In April 2016, 11 Black school children were pulled out of elementary school in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, placed in handcuffs, and held at the Rutherford County juvenile detention center, five of them overnight. The suspected criminals ranged between eight to 12 years old. Weeks earlier, a video had emerged of two young boys shoving each other outside of school. The subsequent arrest of each child seen in the video sparked outrage across the state and made national news. Hosted by the Peabody-winning journalist Meribah Knight, the latest podcast from Serial Productions and The New York Times unfolds the larger story of the county’s secretive juvenile courts—which for years have been jailing kids at a rate three times higher than the U.S. state average. The four-part series investigates how these illegal jailings were allowed to happen, and how two lawyers, former delinquents themselves, finally exposed the operation. —Paulina Prosnitz