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Skyrocketing incarceration rates, over-representation of ethnic minorities, a fixation on punishment rather than rehabilitation—this isn't describing the modern criminal justice system in the United States. It's New Zealand's in the 1980s. After watching its criminal justice system devour six times more indigenous Maori youth than their white counterparts, New Zealand passed the Children's and Young People's Well-Being Act in 1989. The legislation, which limited police power to arrest youth...

Updated: September 04, 2018 Editor's Note: This article has been updated to reflect an announcement by Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel that he will not seek reelection. It’s well known that a run for a big office needs big money backing it, but up and down the ballot, budgets have been swelling, and not only in the U.S.’s largest cities. Several localities—including Portland, Denver, and Baltimore—have initiatives in motion to overhaul the system either by driving down the dollar amounts each...

Watching TV these days, it often feels like we’re in the middle of a messy moment of self-reflection on the state of the nation. Earlier this summer, Orange Is the New Black’s sixth season delved more deeply than it previously had into issues of racial inequity within the justice system, both in prison and in court. The second season of Dear White People did the same thing with a fictional Ivy League university, exploring specifically how the Donald Trump presidency had affected students of...

TUCSON — In February of 2012, I stood pregnant outside our Arizona farmhouse, staring at a wide desert sky pinpricked with stars. The baby had dropped and my belly was as hard as a stone. Near midnight, I labored inside the house in an inflatable kiddie pool with crayon-colored fish stamped on the sides. While I pushed and screamed my head off, their cartoon faces smiled back at me, and then my son slid out into the arms of my midwife. Two years later, the same midwife caught my second son,...

When Margaret Hagerman was trying to recruit white affluent families as subjects for the research she was doing on race, one prospective interviewee told her, “I can try to connect you with my colleague at work who is black. She might be more helpful.” Modern-day segregation in public schools To Hagerman, that response was helpful in itself. She is a sociologist at Mississippi State University, and her new book, White Kids: Growing Up With Privilege in a Racially Divided America , summarizes...

The United States receives tremendous benefits from public health spending — with far more value per dollar than with most other types of health care spending. We reviewed those benefits in a recent article , suggesting that more such spending should be considered. Then Upshot readers weighed in with their choices of what public health campaigns they’d like to see. Those included more help for mothers and babies (the Nurse-Family Partnership ), and a greater focus on diabetes, nutrition, gun...

To quote a friend who just gave her testimony at our church about her own struggles with mental health misdiagnosis and recovery, she was told after her first hospitalization, “This won’t be the first time you deal with this.” Our trauma is always with us.

Join the ACEs Connection Team. We are interested in someone that lives in Southern CA, works with folks impacted by ACEs, and is fluent in Spanish. Link here to read the Job Description and apply https://www.tsne.org/regional-community-facilitator-aces-connection

A small South Jersey town's annual reunion had it all. A centenarian celebrated her 100th birthday, a historic postmark was unveiled, gospel music choirs performed -- and Oprah Winfrey was there to see it. Winfrey's longtime partner, author and podcaster Stedman Graham, is a native of Whitesboro, an unincorporated community within Middle Township. Graham is also the executive director and a founder of the community organization Concerned Citizens of Whitesboro. According to social media...

Diabetic ketoacidosis is a terrible way to die. It's what happens when you don't have enough insulin. Your blood sugar gets so high that your blood becomes highly acidic, your cells dehydrate, and your body stops functioning. Diabetic ketoacidosis is how Nicole Smith-Holt lost her son. Three days before his payday. Because he couldn't afford his insulin. "It shouldn't have happened," Smith-Holt says looking at her son's death certificate on her dining room table in Richfield, Minn. "That...

To great fanfare, California Gov. Jerry Brown this week signed into law the nation’s most radical overhaul of bail, essentially abolishing cash bail and putting bondsmen out of business. In a statement, Brown declared the new law would assure that “that rich and poor alike are treated fairly” when accused of crimes. But even before the governor signed it, the new law was under sharp attack from some surprising voices — criminal justice advocacy organizations that have long sought to overturn...

On a recent afternoon at the city hall in Toledo, Ohio, Holly Matthews is teaching her colleagues some slang. “I forgot to tell everyone my new word of the day,” she says. “It’s ‘pookie.’” A pookie, Matthews explains, is another word for a crack pipe. “I checked with Urban Dictionary,” she says, chuckling. Matthews is executive director of the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council , an agency that provides criminal justice information services to residents of Lucas County in Northwest Ohio.