigued and struggling, like a podcaster with a sinus infection
0:00:00.4 Speaker 1: Number 116 in the matter of application of Paul L. Gault Adele?
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0:00:11.3 Rachel: Hey everyone, this isn't Leon from Fiasco and Prologue projects. It's Rachel, Leon's on vacation. On this episode of 5-4, Peter, Rhiannon and Michael are joined by journalist Josie Duffy Rice to talk about In re Gault. The case has its genesis in a phone call made in 1964. The police called it obscene, and 15-year-old Gerald Gault claimed it was a friend who had made the call. But either way, Gault took the fall for what is now a time honored tradition among dumb teenagers.
0:00:40.8 Speaker 3: This Brack?
0:00:44.3 Speaker 4: Hello, this is Nile Standish calling.
0:00:46.6 Speaker 3: Hello, sir.
0:00:47.6 Speaker 4: Hello. I was calling because I had some questions about cock for my bathroom.
0:00:54.0 Rachel: The police detained Gault and eventually a judge imposed a six year sentence in a state juvenile facility. Gault's parents appealed the case all the way up to the Supreme Court where the justices determined that in fact, Gault's constitutional rights had been violated, creating a series of new protections for youth in the criminal punishment system. But it wouldn't be 5-4 if there wasn't an asterisk. This is 5-4, a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks.
0:01:23.9 Peter: Welcome to 5-4, where we dissect and analyze the Supreme Court cases that have left our nation fatigued and struggling like a podcaster with a sinus infection.
0:01:34.6 Michael: All right.
0:01:35.0 Peter: I'm Peter. I'm here with Rhiannon.
0:01:36.0 Rhiannon: How many cold medications are you on right now, Peter?
0:01:38.9 Peter: I went to urgent care today and I got the good stuff. I got the fucking juice. So I am ready to go.
[laughter]
0:01:45.4 Rhiannon: Yeah. Gone off that sauce.
[laughter]
0:01:47.0 Peter: I still don't sound or feel particularly good but it's a big improvement.
[laughter]
0:01:53.3 Peter: Where was I? And Michael.
0:01:55.0 Michael: Hey everybody.
0:01:55.9 Peter: And our good friend, Josie Duffy Rice.
0:02:00.5 Josie Duffy Rice: Hello.
0:02:00.6 Michael: Hi.
0:02:00.6 Rhiannon: Hi.
0:02:01.0 Josie Duffy Rice: Hi.
0:02:01.4 Peter: How you doing, Josie?
0:02:02.5 Josie Duffy Rice: I'm really great. Well, I have strep throat, but other than that I'm really great.
0:02:07.3 Peter: Oh, hell yeah.
0:02:08.5 Rhiannon: Damn, two sick podcasters here.
0:02:10.7 Peter: Sick podcasters.
0:02:10.7 Michael: Sick podcasters.
[laughter]
0:02:12.6 Michael: I feel like strep throat is going around. My wife had strep throat.
0:02:15.8 Josie Duffy Rice: It is.
0:02:16.2 Michael: I was complaining about it to some friends and they were like, "Oh yeah, my wife had strep throat and blah, blah, blah." It's just like...
0:02:20.7 Josie Duffy Rice: Doesnt it feel like a kid's disease?
0:02:21.8 Michael: It does. It's odd.
0:02:22.6 Josie Duffy Rice: I'm like, "No, no, no. We don't get that anymore."
0:02:24.6 Michael: Yeah.
0:02:24.9 Josie Duffy Rice: But it turns out we do.
0:02:26.1 Peter: But it's not, it's a wife's disease.
0:02:27.4 Josie Duffy Rice: It's a wife's disease, correct.
0:02:29.6 Rhiannon: Yeah. That's why I don't have strep throat. I'm nobody's wife.
0:02:32.0 Michael: There you go.
[laughter]
0:02:32.7 Rhiannon: You're my wife.
[laughter]
0:02:35.1 Peter: Josie is here to talk to us about children's rights because she just released a new podcast called Unreformed: The Story of the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, which is about an abusive reform school for Black children that derailed thousands of lives in Alabama over the course of several decades, and in fact, still operates today as a juvenile correction facility. The podcast has become a bit of a sensation, so Josie, congrats.
0:03:08.2 Michael: Yeah, congrats.
0:03:09.2 Josie Duffy Rice: Thanks.
0:03:09.7 Rhiannon: It's so good.
0:03:10.8 Josie Duffy Rice: Thank you. Yeah, it was a year and a half of my life, so I'm glad someone that's not my parents are listening to it. They actually just started listening to it, so couldn't even depend on them.
[laughter]
0:03:20.3 Peter: Today's case, In re Gault, this is a rare case for us because it is actually sort of a good one. It's the case that found that the due process clause of the 14th Amendment applies to juveniles. At the time, it was a massive step forward in juvenile rights, which have always been a very fraught gray area in our law. The case replaced a system where the state could functionally act as a parental figure at its own discretion and shifted to one where juveniles have independent constitutional rights of a sort. But this is not a podcast about how good the Supreme Court is.
[chuckle]
0:03:58.6 Peter: This is a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks and so we have brought Josie on to talk about how this country has failed to deliver on the promise of the case, how the case itself came up short a bit, and what the state of juvenile justice in this country is today. So I think the place to start, and Josie, I'll let you handle this, is what the law was before this and for much of the country's history with respect to juvenile rights.
0:04:26.4 Josie Duffy Rice: Yeah. So before In re Gault... And thank you for reminding me that it's Re, not Ri because I am not a real lawyer.
[laughter]
0:04:34.4 Josie Duffy Rice: So it's hard for me to say words. You're gonna have to rerecord that part of the podcast.
[laughter]
0:04:42.8 Josie Duffy Rice: But in the early to mid-1800s, in 1825, these things called the Houses of Refuge start. The first one was in New York, and they are kind of like homes for kids who are "neglected" or considered to be at risk of becoming delinquent. And they're seen as these places where parents or the state can take in kids and improve them, rehabilitate them, prevent them from committing harm. And so a year after the first one starts, the mother of this girl, Marianne Krause, goes to the courts and Marianne Krause is 14, and the mother says that she is guilty of vicious behavior. I have to say I love this part of the case because I'm like, my kids are not 14, but I can see it coming. I'm like, "Yeah."
0:05:35.8 Peter: Yeah.
[laughter]
0:05:35.8 Josie Duffy Rice: Definitely gonna need a house of refuge, 100%.
