M. Gessen

He has access to the internet.

He knows what his father did.

And I don't know how a person wraps their mind around that.

I don't know how I, as a 59-year-old, would wrap my mind around finding out that one of my parents wanted the other killed.

What do you do with that, you know, too much upset for a child logic?

Because there's so much in prison, whether it has to do with your own parents or with their circumstances, that seems like it would be too much for a child.

There are a couple of things that are striking me about the way you talk about the crossroad system.

One, and this is, I'm going to bring this around to a question, but let me make an observation first, right?

You're not really criticizing the system itself.

You're criticizing our attitude to it.

But I think that, you know, something happened to me when I was reporting this podcast that shocked me.

And that's, you know, I talk about it on the podcast that I've always thought of myself as somebody who is opposed to carceral justice, somebody who is really critical of the adversarial process.

And then I found myself in the courtroom watching Alan's, my cousin's, hearing and rooting for the prosecutor and, like, wanting this guy to go to prison for as long as possible.

Which, you know, first of all, that shocked me about myself.

It also surprised me because if there was one thing that I sort of believed about the system was that it at least performs the function of sort of staying the hand of vengeance, right?

One of the ideas that we have about our system of justice, such as it is, is that it stops people from acting out of vengeance and the state steps in.

and acts on the basis of law and does justice.

And I found that, in fact, my own sense of vengeance was being channeled by the prosecutor, right?

And it is as though it was in total concert with the carceral system.

And you're nodding.