Journalist and podcast host Kai Wright* told Colorlines that the podcast grew out of the Radio Rookies program, which teaches New York teenagers to produce stories about their lives. Program participants found several of the subjects, featured under pseudonyms in “Caught,” via earlier projects. Most of the profiled teenagers are children of color who survived incarceration in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington.

“In talking about mass incarceration and police violence, we so often focus on the end of the story—when there is, frankly, a dead body, or some other horrific climax to what this system does to Black and Brown bodies,” Wright explained. “That is at the exclusion of all of the quotidian awfulness that takes place leading up to those peaks. We have to go way back to the beginning and talk about the day to day ways in which we set up young people, and particularly young people of the color, to end up inside of a punitive criminal justice system.”

[For more on this story by Sameer Rao, go to https://www.colorlines.com/art...t-mass-incarceration]