[laughter]
0:05:38.1 Josie Duffy Rice: We're headed straight there. So goes to the court, kid's guilty of vicious behavior, basically like, "I can't control her, I can't take care of her, just do something." And they're like, "Okay, we'll put her in a house of refuge." So Marianne Krause is 14 at this point, and soon after her father comes to the court and is like, "Wait a second, nobody talked to me about it. She didn't have a court hearing, she didn't have a lawyer. There was no due process. Like this is not constitutional." The court is basically, at that point, kind of codifies a concept that they'd been inching towards for the 50 years that there had been these courts in America, which is this concept of parens patriae, this idea that the state is the parent and basically that if you are a kid, you think of the people having control over you as being your parents, if you're an adult, you recognize that the state has control over you. Right?
0:06:28.1 Josie Duffy Rice: But there's this point at which the court basically says, yeah, your parents have some control as long as they use it right, but ultimately you are our children too. You are the state's children too. And so, at the end of the day, if we think something is good for you because either you're neglected or you are heading towards criminality as they frame it, then we have the right to do whatever we want. And the reason we can do that is because the House of Refuge is not a prison. It is a school. It is a good place, not a bad place. And when the state is nice enough to do something good for people, they don't get any rights.
[laughter]
0:07:04.0 Rhiannon: There's a catch.
[laughter]
0:07:05.4 Josie Duffy Rice: So stop looking this gift horse in the mouth and asking for rights. Okay?
0:07:10.1 Rhiannon: Right.
0:07:10.2 Josie Duffy Rice: And so that sets off this tradition in juvenile justice that exists for the next 150 years approximately.
0:07:17.1 Peter: I think that's important background because that's undergirding all of these institutions that spring up on top of it. So you have Houses of Refuge which are notably less punitive than contemporary prisons, but also are sort of a black box.
0:07:34.9 Josie Duffy Rice: Right.
0:07:35.2 Peter: They seem to be housing juveniles that are convicted of very minor crimes.
0:07:41.4 Josie Duffy Rice: Right.
0:07:42.3 Peter: Things that perhaps are not even crimes at all. So it's sort of... There's nothing formal. It's all very haphazard. Most of these are privately funded. They're not really run directly by the state. And it's not until 1899 that you see juvenile courts spring up starting in Illinois. Now, they don't have the same types of procedural protections that are afforded to adults because they're still adhering to this concept of parens patriae or whatever, the state as the parent. So no right to counsel, no right to bail, no protections during interrogation, no right to a trial by jury, etcetera, etcetera. And moreover, the judges there have enormous discretion so disparate treatment within the system is rampant.
0:08:30.4 Josie Duffy Rice: Right.
0:08:30.8 Peter: They are profoundly racist with Black children being much less likely to be deemed worthy of rehabilitation. And that's notable for a couple of reasons, primarily because a lot of this springs up because everyone starts in the progressive era to understand that children are more readily rehabilitatable, right?
0:08:51.4 Josie Duffy Rice: Right.
0:08:51.7 Peter: I'm sure there's a real word for that.
[laughter]
0:08:54.5 Peter: But the...
0:08:55.9 Josie Duffy Rice: Rehabilitated?
0:08:56.4 Rhiannon: Capable of rehabilitation.
0:08:58.0 Peter: Yeah, sure.
0:09:00.1 Josie Duffy Rice: Rehabilitating?
[laughter]
0:09:01.8 Peter: And to give the racism of the system some color. The first White child whose case was decided by the juvenile courts was sent to live with his grandmother. And meanwhile, there are records of a 14-year-old Black child whose punishment was being leased out to a plantation a couple years later.
0:09:22.2 Josie Duffy Rice: Right.
0:09:22.8 Peter: The disparities are blatant in the South especially. In 1905, the governor of Arkansas pushed for a juvenile reform school "where White boys might be taught some useful occupation and the Negro boys compelled to work and support the institution." Corporal punishment disproportionately used on Black children. And you generally just sort of see the juvenile justice system absorbing the disparities of Jim Crow in the South and this sort of regularized racism of the rest of the country.
0:09:57.9 Rhiannon: Yeah. These are very Mount Meigs vibes. This is like...
0:10:00.3 Peter: Right.
0:10:00.4 Rhiannon: Or exactly what Mount Meigs was.
0:10:02.8 Josie Duffy Rice: Yeah.
0:10:03.5 Peter: So in the mid-century for this case, you see the Supreme Court step in ostensibly to bring some order to this fairly chaotic system and replace the state as the parent concept with something a little more grounded. So Rhi, I will hand it off to you because the background here is actually kind of fun as far as these things go.
0:10:28.0 Josie Duffy Rice: Yeah.
0:10:29.8 Rhiannon: Yeah. Yeah. It's fun and that is creepy.
0:10:30.2 Peter: It's fun until the end, I guess.
[laughter]
0:10:33.3 Josie Duffy Rice: Calling your neighbor and asking about their boobs is objectively funny.
0:10:36.9 Michael: Right.
[laughter]
0:10:39.1 Peter: Gerald Gault is hilarious.
0:10:40.4 Josie Duffy Rice: Hilarious.
0:10:41.1 Peter: We have to admit.
0:10:42.8 Rhiannon: Yeah. This case In re Gault is... It's a really good example of this concept that basically children did not have legal rights. Right? Children are different at this time in history in their legal personhood. Josie, something I heard you talk about when you were on the podcast, Citations Needed, talking about Unreformed was really striking to me. You were talking about how people say all the time that kids are resilient. Like, oh yeah, kids are really resilient.
0:11:13.4 Josie Duffy Rice: Yeah.
0:11:13.6 Rhiannon: Kids can make it through such struggles or hardships.
0:11:16.4 Josie Duffy Rice: Right.
0:11:16.6 Rhiannon: They always bounce back and you're like, "Yeah, some kids are resilient. But kids are people."
0:11:22.7 Josie Duffy Rice: Kids are people, so some of them are different.
0:11:24.8 Rhiannon: Right. Right.
0:11:25.4 Josie Duffy Rice: It's just a weird thing we do where we project kids as this like... It's just so weird. And all of us were kids, I'm like, were you this way that you describe all kids as being? It's a very strange kind of pattern that we tend to follow.
0:11:37.4 Rhiannon: Grey.
0:11:41.0 Michael: I mean, I don't wanna say that I wasn't resilient or anything, but I still remember the name of... The full name of the girl who called me an ugly nerd in second grade.
[laughter]
0:11:50.5 Josie Duffy Rice: Yeah. Well, you should tell us her day of...
0:11:52.8 Michael: And there's three people whose full names I remember from second grade. And two of them were bullies, right?
0:11:58.4 Josie Duffy Rice: Oh, totally.
