Wondery Presents Generation Why: Kalief Browder
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Love this podcast? Support this show through the A-Cast supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Wondery presents Generation Y, Kalief Browder. On a cold night in 2010, a boy is stopped by the police while walking home from a party in the Bronx. He's only 16.

He's been stopped by the police before, but this time it's different. In a special four-part series, the Generation Y podcast unravels the story of Kalief Browder, a young boy who was falsely accused of stealing a backpack and held without bail at Rikers Island for three years.

During that time, he endured regular abuse by prison staff and inmates, and was held in solitary confinement for more than 700 consecutive days. Three years later, Khalif was released, never once having stood trial.

Kalief's case ended up being a catalyst for change in the use of solitary confinement against minors in federal prisons. But we still have a long way to go. We say innocent until proven guilty. But where do we draw the line between due process and cruelty? I'm about to play a clip from this four-part series on Generation Y.

While you're listening, follow Generation Y wherever you get your podcasts.

Most people, if they were to be jailed or incarcerated for 30 days, they would lose their house. They would lose their job. They would lose everything. Just 30 days behind bars. There are so many other punishments. There are so many other impacts that incarceration have that no one weighs out because we just think time behind bars. We just think,

Did the punishment fit the crime? And then on top of that, people want jailhouse justice. They want prisoners to suffer more while they're behind bars as if they're not suffering already. And I've spent time in the military. I've been isolated from my family and friends.

I can't imagine what it would be like to be put in solitary for even a few days, much less months or years. So we've already talked about the harm that solitary confinement does. And then when you add in the fact that Kalief Browder was just picked off the street, no proof of crime, of laws broken, just picked up off the street and put behind bars.

Never convicted of anything. And then he's punished anyway. Yeah. I think this is the weight of the case, Justin, that we are somehow in this country okay with punishing people who we haven't even convicted.

We're just going to punish them. It seems wrong to me. And I don't understand how this isn't causing more people to stand up and say something. I mean, we're all ready to try and get someone fired from their job because they said something we didn't like.

Right. Yeah, I guess it's not that much more of a stretch to say we're OK with someone who somehow maybe they're not sure, probably not even enough information to even guess on whether they broke a law or not. We're OK with them being put in solitary confinement and being beaten and starved.

Because people seem to think that it's pedophiles and rapists that get that jailhouse justice. You know, people just think it's murderers who deserve the most extreme punishment or most extreme factors that go along with incarceration. But it's everybody.

Being incarcerated, there's no distinction between somebody who's there for unpaid parking tickets or somebody that's there for minor drug offenses or somebody that is a violent offender. It doesn't discriminate. It doesn't save the worst for the worst offenders. And here we have Kalief Browder, who, again, never convicted of his crime that he went to Rikers for.

It's not like the worst of the worst are the only ones being put in solitary confinement. The guards can put people in solitary for any number of reasons. You'd be surprised. It doesn't take much.