The US government outlawed debtors' prisons in the 1830s, the Supreme Court ruled they're unconstitutional more than 40 years ago, and you'll find sentences like this on the internet: "Today it is illegal to put someone in prison because of a debt." So how is it that courts across the country lock up thousands of low-income people each year, according to estimates, because they haven't paid up their traffic tickets, garbage collection bills and other minor violations? Lisa Foster, a former judge and co-founder of the Fines and Fees Justice Center, says many courts have become "a place of oppression" because they "make the measure of justice the measure of someone's wealth. That is fundamentally un-American and it is unjust," Lisa tells us. "But our system does it every day."

So much for the "greatest country on earth." Recent studies show that if Americans died at the same rate as people do in average European countries, which Trump derides, at least half a million Americans who die each year would likely have lived. And the biggest difference is among people younger than 65. Our guests - epidemiologist Jacob Bor at Boston University and Katherine Newman, executive vice president of the University of California - say that the U.S. is way behind not just because it has a worse health care system: The nation already has far worse housing, education, unemployment benefits and other social supports for middle- and low-income people than many other developed countries do. So what might happen to death rates under the Trump regime?

America's prisons house a "staggering number" of convicts who didn't commit the crime but said under duress that they did - so says our guest, lawyer Alan Hirsch, who testifies in trials across the country as one of the leading expert witnesses on false confessions. He took the stand not long ago in the chilling case of teenager Brooke Skylar Richardson, who was pressured by police to say that she'd murdered her baby, who was actually stillborn, and then burned the body; the jury acquitted her after forensic studies showed that the baby had never been burned at all. Alan says one problem is that police learn to lie about evidence and use clever interrogation methods that break down suspects' defenses, whether they're actually guilty or not. Some states are requiring police to film their whole interrogations - a step forward but not a panacea.