When you finish the season, freshly enraged about the juvenile-justice system, listen to “Caught,” No. The season isn’t perfect (in the absence of a single suspenseful story pulling us along, I longed for more rigorous connective narration) and Koenig’s style, at this point, can sometimes sound almost too podcasty, as when she sighs and begins, “I mean, I don’t know … ‘fair’ is such a weird thing,” in response to the question “Do you think ten years is fair, though, for killing a kid?” But it’s good to be back in the confident hands of the “Serial” team, hearing their lovably evocative theme song and diving into the kinds of tough, important questions that their blockbuster first season provoked. Koenig and her fellow-producer Emmanuel Dzotsi recorded liberally at the center, reporting stories involving bar fights, judicial hubris, the terrifying consequences of putting a cop in jail, a gang called the Heartless Felons, and much more, giving us a palpable sense of the inadequacies of our system and the struggles of the people within it. In its third season, “Serial” uses its mega-platform nobly: to investigate not a crime but the criminal-justice system itself, in the form of a year’s worth of reporting at the Justice Center in Cleveland, Ohio-“One courthouse, told week by week,” as Sarah Koenig says. But there are new rules for subsidized tenants-about cleanliness, pets, food storage, unit inspections-and an ominous feeling looms about what such measures portend.
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The series ends as one of the new buildings is opening we hear one resident crying with joy about her new apartment, saying that she feels like Cinderella. and in Nashville specifically, and we consider how it might be improved upon.
We get to know them, as well as the fascinating history of public housing in the U.S. Knight reported “The Promise” for a year, going to Cayce every day, and the series reflects the intimacy and trust she established with its residents. But history hasn’t given Cayce residents much reason to have faith. As the series begins, Cayce (pronounced “Casey”) is about to be razed, redeveloped, renamed, and radically reimagined, for the supposed benefit of all, as a new, modern complex, where subsidized residents and young professionals will live in harmony. Cayce Homes, a sixty-three-acre tract of run-down public housing in one of the city’s hottest neighborhoods. “The Promise: Life, Death and Change in the Projects,” from Nashville Public Radio, hosted and produced by the WPLN staff reporter Meribah Knight, studies the transformation of Nashville’s James A. He says he’s a mix: “I want to be a good guy, but sometimes I’m a bad guy.” “Caught” makes us consider some of the most basic questions about growing up, being human, and being humane.
“There’s some people that belong in jail and there’s some people that’s misguided and don’t know what to do,” one boy says.
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They are finding their way-discovering who they are, who to trust, how to act. “What does society owe those children, beyond punishment?” What makes “Caught” truly stand out is the voices of its subjects: the kids sound like kids, which, considering their circumstances, is startling in itself. “What happens once we decide a child is a criminal?” Wright asks. It’s impressively wide-ranging, giving context about neuroscience, sentencing, and progressive approaches to helping young people, and it’s impressively fine-grained, too, telling intimate, nuanced stories with empathy and honesty. “Caught: The Lives of Juvenile Justice,” from WNYC Studios and hosted by Kai Wright, introduces us to kids, both inside and outside the incarceration system, who are trying to find their way out of trouble.
With remarkable sensitivity and a knack for scene-setting, Moon guides us through a thicket of grisly story lines spanning several decades, characters, aliases, and states, in a narrative that culminates in an investigator’s discovery of a revolutionary, controversial DNA technique, which both solved the case of the Golden State Killer and brings Bear Brook ever closer to a resolution.
Bear Brook is not far from NHPR’s studios, and the young NHPR beat reporter Jason Moon worked on the series for three years-“something to look into when I wasn’t sitting at a town-hall meeting or covering the state legislature,” he says in Episode 1. Until recently, no one knew who the victims were or who had killed them, and the case mystified locals and investigators for decades. The series centers on a cold case from 1985, involving four bodies found in barrels near Bear Brook State Park, in Allenstown, New Hampshire. The true-crime genre is crowded with podcasts, but “Bear Brook,” from New Hampshire Public Radio, stands out for its ambition, complexity, and thoughtful tone.
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