[laughter]
0:12:00.3 Rhiannon: Right. Yeah.
0:12:00.4 Michael: And then one was my best friend and that's it. That's the only people I remember.
0:12:03.9 Josie Duffy Rice: Right.
0:12:04.4 Rhiannon: Right. Right. To say nothing of the massive trauma we're talking about kids going through in the juvenile justice system at this time. But yeah, this is...
0:12:13.1 Michael: Roughly similar to what has to start.
[laughter]
0:12:16.2 Rhiannon: But yeah. This is the court kind of shifting a history that we've just talked about of kids not really being recognized as individual human beings who have their own constitutional rights, right?
0:12:28.4 Josie Duffy Rice: Right. Right.
0:12:30.4 Rhiannon: So, June, 1964, 15-year-old Gerald Gault is taken into custody by the sheriff in Gila County, Arizona. Now, Gault's neighbor or a cook had complained to the sheriff that she'd received an inappropriate and offensive telephone call.
[laughter]
0:12:49.2 Rhiannon: We're talking about a prank call here, right?
[laughter]
0:12:51.9 Peter: Yeah.
0:12:52.2 Rhiannon: This is what this kid is accused of doing.
0:12:54.9 Josie Duffy Rice: No threats, not like I'm gonna kill you.
0:12:55.5 Rhiannon: Right.
0:12:56.7 Josie Duffy Rice: Just like, is your refrigerator running?
0:12:58.6 Rhiannon: Right. No, not even that.
0:13:00.5 Peter: It's 1964. The household telephone is relatively new and this kid's like, "You know what I'm gonna do."
[laughter]
0:13:07.2 Peter: I know it will be funny, and he paved the way.
0:13:10.4 Josie Duffy Rice: Right. They were a thing until recently, like we did prank phone calls as a kid.
0:13:14.3 Peter: Absolutely.
0:13:14.8 Rhiannon: Of course.
0:13:14.8 Michael: Yeah. We did too, and of course, we loved The Jerky Boys. Did you guys listen to The Jerky Boys?
0:13:20.7 Peter: Yeah.
0:13:22.3 Rhiannon: No.
0:13:22.6 Josie Duffy Rice: I don't know, but I will be Googling that immediately.
0:13:24.7 Peter: That was a very guy thing.
0:13:26.1 Josie Duffy Rice: Oh, were they like radio people who did the fake phone calls?
0:13:29.3 Michael: It was like... Yeah, you buy like cassette tapes. This was before the days of CDs, and they recorded themselves prank calling people and it was excellent, they were...
0:13:36.2 Josie Duffy Rice: That's so funny.
0:13:37.1 Peter: You had Crank Yankers and the Early Oates on Comedy Central. This is a part of recent history, and it's all thanks to Gerald Gault.
[laughter]
0:13:47.1 Rhiannon: So actually, for his part, Gault always said that he had a friend over at the family trailer, and the friend asked to use the phone.
0:13:55.0 Josie Duffy Rice: Okay, Gerald.
0:13:56.4 Rhiannon: He didn't know who his friend called, but he heard him using vulgar language, he took the phone from him and he hung it up. At any rate, this boomer would be present day MAGA freak neighbor lady, calls the cops.
0:14:10.0 Peter: Yeah. It's funny to call her a boomer, she was probably born in like 1903, but...
[laughter]
0:14:15.0 Rhiannon: But she's a boomer at the time.
0:14:18.7 Josie Duffy Rice: She's got boomer energy, okay?
0:14:18.9 Peter: The Spanish-American War of boom.
0:14:20.3 Michael: If she is still alive, she almost certainly was at the Capitol on January 6.
[laughter]
0:14:26.9 Rhiannon: That's right.
0:14:28.3 Peter: In a walker just very slowly approaching the Capitol building.
[laughter]
0:14:31.7 Rhiannon: So yeah, she fucking calls the cops because of a prank call and Gault is taken into custody without his parents being told. Again, this is a 15-year-old boy. Gault's mother gets home from work in the evening, she can't find her kid, eventually finds him at the county jail, she is not allowed to take him home. The next morning, the judge in the juvenile court holds a preliminary hearing and says he's not deciding anything right then, so Gault stays in jail for another few days before he's eventually released, no reason given. Gault's mom gets a note from the superintendent of the juvenile detention home saying that the judge is gonna have further hearings on, "Gerald's delinquency," on a certain date. At that hearing, the state filed a petition, which would be sort of roughly analogous to a formal charge, like a charging document, but that petition wasn't ever served on Gault's parents. It didn't contain any factual allegations, right? Like a charging document, like an indictment. It has to have facts, alleged facts that meet the elements of a crime, none of that is in this supposed charging instrument.
0:15:43.6 Rhiannon: It just said that Gault was under the age of 18 and needed to be supervised by the court. Gault at this hearing did not have a lawyer, the neighbor who accused him of making the prank call was not present and did not testify. There was no transcript of the hearing, the judge said that Gault admitted to making the lude phone call, but Gault's parents said he absolutely did not do that. So at the end of this circus proceeding, the judge finds that Gerald is a "delinquent child" and sentences him to detention at the State Industrial School until he is 21 years-old. Side note, at the time, if someone were convicted as an adult for making lude phone calls, the maximum prison sentence in Arizona was two months, this is a 15-year-old getting sentenced to six years.
0:16:38.1 Peter: Right.
0:16:38.7 Josie Duffy Rice: It's so bizarre.
0:16:40.2 Peter: Rhi, I think we talked about this when we briefly discussed this case a couple of years back, but they would have fried me back in the '60s if this is what they were doing to prank callers.
[laughter]
0:16:50.5 Peter: I mean, how did any child make it through this? It's just a total crapshoot.
0:16:53.9 Rhiannon: I know, I know, right?
0:16:55.2 Josie Duffy Rice: I'm like, did the judges not ever... I guess they grew up before the phones.
0:17:00.1 Peter: Literally, literally before...
0:17:00.2 Josie Duffy Rice: How could you possibly think this was that a big of deal?
0:17:01.8 Peter: This was like... Phones in the '60s to these judges who are making these decision was like the equivalent of TikTok now.
0:17:07.5 Rhiannon: Right.
0:17:08.7 Josie Duffy Rice: Or like OnlyFans. They're like, "You have an OnlyFans, six years."
0:17:12.0 Rhiannon: Yeah. Right.
0:17:12.2 Peter: Right. They're like, "What is this?"
0:17:14.0 Rhiannon: This is nothing but a vessel for lude and inappropriate pornography.
0:17:20.6 Josie Duffy Rice: Right. Right.
