Anyone who is in prison has been charged for a crime by a prosecutor. The charges are important because they determine someone’s punishment. How do prosecutors make their charging decisions? And what are the long-term impacts of those decisions?  

Reported by Esteban Salmón, an anthropologist born and raised in Mexico City, we learn just how powerful a charging decision can be in the Mexican criminal justice system. 

SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human is produced by House of Pod. Cat Jaffee was the editor for this piece, with help from producer Ann Marie Awad. Seth Samuel was the audio editor and sound designer. The executive producers were Cat Jaffee and Chip Colwell. 

Esteban Salmón is an anthropologist who studies the ethics of criminal prosecution in Mexico City. He is currently a doctoral candidate in anthropology at Stanford University. His first book explores how immigration enforcement at the U.S.-Mexico border affects the relations between a community of undocumented migrants in New York and their hometown in central Mexico. Before attending graduate school, Esteban worked as a community organizer and policy advocate for access to justice initiatives in Mexico City. His research has been funded by the Fulbright Program, the National Science Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. Follow him on Twitter @EsteSalmon.

SAPIENS is an editorially independent podcast funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation. SAPIENS is part of the American Anthropological Association Podcast Library.

Episode sponsor:

·   This episode is included in season 5 of the SAPIENS podcast, which is part of the SAPIENS Public Scholars Training Fellowship funded with the support of a three-year grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

The Power of Criminal Prosecutors

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