Blog

Hard-core criminals are trapped in a vicious circle of their own thinking. Cognitive treatment of offenders can show them a way out of that trap. With effort and practice, even the most serious offenders can learn to change their thinking about other people and themselves. They can learn to be good citizens, and feel good about it. But in most cases the criminal justice system doesn't present them that opportunity — not in a form that offenders recognize as genuine. Since 1973, I've been...

Recent research from a team led by Shelby McDonald of Virginia Commonwealth University looks at the effects of seeing animal abuse on children’s psychological health in a context where they already witness intimate partner violence. Not long ago, I reported on a related study by McDonald that found one-quarter of children whose mothers experience domestic violence also see their pet threatened or abused, and that most often the child says the motivation is to control the mother. Since pets...

After a hellish first night in Sacramento, Nazir Ahmad Ahmadi was ready to return to Afghanistan with his wife and 5-month-old son despite the danger of being killed by the Taliban. He took his family to the Sacramento refugee health clinic. There, a tall, well-groomed interpreter listened patiently to his story. Ahmadi told Dr. Fahim Pirzada about the roaches and bedbugs that besieged his family that first night, leaving them with irritating bites and rashes days later. Their refugee...

When Afomeia Tesfai, a research fellow for Human Impact Partners , took a look at the health impacts of public-housing policies on the formerly incarcerated in Oakland, California, she found some good news. Public housing authorities normally have a bad rep for creating policies that make it difficult for those returning from jail to find new, affordable homes . In Oakland, however, former inmates have been finding it a bit easier to get into public housing in recent years, Tesfai found in a...

“I wanted to call the book The New Normal, but everyone around me said no, you can’t!” said Louise Greenspan, a pediatric endocrinologist and co-author of a book that ended up being calledThe New Puberty: How to Navigate Early Development in Today’s Girls,on Sunday at Spotlight Health, a conference co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic. “It may be average, but it’s not okay.” Greenspan is also a co-author of a longitudinal study that looked at around 1,200 girls ages six to...

Don Meade doesn’t like hospitals, but he uses them. In just one year, he made 62 trips to the emergency room. He rattles off the names of local hospitals in Orange and Los Angeles counties like they’re a handful of pills. “St. Joseph’s in Orange, [Saddleback Memorial in] Laguna Hills,” he says. “The best one for me around here is PIH in Whittier.” At 52, Meade has chronic heart disease and other serious ailments, and he is recovering from a longtime addiction to crack cocaine. Today, he...

WHAT are your kids up to this summer? Sounds like a casual question. But for working parents at this time of year, it’s loaded. What have you managed to pull together that will keep your kids engaged, healthy, happy and safe, while still allowing you to keep feeding and clothing them? For most parents, summer, that beloved institution, is a financial and logistical nightmare. Tolanda Barnette is hoping for “a miracle” for her 6-year-old son: The 41-year-old day care worker can’t afford to...

If you know, love, live with, work with or want to better understand men who are survivors, and become fathers, t his entire series has been amazing. Here's an excerpt from the one with Jeff Glover who is part of the malesurvivor.org team and answered some questions. 7. What would you tell another survivor father who is expecting their first child? I would tell him to brace himself! The journey has been the most intense that anyone could imagine. But for all the pain and fear and yes face it...

Great column by Maia Szalavitz who is the author of “Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction.” There are, speaking broadly, two schools of thought on addiction: The first was that my brain had been chemically “hijacked” by drugs, leaving me no control over a chronic, progressive disease. The second was simply that I was a selfish criminal, with little regard for others, as much of the public still seems to believe. (When it’s our own loved ones who become addicted,...

On June 23, the U.S. Department of Justice sealed a deal with the Hinds County Detention Center and sheriff’s office in Mississippi to making sweeping changes to the county’s jail system. The new reforms focus on how to identify and treat mentally ill inmates and on reducing the time people can be detained at the jail. While this is happening in a small county in the Deep South, what makes these reforms monumental is that they seem to be signaling the dawn of a post-solitary-confinement era.

There's a hot pink suitcase on the floor of Shariah Vroman-Nagy's bedroom. The 18-year-old is packing for a trip to Disneyland, one of several she takes with her family every year. "Let's see, I need a hairbrush," she says, moving past the collection of Mickey Mouse ears on her dresser and glancing at the inspirational quotes from Marilyn Monroe on the wall. The lyrics to a song called " Smile " hang in a frame over her bed. "My mom made me that when I was struggling," says Vroman-Nagy,...

Minnesota took the top spot in a national annual ranking that scores the well-being of U.S. children. But the state’s children of color don’t fare as well. In the 2016 Kids Count ranking released Tuesday by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Minnesota was No. 1 in the overall child well-being ranking that’s based on 16 indicators. The indicators cover economic well-being, education, health, and family and community. It was the second consecutive year the state ranked first overall and the...