0:17:20.8 Rhiannon: So at the time, there was also no right to appeal a juvenile case. So Gerald Gault, his family, they cannot appeal the judge's ruling there, so the parents had to file a writ of habeas corpus, that's a special kind of legal filing asking for a court to review someone's detention basically. They filed that at the Arizona Supreme Court, the Arizona Supreme Court referred the writ back down to the same juvenile court judge who dismissed the case, obviously. At that point, they appealed that order on constitutional grounds, and that's how we eventually get to the US Supreme Court. So Gault is saying that the Arizona Juvenile Code is unconstitutional because it didn't require notice to his parents or notice of the charges against him, it didn't allow for an appeal, in general, this is a massive denial of due process across the board.
0:18:11.8 Peter: Yeah, so here we are, a prank phone call has made its way to the United States Supreme Court.
[laughter]
0:18:20.6 Peter: So the court is addressing the issue that all of these basic constitutional guarantees are inapplicable in juvenile proceedings, right? And they start off in this opinion by acknowledging that there are differences in the procedural protections guaranteed to adults and juveniles, and noting that the lack of those protections and the discretion given to juvenile judges has led to many juveniles being denied their fundamental rights. They acknowledge the utility of many of these different procedures, but they ultimately say that, "Under our constitution, the condition of being a boy does not justify a kangaroo court." Amen, I say. Amen.
[laughter]
0:19:03.9 Peter: What they hold is that while juvenile proceedings do not need to conform to all of the requirements of adult proceedings, they do need to adhere to basic principles of due process and fairness, and therefore in this case, Gault should be afforded at least the right of notice of the charges, the right against self-incrimination and the right to confront his accusers. So it's worth noting, I think, that this case expressly does not afford the full suite of constitutional protections to juveniles. It's sort of a half-measure essentially saying that the proceedings need to adhere to the principles of fairness and due process, but what exactly that means isn't entirely clear, other than at least it means notice of the charges, right against self-incrimination and the right to confront one's accusers.
0:19:53.6 Peter: So it's a step forward in the jurisprudence, but it's one that leaves the door open to the abuse of juvenile rights moving forward and leaves juvenile courts to operate within the margins of the constitution in a sort of perpetual gray area. So you get a number of consequences flowing out of that. But one of the most obvious ones is just a few years later in 1971, there's a case called McKeiver v. Pennsylvania where the court says that juveniles do not have the right to a jury trial. And had the court taken a firmer stance here that might have come out the other way. Why deny them a right to a jury trial? Why is that fair to deny someone a jury trial but unfair to deny them the right to confront one's accusers? There's not really like a consistent thread of reasoning there. And that gray area results in juveniles being denied plenty of constitutional rights up until the present day.
0:20:50.3 Josie Duffy Rice: It's basically, they'll figure it out later.
[laughter]
0:20:53.5 Rhiannon: Yeah, exactly. It's like this throwaway... It's like kicking the can, moving the goal post.
0:20:57.5 Josie Duffy Rice: Totally, totally, totally.
0:20:58.7 Michael: I gotta say I missed a lot of that 'cause I was reading an article frantically doing some mental math, and speaking on behalf of the podcast, I wanna issue a correction on a previous joke. You do not under any circumstances need to hand it to Gerald Gault.
[laughter]
0:21:16.6 Josie Duffy Rice: Turns out Gerald Gault may have ended up doing some not ideal things later, but...
0:21:22.1 Michael: Convicted sex offender.
0:21:24.0 Peter: Convicted sex offender, Gerald.
0:21:26.2 Michael: Pedophile.
0:21:27.0 Josie Duffy Rice: That's not good.
[laughter]
0:21:31.0 Peter: Obviously, we apologize for the statements we made in support of Gerald Gault, but perhaps had he not been thrown into prison...
0:21:39.6 Josie Duffy Rice: Exactly.
0:21:39.7 Peter: For a prank phone call, he might have gotten his life on the correct track. I think it's important that we leave all of this in the podcast.
0:21:48.9 Rhiannon: Yeah. No, we're cutting all of this.
[laughter]
0:21:52.2 Peter: That way people know that we own up to our mistakes. That's worst case scenario for someone you just called cool, you know?
0:22:00.5 Michael: It's as bad as it gets.
0:22:01.0 Josie Duffy Rice: It really isn't ideal.
0:22:02.7 Michael: So there were two dissents in this case and I wish I could say they were because, you know, we had some farsighted justices who were like, this does not go far enough. But that is not the case. [laughter] We had John Harlan II, the bad Harlan, for our listeners who don't know, there were two John Harlans, one was the other's grandfather and was a great justice and was on the reconstruction era court and dissented from a lot of the bad civil rights cases. His dissent was just painfully boring. This overly technical decision about deferring to state legislatures. The other is from Potter Stewart. That is just... It's just kind of nasty. It's just like these kids suck [laughter], they don't deserve shit. Literally, it's like only two pages and it's like, this isn't a criminal proceeding. It's just like this isn't real and they're not real people and we shouldn't care. Like, it's wild. And like, one of the things that they have in common is, with the majority as well, is that they're all very concerned about teenage delinquency, call it like one of the biggest troubles of the nation. Which is like, considering this is the mid '60s and there is like racial strife and the sexual revolution and the Cold war...
0:23:26.7 Rhiannon: Yeah.
0:23:26.8 Peter: Well, I think the sexual revolution, to them that is teen delinquency. That's the same thing.
0:23:30.8 Michael: That's true.
0:23:31.6 Rhiannon: Yeah.
0:23:31.6 Michael: Kind of wild. But yeah, the dissents are just absolute garbage.
0:23:35.0 Josie Duffy Rice: Honestly, that's the thing I sort of love about this and I'm not like... Feel comforted by this feeling of like just generations of people being like they're fucking teenagers.
0:23:44.9 Michael: These fucking kids...
0:23:46.6 Josie Duffy Rice: Are freaked out...
0:23:47.7 Rhiannon: Oh yeah.
0:23:48.2 Josie Duffy Rice: About the teens. These ones are gonna be the end of us, you know? It's like not that different than what you see today.
0:23:54.2 Peter: Right.
0:23:54.4 Michael: Bro, when you were like swing dancing in 1921, all the old fogies were like, these kids have been possessed by the devil.
0:24:02.9 Josie Duffy Rice: Definitely 100%. Right. Possessed by the devil is the American tradition of looking at teens. Like every generation forever.
0:24:10.8 Rhiannon: Right. Yes.
0:24:11.8 Michael: This feels like a good time to take a break. And we're back.
