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In April 2016, 11 Black schoolchildren, some as young as 8 years old, were arrested in Rutherford County. 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, as detailed in a joint investigation by WPLN and ProPublica. 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.

In partnership with Serial Productions and The New York Times, “The Kids of Rutherford County” is a four-part narrative series reported and hosted by WPLN’s Meribah Knight.

Knight explores the world of one juvenile court — a court shrouded in confidentiality and privacy, which in turn allowed something secretive and illegal to grow. How did this happen? What does it take to stop it? And will the people in charge face any consequences?

Hosted by Meribah Knight
Reporting by Meribah Knight and Ken Armstrong
Produced by Daniel Guillemette and Michelle Navarro
Edited by Julie Snyder and Jen Guerra
Engineered by Phoebe Wang
Original music by The Blasting Company

Behind the Series

Your Host

Meribah Knight is a senior reporter and producer at Nashville Public Radio. She is the host, reporter and producer of the Peabody Award-winning podcast “The Promise,” an immersive series about inequality and the people trying to rise above it. Her work has appeared in publications including The New York Times and The New Yorker. Her reporting on juvenile justice for ProPublica was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the Goldsmith Award and a National Magazine Award.

About the Music

The Blasting Company is the project of J.R. Kaufman and Justin Rubenstein, brothers best known for their work on the Emmy-winning animated series “Over the Garden Wall.” Starting as a two-man street band in Nashville, the brothers busked their way to Los Angeles, where an accommodating farmer’s market and kindly word of mouth led to unexpected adventures into film, television and, as of this year, podcasts and video games. Outside of composing, the brothers continue to perform and release their own music, the most recent of which was a collaboration with one of their musical heroes, Van Dyke Parks, for the single “Old Summer Reckoning.”