Can America rethink prison?

America’s criminal justice system is often seen as an intractable problem — too vast, too entrenched, too political to welcome meaningful change. But what if that assumption is wrong?

This week on my What Could Go Right? podcast, I sat down with Alex Duran, whose life embodies both the failures and possibilities of our justice system. While serving a 12-year sentence, Alex earned a liberal arts degree through the Bard Prison Initiative. Today, after stops at the Ford Foundation and Open Society Foundations, he leads criminal justice philanthropy at Galaxy Gives. His journey challenges our more simplistic narratives about crime and punishment, accountability and redemption.

In our wide-ranging and sometimes free-wheeling conversation, we discussed the beginnings of America’s prison system, the struggles of corrections officers, and the tradeoffs we accept in search of safety. Most of the problems are without easy answers, even if you feel sure morally one way or another. The age-old tension between prison as punishment and prison as an incubator of rehabilitation shows no signs of resolution.

Alex, by the way, believes that though public conversation hasn’t caught up with the data, we’re closer to the end of the era of mass incarceration than the beginning. Whether or not you agree with his takes, they come from a perspective few others have. His story is one of possibility — and a reminder that meaningful reform often begins by imagining a future that looks different from the past.

Here are four excerpts that will give you a sense of our revealing conversation. I hope they encourage you to listen to it in its entirety:

• “One of the things that I find most striking is that since the very beginning of this country, there have existed criminal justice reformers who have looked at that system and said, ‘Oh, my god, this is a failure.’ ”

• “I bought a condo in Stamford three years after I was out, and I told my parole officer in the Bronx. She’s like, ‘You bought a place?’ It was nerve-wracking to her. She asked me if I was selling drugs. Like, how did I get the money for that? She couldn’t even picture that because she’s only used to seeing failure.”

• “If we were to care about creating a system that is actually keeping people safe, we would care about the wellness of the officers themselves. They have one of the lowest life expectancy rates in the country.”

• “One of my spiritual practices is to pick up trash, going around with a garbage grabber. You’d think I’m a weirdo, but I do that because I get my political philosophy from the Young Lords, who were the Puerto Rican counterpart of the Black Panther Party. When they polled in the community, eight out of 10 residents were saying, ‘Actually, the No. 1 problem is the garbage. And they were like, ‘Damn, I don’t really wanna pick up garbage, but if that’s the No. 1 problem, I guess I gotta address it.’ I joke that if you give the police garbage grabbers instead of guns, that would do more to solve crimes than anything else.”