0:24:17.1 Peter: So Josie, I wanna sort of give you a broad prompt here, but what do you see as the legacy of this case? Or maybe another way of framing it is, what do you see as, you know, we move away from the concept of the state as the parent and into this sort of era of juveniles having some rights but not all rights. How would you describe that era, the sort of 50 or so years following this case? What are its definitive qualities in your mind?
0:24:44.9 Josie Duffy Rice: I would define it as bad, is the word I would use. You know, the interesting part about this case is it's granting children rights, which like two thumbs up, but it's also in a way kind of acknowledging like this is a criminal system. This is a system of punishment. Like actually the state is not just thinking of its job as rehabilitation. It's thinking of its job as punishment too. That was true before, but now it's kind of more explicit and aligning kids with the same rights as adults also kind of has given juvenile justice systems free reign to kind of giving them the same punishments as adults too. You can look at it both ways. At least they're not lying to themselves anymore, saying that like they were rehabilitating kids when they weren't. And some of that fiction was important in differentiating between how we think of kids and adults and like with this case, which obviously like on its face is really good, that fiction kind of disappears.
0:25:46.2 Josie Duffy Rice: And like this is, like you said, the '60s. This is racial strife, this is Lyndon B. Johnson's war on crime, this is, we're going to Nixon. And then we're like pretty soon after that going into Reagan. And, you know, like then we're in super predator land. Then we're in like thousands and thousands of kids in adult prisons. Thousands and thousands of kids institutionalized. Yes, they have rights now, they can have a lawyer and they can go to juvenile court. They actually have to be found guilty of something, which is a major shift obviously, very important. But like this doesn't change the way that the courts are seeing kids. In fact, it aligns with the increased cruelty towards children that we see over the next 50, 60 years, right? And so that really matters. I mean, when you think about this idea of kids as little adults, these like little evil adults, there are some people who are just born bad or like... Again, the super predator idea, all of this sort of stuff you're seeing, especially in the '90s, but in the decades before that too. That kind of is like one element of the American conception of children that for a long time the courts were trying to deny existed and finally admit that it really kind of does. Right?
0:27:00.8 Michael: Right.
0:27:01.3 Josie Duffy Rice: And so it's a big deal, I mean like, it's a major case and that like before that, like at Mount Meigs, for example, you're seeing kids go to Mount Meigs for loitering, for laziness, for missing curfew, for things... Sent away for six, seven, eight years. You know, you're seeing parents write it in and say like, "I don't know where my child is and I have no right to know? And I need to know where my kid is." Like it's obviously a depraved system, but I think the idea that Gault kind of drastically grants kids and the juvenile justice system more restrain, I think is a falsehood.
0:27:34.9 Peter: Mm-hmm.
0:27:35.4 Rhiannon: Yeah, yeah. I think there's this idea like after In re Gault, that like the court thinks that it's solving a juvenile justice problem by bringing juveniles into this constitutional world Where kids have constitutional rights, but it's actually "solving" this problem by putting kids in a system much the same as the adult criminal system...
0:28:03.4 Josie Duffy Rice: Mm-hmm.
0:28:03.6 Rhiannon: Which is rife with injustice. Right? And so it doesn't actually totally solve their problem. The other idea too is like, yeah, kids were getting sent to Mount Meigs before this in a completely depraved way where they were deprived 100% of any due process rights, but it didn't stop kids from being sent to Mount Meigs, right?
0:28:25.9 Josie Duffy Rice: Nope.
0:28:26.3 Rhiannon: They were still sent there and it's still open.
0:28:29.5 Josie Duffy Rice: Sure did it 'cause that place is still open. And so I actually was talking to a friend of mine who's a lawyer in Alabama about this exact thing, and she sort of said like, yeah, they kind of gave up on pretending juvenile justice was something different, but also like having a lawyer in this system doesn't always mean what it should, in part because like lawyers in juvenile justice systems sometimes think that they are guardians, according to them, exactly. And so this idea that like, you know, she was saying she sees lawyers argue for imprisonment because it's in the kid's best interest. There's still this parents' parens patriae... I don't know how to say any of these words, way of thinking about kids where we are trying to save them from themselves, kind of, by like constraining their liberty in a way that doesn't actually address the problem or give them what they need.
0:29:17.5 Peter: Right. It seems like this case sort of solves some problems and then entrenches others, right?
0:29:25.0 Josie Duffy Rice: Right.
0:29:25.3 Peter: So you have problems like parents literally not knowing what happened to their child, and this mitigates that to a large degree by providing the right for people to have notice, but on the other hand you have the formalization of the juvenile justice system as something that resembles the adult criminal justice system much more, which then leads to juveniles being just eventually placed into adult facilities at incredibly alarming rates, right?
0:29:58.8 Josie Duffy Rice: Mm-hmm.
0:30:00.4 Peter: So you start from a place where kids can be sent to these reform schools where the goal is rehabilitation for damn near anything and without any protections, you give them protections, but on the back end, within a couple of decades, they're being sent to like adult prisons in the hundreds of thousands every year.
0:30:22.4 Josie Duffy Rice: Right.
0:30:22.9 Michael: And their protections aren't the full suite of constitutional protections that adults get.
0:30:28.4 Peter: Right.
0:30:28.7 Rhiannon: Right. You still don't have a right to a jury trial. Right?
0:30:31.6 Peter: Right.
0:30:31.8 Rhiannon: There are still rights that you don't get as a juvenile child.
0:30:34.0 Michael: Right.
0:30:34.4 Peter: Not to mention that we have a whole podcast about how half those rights don't mean shit anyway.
0:30:37.8 Michael: Yeah.
0:30:38.0 Josie Duffy Rice: Exactly.
0:30:38.8 Rhiannon: Exactly.
0:30:39.4 Peter: So, you know, there's a real question of how much good was done by this case.
0:30:44.9 Josie Duffy Rice: Yeah, you know, all of these kind of procedural protections, it's like, it doesn't mean nothing, but it doesn't mean everything. [chuckle]
0:30:50.3 Michael: Right.
0:30:50.7 Josie Duffy Rice: And we tend to like grant it this like almost super human power of... Well, now kids really got their fair shot in front of courts. Right? We know that's not the case.
0:31:00.7 Peter: Right.
0:31:01.0 Josie Duffy Rice: We know that like this case exists and we still have prosecutors in Florida transferring enormous numbers of like juvenile cases to adult court unilaterally, [chuckle] like the ways in which the protections for juveniles or adults, you know, civilians generally, the ways in which we've kind of made that possible, make things like this, even the good cases, seem like they've had equally bad results, almost.
0:31:27.1 Michael: Yes, yeah.
