The Ezra Klein Show

A former prosecutor's case for prison abolition

In 2017, Paul Butler published the book Chokehold: Policing Black Men. For Butler the chokehold is much more than a barbaric police tactic; it is also a powerful powerful metaphor for understanding how racial oppression functions in the US criminal justice system. Butler describes a chokehold as “a process of coercing submission that is self-reinforcing. A…