Matt Watkins
Media and Policy Advisor
Matt Watkins is the host and producer of our award-winning New Thinking podcast on criminal legal reform (subscribe here) and the media and policy advisor in the Research and Policy department. He has written reports on everything from racial bias and pretrial risk assessments, to the imperative of improving confinement conditions in jails and prisons. Matt taught European history at New York University and Adelphi University and spent six years as a radio reporter, editor, and documentary producer at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Montreal, Toronto, and Iqaluit, Nunavut. Matt has a B.A. from McGill University in Philosophy and History and a Ph.D. in History from NYU. You can find him on Twitter @didacticmatt.
Publications
- When Young People Go to Prison for Life
- Emphasizing the Harms
- Evicting Evictions
- Why Data Doesn't Stick
- The Future of Rikers
- The Question of Dirty Work
- Taking Reform Out of Its Comfort Zone
- The Crisis on Rikers Island
- Cages Don't Help Us Heal
- The Cycle: Police Violence, Black Rebellion
- The Front End: Policing, Race, and Mental Health
- Does the Criminal Justice System Cause Crime?
- How Will the Death Penalty End?
- The Facts on Bail Reform and Crime in New York City
- COVID-19 Behind Bars: A Pandemic of Neglect
- Josie Duffy Rice: Fighting a Big Fight
- Guns, Young People, Hidden Networks
- Reform and Its Discontents
- Restorative Justice is Racial Justice
- Justice and the Virus: Racial Patterns
- Justice and the Virus: Rachel Barkow
- Getting People Off Rikers Island in a Pandemic
- The Inequities of COVID-19: A Focus on Public Housing
- Preventing Minority Youth Violence: Lessons from Law Enforcement-Public Health Collaborations
- Shrinking Jails, Improving Conditions of Confinement: There's No Zero Sum
- "One of These Days We Might Find Us Some Free"
- College Incarcerated
- What Do We Know About Community Service?
- Ending Bail, Closing Rikers: How Change Happens
- 'Jail-Attributable Deaths'
- Art vs. Mass Incarceration
- What We All Get Wrong About Gun Violence
- Beyond the Algorithm: Pretrial Reform, Risk Assessment, and Racial Fairness
- Marilyn Mosby, Karl Racine: "We're Talking About Humans"
- The Pathological Politics of Criminal Justice
- Emily Bazelon: When Power Shifts
- Misdemeanors Matter #3: Rachael Rollins Reboots Low-Level Justice
- New Jails to End All Jails?
- The Cost of Being Poor? The Fight Against Fines and Fees
- Prosecutor Power #8: What's Next for Progressive Prosecutors?
- Misdemeanors Matter #2: Alexandra Natapoff on a Legacy of Injustice
- Prosecutor Power #7: Strength in Numbers
- Heal and Punish? When Therapy Is the Alternative to Incarceration
- The Power of Prosecutors: A Podcast Series from New Thinking
- Prosecutor Power #6: Larry Krasner, The Antagonist
- Misdemeanors Matter #1: Social Control and the Lower Criminal Courts
- The Most Hot-Button Issue in Criminal Justice Reform?
- Prosecutor Power #4: Kim Foxx, Rooted in Humanity
- Criminal Justice as Social Justice: A Conversation With Bruce Western
- Prosecutor Power #3: Reform From Within—The Brooklyn D.A.
- Rikers: An American Jail
- Keeping the Peace: Patrick Sharkey on Sustaining the Great Crime Decline
- How Do We Tell What's Working? Disrupting the Justice Evaluation Model
- Putting the Public in Public Defending: Standing Up for a Profession in Crisis
- Prosecutor Power #2: A Public Defender on the Urgency of Reform
- Violence, Trauma, and Healing in Crown Heights, Brooklyn
- Prosecutor Power #1: John Pfaff on Mass Incarceration
- Reducing Incarceration Now: A Conversation About 'Start Here'
- Renewing Justice: When the Library Becomes a Community Court
- Project SAFE: Improving Services for Criminalized Black Women
- Designing Decarceration: Architect Deanna Van Buren
- The End of Rikers? Courtney Bryan on the Call to Close the Rikers Island Jails
- Reducing New York City's Jail Population
- Problem-Solving in L.A.: Multiple Issues, One Collaborative Court