0:31:27.2 Peter: I think it's worth noting that there's this like fundamental problem here, which is that it's difficult to agree on the framework for viewing juvenile rights. Right? And it's inherently tricky, right? You have to strike a balance between respecting the human rights of the child and also respecting the fact that they are merely a child, respecting that they are the responsibility of their parents or guardian, but also that their parents or guardian might be failing them in some ways, right? That they can cause real damage and suffering, but also that they are more likely to be rehabilitated and less likely to understand the consequences of their actions, these are really complex dynamics...
0:32:04.5 Rhiannon: Right.
0:32:04.5 Peter: That are not easy to navigate. I think sometimes we talk about issues that do have simple solutions, and I think this isn't one of them.
0:32:11.2 Rhiannon: Right.
0:32:11.5 Peter: When you're trying to find solutions for a problem this complex, I think it's useful to look at low-hanging fruit, right? When I look at the juvenile justice system now, my thoughts are, get juveniles out of adult jails and prisons, stop trying them as adults, drive resources towards rehabilitation, push for a different sets of sentencing guidelines, etcetera. Now, a lot of these efforts have been made over the last couple of decades and in some regards have been quite successful, but I just wanted to sort of put that out there because I do think these are tricky issues, and I don't think the solutions are super clear-cut.
0:32:48.2 Josie Duffy Rice: Look, we've seen just in the past couple of years, and I brought this up a few times over the past few weeks, as I've been talking about juvenile justice a lot, like you think about Uvalde, or Buffalo, or Dylann Roof or people... I think all three of them were technically adults, but they were young, you know? I think in Uvalde the shooter was days past his 18th birthday, and what we know about juveniles, that their brains are less developed, that they have less impulse control, less emotional control, less likely to think about the consequences of their actions, make them really easy targets for this narrative of evil because they are capable of doing bad things, right? They're capable of committing serious harm. The fact that you are less developed doesn't really stop you from being capable of doing these things. And so it is a really tough question. It just is so clear that the way that we currently do it is illogical. It's based on all these kind of legal fictions of somehow a kid is an adult or whatever. And it's another example of us not putting any kind of resources and attention into prevention and then throwing up our hands when a kid who's been trolling the white supremacist like message boards ends up going into a supermarket and shooting people. It just seems so clear that all the places that we could get involved before we fail to do that, and then we treat kids like adults. Yeah.
0:34:10.4 Michael: Right. Yeah. And I don't want to wander too far afield, but just to your point, it's just phenomenally easy to do large scale damage right now. Right?
0:34:20.8 Josie Duffy Rice: It is.
0:34:20.9 Michael: It's very easy to get your hand on very lethal weapons if you're 18 that don't require a lot of advanced planning. Right? You don't have to be fucking Timothy McVeigh and building a giant bomb. You just go to Walmart and buy an AR-15 and that's it.
0:34:38.8 Josie Duffy Rice: Yeah, that's right. That is a notable difference, when I say they were almost children, well, they were adult enough to get the gun, they couldn't have gotten it a couple days before, which does matter [chuckle]
0:34:48.6 Michael: Right.
0:34:48.9 Josie Duffy Rice: Then it is true that we afford basically kids with access to the ability to commit widespread harm, the ability to make the front page of the Washington Post. Right?
0:35:00.2 Michael: Yeah.
0:35:00.2 Josie Duffy Rice: And then we allow them to kind of re-entrench our system of cruelty.
0:35:03.3 Michael: Yeah.
0:35:04.0 Peter: So I think it's probably worth talking about the state of the law now.
0:35:09.1 Rhiannon: Yeah.
0:35:09.4 Peter: We've talked about this in the past, couple years ago me and Rhi talked about it on the pod, but in 2005, Roper v. Simmons holds that you cannot put juveniles to death.
0:35:20.7 Rhiannon: Phenomenal.
0:35:21.8 Peter: In 2010 you get Graham v. Florida and the court says that you can't sentence juveniles to mandatory life without parole for non-homicide offenses. And in case anyone's not a lawyer who's listening, mandatory means required by the sentencing. So you can still sentence a juvenile to life without parole, but you need to do it after an individualized evaluation of the case. In 2012, you have Miller v. Alabama where the court says you cannot implement mandatory life without parole for juveniles period, even including homicide offenses. There was a clear trend of recognizing that juveniles should have more access to rehabilitation until the recent conservative takeover of the court, until Brett Kavanaugh basically steps on the court and replaces Anthony Kennedy, and then of course made worse by Amy Coney Barrett. So I'm wondering whether you have any thoughts, Josie, about where we are other than that it's not looking great.
0:36:21.0 Josie Duffy Rice: Right.
0:36:21.5 Peter: Where you see the broader movement, because activists have had a lot of success over the last 20 years in changing laws on the ground. We have far fewer juveniles in adult prisons. We have fewer juveniles being tried as adults, but where do we go from here in your mind?
0:36:37.2 Josie Duffy Rice: Yeah, I think it's a really... When you look at the period from 2005-2016, it's a major shift, right? It's just a major shift in the way that the court is acknowledging that juveniles are different than adults and the trend is headed in such a very clear direction. I think if you had asked me five years ago, I would've said, we are five years out from no life without parole sentences for juveniles, including at all, period.
0:37:05.9 Peter: Yeah.
0:37:06.4 Josie Duffy Rice: We were almost there. And you also see the court kind of moving away from this idea of being incorrigible, which is like this term they use, from the beginning of time essentially, is in the beginning of them making decisions of what kids they're most concerned with, the incorrigible ones.
0:37:23.2 Peter: Right.
0:37:23.2 Josie Duffy Rice: Obviously this is a fiction of us being psychic beings. The Supreme Court justices knowing something that the rest of us don't know, which is where will you be in 20, 50, 100 years? We don't actually... [chuckle] turns out you can't predict the future. So the idea of incorrigibility is like a ridiculous one anyway.
0:37:44.1 Peter: But it's important, right? For the fiction they need to maintain. Because what activists have been pushing on this issue for over a century now is that young people are more receptive to rehabilitation, right?
0:37:55.5 Josie Duffy Rice: Totally.
0:37:56.0 Peter: You need what is essentially a pseudoscientific concept to throw at them to be like, well, not this one 'cause he or she is incorrigible.
