Not Just Speed Traps: Alabama Community Fights Back Against For-profit Policing – A 70 Million Story (Encore)
Just 20 minutes north of Birmingham on Interstate 22, Brookside, Alabama is a working-class town with less than 1,300 residents. From 2018 to 2020, income from traffic fines and forfeitures increased 640%, accounting for 49% of the town’s revenue. In 2019, Brookside saw its first lawsuit from a motorist that included allegations of racism and police misconduct. It caught national attention for being a predatory speed trap in 2022 and...
Modern Parenting… The Latino Way
How do you decide what kind of parent you want to be? Our friends at Pulso Podcast, Maribel Quezada Smith and Liz Alarcón, discuss ways they maintain their children’s cultural identity as Latinos. They also touch on what they have changed from how their immigrant parents raised them. And, Liz sits down with Latinx parenting coach Leslie Priscilla to talk about her work using an antiracist, anticolonial and child-centered lens. Like...
The Rest of the Story: Indigenous Resistance
In this episode, we revisit two stories concerning indigenous rights we’ve covered in the past. In the first half, Rebecca Nagle joins us to discuss the Supreme Court decision to uphold the Indian Child Welfare Act and why the legitimacy of the law is so important to tribal sovereignty. We also talk about the right’s legal strategy in the last few decades and what that means for decisions at the Supreme Court. In the...
The Shadow of Nuclear Colonialism
The film Oppenheimer has reignited public interest in the Manhattan Project, the WWII-era secret program to develop the atomic bomb. But the movie leaves out important parts of the story. On today’s show, we hear about the impact of nuclear colonialism and the Manhattan Project on the people and places of New Mexico with Myrriah Gómez, author of Nuclear Nuevo México: Colonialism and the Effects of the Nuclear Industrial Complex...
70 Million – Highway Robbery: How a Small Town Traffic Trap Became A Legal Black Hole
This week on Making Contact, we bring you a story from our podcast partners, 70 Million titled Highway Robbery: How a Small-Town Traffic Trap Became A Legal Black Hole. About 20 minutes north of Birmingham, Alabama, on Interstate 22, is the working-class town of Brookside. Its almost 1300 residents make it about the size of a large high school. According to the 2020 census, Brookside’s population is mostly White and 21% are...
Criminalized Survival
Journalist Natalie Pattillo and filmmaker Daniel A. Nelson created the documentary film And So I Stayed to raise awareness about criminalized survival, the criminal justice system’s long practice of imprisoning survivors of intimate partner violence when they fight back against their abusers. Pattillo, herself a survivor, followed the stories of Kim Dadou Brown, Tanisha Davis and Nikki Addimando, women imprisoned for killing their...
