NY Times: “In April 2016, 11 Black schoolchildren, some as young as 8 years old, were arrested in Rutherford County, Tenn. The reason? They didn’t stop a fight between some other kids.
What happened in the wake of those arrests would expose a juvenile justice system that was playing by its own rules. For over a decade, this county had arrested and illegally jailed hundreds, maybe thousands, of children. It would take years, but eventually one lawyer, a former juvenile delinquent himself, asked: Why? The answer would lead back to a powerful judge, the jailer she appointed and a county that treated this astronomical number of arrests as normal.
From Serial Productions and The New York Times, “The Kids of Rutherford County” is a four-part narrative series reported and hosted by Meribah Knight, a Peabody-award winning reporter based in the South.”