0:38:04.4 Josie Duffy Rice: Right. And look, this kind of idea of people being incorrigible is not just a conservative one either. Kyle Rittenhouse obviously an asshole, whatever, not my favorite guy, right? But I was blown away at how many people were like, put him under the prison forever on the left, he was a kid, right? We see kids on both sides do horrible things and still this recognition that they are a child becomes this kind of political weapon that we wield when it's convenient and don't wield when it's not. And so the court is moving away from this idea of incorrigibility. You see them in Montgomery, which makes Miller retroactive and says, okay, mandatory life sentences without parole should not apply. And everybody who had one gets a rehearing. But you also see them talk about this corruptibility, this idea of, well, they have to be very incorrigible for you to sentence them to life without parole. And then obviously... And once we see Brett Kavanaugh and his ilk get on the court, we have Jones v. Mississippi, which you guys have talked about plenty before, but they're sort of like, they don't have to find that you're permanently incorrigible. They just have to find you're incorrigible for the time being or whatever.
0:39:13.0 Michael: This kid's just a piece of shit.
0:39:14.3 Peter: This kid sucks, dude.
0:39:15.8 Michael: Bad vibes.
0:39:16.7 Josie Duffy Rice: Right. And this is a big deal because I'm scared we're moving backwards and I'm certain we're in a stasis state when it comes to juvenile sentencing and juvenile justice at the court. And so it's really just another example of how this shift in the court to whatever the hell we have now, just the world's worst people wearing these black robes, it just is a reminder that nothing has changed. Children are the same, their brains operate the same, their brains advance the same. We know that kids, their brains don't stop developing until they're about 25 years old. This has always been the case, right? But the court creates these legal categories, these fictions that are made up and the future of children's rights kind of depends on who's sitting on the court that day. I'm not saying anything groundbreaking. This is the basis of your entire podcast.
0:40:06.4 Peter: Yeah.
0:40:06.7 Josie Duffy Rice: But it really is just a reminder of how arbitrary it all is.
0:40:11.7 Michael: Yeah. And this is a slightly academic point, but just thinking about that, I don't know that the court is necessarily the right vehicle regardless for changing the way we treat juveniles in our legal system in general, but to the extent we want to, like the language is right there in the constitution. The 14th amendment, on its face, it includes birthright citizenship. It applies to infants and toddlers. It talks about persons, all the Bill of Rights that are incorporated by the 14th Amendment refer to the people and persons and the accused. The language is there for robust constitutional protections for children if we want to build a jurisprudence around that. The tools are there, and this is a point we've made a number of times lately I think, but the language and the tools are there in the constitution already. We don't need to amend it. We don't need groundbreaking historical research you just gotta read the constitution on its face.
0:41:20.3 Josie Duffy Rice: We'd rather do shooter drills and put a cop in every school than we would actually...
0:41:25.2 Peter: Yeah. I also think it's probably worth noting, and we've talked about this a bit before too, but the conservative view on this is just profoundly unscientific.
0:41:35.7 Josie Duffy Rice: Insane.
0:41:35.9 Peter: There are mountains of research showing that juvenile and young adult brain does not stop developing until the age of 25. And violent behavior falls off a cliff after that age tremendously. These are basic facts. They should affect how we sentence young people. They should affect how we look at a young violent offender versus an old one. The fact that the modern courts have decided to ignore that is just one of the many ways that the conservative intellectual movement has chosen to reject modern science. And in this case, not even modern science, we're talking about the last 150 years of research on this.
0:42:23.3 Josie Duffy Rice: Another example of what part of the conservative project has an enormous amount of control over this is the state legislatures. Last year, I did this story in Tennessee and talked to a state legislator who said, some kids are just born bad, is what he told me. And I was like, you wanna cite any resources there? And the answer is no. He just wants to support the law. In Tennessee, it was 51 year mandatory minimum. And despite the fact that there are lawyers there like Jonathan Harwell going in front of the State Supreme Court and winning actually, but saying, here's how kid's brains work, it's irrelevant to people trying to get reelected. And so you see this, I'm tough on crime, this is my tradition of not letting you get killed by that juvenile gang member in your home or whatever, that has just re-entrenched the cruelty of juvenile sentencing across the country.
0:43:15.6 Peter: Right. And I do have to say before we wrap, I think one of the most disconcerting things about modern conservative discourse, and by modern I really mean the last year of conservative discourse, is a renewed interest in hyper violent punishments directed at non-violent criminals, most prominently Donald Trump.
0:43:37.4 Josie Duffy Rice: Who?
0:43:39.1 Peter: Former President, Donald Trump?
0:43:41.6 Josie Duffy Rice: Oh. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[laughter]
0:43:43.6 Peter: I know you're not super into politics. He has said that he would support the execution of drug dealers and I think a lot of people very quickly wrote that off, but segments of the right, the sort of fringe, intellectually fringe, but still quite popular right has grabbed onto similar concepts and talked about bringing back things like public hangings and types of corporal punishment for adult criminals. And that's notable because I think when you look back at 2016, there were a lot of things that Trump said like, "I'm gonna ban Muslims from coming into this country," that everyone rolled their eyes at, like you can't do that. Because it was so far outside of the bounds of polite discourse. Everyone felt it was off the table, but in fact it was something that was relatively popular with the common voter because they don't have any concern for the norms of Washington discourse. Executing drug dealers feels similar to me.
0:44:56.7 Josie Duffy Rice: I totally agree.
0:44:58.0 Peter: It feels like the same thing. And I think it's a very disconcerting and sort of undercovered trend in conservative politics right now. And it has me a little bit freaked out.
0:45:09.5 Josie Duffy Rice: There's that serious move towards charging people with homicide for drug dealing essentially right now, you see that left and right. You deal some drugs, they later overdose, you get a homicide charge. And that happens sometimes when you share drugs with your friend or you didn't know there was something in your drugs or whatever. We judge this to be the most harmful thing and the most harmful thing, all bets are off the table, all protections are off the table is a real direct line there. I think that we're not taking sort of these threats of sex offenders should be executed, drug dealers should be executed... I would not even be surprised if that polls kind of okay among the center left too.
0:45:47.4 Peter: Absolutely. Well, because for us it's like, is there fentanyl in our cocaine? That's important in Brooklyn for us to verify.
0:45:54.7 Josie Duffy Rice: Right, right. As an Atlanta mom, I can't confirm that, but...
0:45:58.2 Peter: Sure.
[laughter]
0:46:03.3 Michael: It reminds me of immigration where there was a not too distant past where the Republican party mainstream was pretty pro-immigration 'cause it aligned with the interests of their donors and businesses. And George Bush and Karl Rove, they wanted to strike a grand bargain on immigration reform in 2006, but it became a way for politicians to prove their bonafides to the base, starting with Mitt Romney in 2012 and going from there, there was just this race to the bottom of, well, I'm gonna make it so miserable for immigrants that they'll self deport. Well, I am gonna build the wall, and everybody climbing over one another to be just more inhumane and grotesque. And there are two issues that remind me of that right now and one is transgender stuff and the other is the death penalty and just criminal punishment in general. And it's like Ron DeSantis is saying, "Well, we wanna put to death anybody who rapes children." And Trump is like, "We're gonna put to death drug dealers." And they brought back federal executions in a big way at the end of Trump's term. And it seems like it's a trend where we're gonna be seeing just worse and worse stuff for the next decade.
0:47:21.8 Rhiannon: And Biden has a death penalty case as we speak, right? Like here's a man who ran on, "I'm gonna end the federal death penalty and... "
0:47:28.7 Josie Duffy Rice: "I'm gonna encourage governors to like end that state death penalty," where there's a case in front of him as we speak, the DOJ is prosecuting someone and hoping to get the death penalty. And the transgender thing also relates to the kids thing, right? This idea of kids as political pawns and deep down evil who are manipulating the rest of us basically is like not separate from this question of like, how much can they be punished?
0:47:52.1 Michael: The Biden death penalty thing is the most lawyer brained thing too 'cause their excuse is that before he took office, they were already seeing the death penalty so there's like...
0:48:02.0 Rhiannon: Just doing what we were doing.
0:48:03.5 Michael: Just continuity in the case or whatever. It's like this is something that is not even persuasive to most lawyers. And everybody else is gonna be like, "What the fuck are you talking about?"
0:48:14.5 Peter: Well, like 'cause why end the federal death penalty if not out of some respect for human life? And so to say that some principle of continuity between presidential administrations matters more...
0:48:29.7 Michael: Because Jeff Sessions wanted to send someone to death.
0:48:33.5 Josie Duffy Rice: Look, I care about human life as much as the next person, but this one guy said we had to do this thing. And that also really matters.
0:48:39.9 Michael: We're already on the way.
0:48:41.7 Peter: We already filed the breeze.
0:48:43.2 Michael: No turning back now.
0:48:43.9 Josie Duffy Rice: Right. Exactly. Exactly. We wouldn't wanna like waste our time.
0:48:46.4 Michael: Unreal.
0:48:48.4 Peter: Yeah.
0:48:48.4 Josie Duffy Rice: And look, all of this is emotional response, right? All of this is highlighting the worst, the Nikolas Cruzs and the worst possible crimes by young kids and saying like, they're our exception. But the point is that the exception proves the rule and we still allow this, you know, we still allow this. This is our method of prevention. This is what we're like, this will deter the next kid from doing something bad.
0:49:13.2 Michael: Yeah. 'Cause kids are really thinking about consequences.
0:49:14.9 Josie Duffy Rice: Exactly. And also like, know what the sentencing scheme is in their state. I mean, like it's all just so made up. And that's what we know already.
0:49:23.4 Peter: Yeah. I think, as we wrap, I think it's to sort of square what we've been talking about with the case, In re Gault does what's on the surface quite a good thing by adding these protections, but it also funnels juveniles into the criminal justice system and sort of puts them at its mercy. And now we have a situation where the politics of the criminal justice system are getting a little bit dicey and had we created a separate apparatus for juveniles that truly treated them differently and handled them separately, had separate institutions dedicated towards juveniles and geared them truly towards rehabilitation rather than just purportedly, then we might be in a situation where juvenile rights were sort of safe even with this modern discourse. But as it stands, the discourse is one and the same, right? To the extent that the discourse shifts towards being tough on crime again, like it did in the '90s, that will always fall on juveniles just as it does adults.
0:50:26.5 Josie Duffy Rice: Yep. Absolutely.
0:50:29.7 Peter: So Josie, before we go, I wanna let you do the full pitch, Unreformed, for those who have not listened.
0:50:36.7 Josie Duffy Rice: So Unreformed deals with a lot of these questions, right? It looks at this institution that was started as kind of a safe haven for Black kids in the early 1900s. The state of Alabama took it over, as you can imagine, they didn't have the best intentions in 1911. And what we saw for the next 60 years was this house of abuse functionally, this place of true mental, physical, emotional abuse that these kids suffered. And what we look at is kind of the trend in how they got there. What happens in the courts, right? What happens in the late 1960s when they file a federal case, when a whistleblower files a federal case alleging that the treatment at the facility violates these kids constitutional rights? And what it looks like now, which it still exists, right? This institution still exists.
0:51:25.7 Josie Duffy Rice: It is no longer called the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children. They did get rid of the Negro usage in the name, which I guess is a slight improvement, but it is still an institution where "delinquent children" are sent in Alabama. And so this is really also a look at like where the kids who went there end up. And that's kind of what's coming up in the next couple of episodes. And I think an important look at like, when we admit that kids are more influenceable than adults and then we put them in places where they're abused horribly, why are we surprised when later on that kind of abuse gets replicated? So eight episodes, you can find it on wherever you listen to podcasts, and yeah, check it out.
0:52:07.1 Michael: You can find it wherever you get your podcasts, including in this feed, right here.
0:52:10.1 Peter: Yeah. So next week we will publish an episode of Unreformed so that you can listen yourself.
0:52:16.6 Josie Duffy Rice: This is such great news. Thank you guys so much.
0:52:19.8 Peter: Yeah. In exchange, all we ask is $15,000 of unmarked bills.
[laughter]
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0:52:30.1 Peter: Follow us on Twitter @fivefourpod. Subscribe to our Patreon for premium episodes, ad free episodes, access to our Slack, special events, discounts on merch, all sorts of shit.
0:52:41.4 Josie Duffy Rice: I just wanna say, great Slack.
0:52:42.6 Peter: It is a good Slack.
0:52:43.4 Josie Duffy Rice: Huge fan of the Slack.
0:52:43.9 Peter: Thank you. Josie's in it. You can hang out with Josie Duffy Rice, patreon.com/fivefourpod. We'll see you next week. Bye.
0:52:53.6 Michael: 5-4 is presented by Prologue Projects. Rachel Ward is our producer, Leon Neyfakh and Andrew Parsons provide editorial support. Our production manager is Percia Verlin. Peter Murphy designed our website, fivefourpod.com. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks, @chipsny, and our theme song is by Spatial Relations.
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0:53:29.5 Michael: I filled out a couple of forms recently and both at times I like put in my employment and it was like your occupation was like podcaster.
[laughter]
0:53:39.8 Peter: Sometimes I just put self-employed or freelancer. And once I'd put down journalist, I was like, I feel like you can't say that I'm not.
[laughter]
0:53:50.9 Michael: Legal pundit.
0:53:51.5 Peter: I'm gonna start putting down a thought leader.
[laughter]