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Laura Kiesel was only six years old when she became a parent to her infant brother. At home, his crib was placed directly next to her bed, so that when he cried at night, she was the one to pick him up and sing him back to sleep. She says she was also in charge of changing his diapers and making sure he was fed every day. For the majority of her early childhood, she remembers that she tended to his needs while her own mother was in the depths of heroin addiction. From as early as she can...

Earlier this year, Lake Effect spoke with researchers Dmitri Topitzes and Joshua Mersky about their research on the effects of Adverse Childhood Experiences, also known as ACEs. These encompass a variety of things that can happen in childhood - including different forms of abuse, neglect, and household dysfunctions. Research has found that ACEs can have a huge impact on a person’s ability to succeed later in life. Dr. Dmitri Topitzes and Dr. Joshua Mersky are both associate professors at the...

Seventeen-year-old Jaylan Banks punched a guard at the Illinois Youth Center at Harrisburg as they struggled over a bottle of body wash. David Hayes, 18, spat in a guard’s face. And 18-year-old Lavell Staples was accused of shoving a guard as he tried to force his way out of his room. A few years ago, these incidents would have cost the teenagers their privileges, earned them a stint in solitary confinement or added time to their juvenile sentences. But these young men are among almost a...

Matt Hannon was in preschool when he started getting into trouble. Teachers quickly labeled his mischievous behavior — like cutting his hair under the table — problematic. His kindergarten teacher warned that if Matt didn’t stop using “potty words,” she would make him do his work in the bathroom. His first-grade teacher forced Matt to copy the phrase “I will not blurt out in circle” 100 times. Matt began to dread school and developed serious separation anxiety. His acting-out got worse. “I...

Risk-assessment tools are on the rise in courts across the country, causing a fierce debate over whether justice should be meted out via algorithm. Sunday, The Marshall Project published a piece of commentary by Adam Neufeld, a senior fellow at Georgetown Law’s Institute for Technology Policy and Law and the Beeck Center for Social Impact & Innovation. In it, Neufeld comes down in favor of risk-assessment tools, arguing that algorithms can help the criminal justice system, “but only...

It's a Sunday morning at the Abyssinian Baptist Church , a famous African-American church in the Harlem area of New York City. The organist plays as hundreds of worshippers stream into the pews. The Rev. Dr. Calvin O. Butts III steps to the pulpit. "Now may we stand for our call to worship," says Butts, as he begins a powerful three-hour service filed with music, dancing, prayers and preaching. "How good and pleasant it is when all of God's children get together." Then, about an hour into...

A scathing report recently made public by the Los Angeles County Probation Department paints a troubling picture of the agency that oversees the county’s juvenile justice system. The report describes long-standing department-wide problems, including decrepit and out-of-date conditions at its three juvenile halls, widespread racial disparities for youth overseen by the department, numerous staffing and training issues and continuing failures to re-direct money to work with community-based...

NORRKÖPING, Sweden—When Beate Autrum first heard that she and hundreds of other employees were getting laid off from the Whirlpool factory where she worked, she was terrified. Autrum, a single mother, had uprooted her whole life to move to Sweden from Germany to work for Whirlpool, and she worried about her immigration status, how she would support her daughter, and whether she’d find a new job again. It was 2014, a tough time to lose a job in this industrial Swedish town, as other companies...

When visiting Sullivan’s Island off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina, a few years ago, designer Walter Hood came across an interesting pattern or tapestry of some sort in a small museum there. As he looked closer, he realized that it wasn’t a pattern: It was the outlines of bodies lined up next to each other. He was looking at the Brooks Map , the document that shows how enslaved Africans were packed into the bottom of slave ships. Sullivan’s Island was a slave ship hub; it was where...

The United States isn’t exactly an international role model when it comes to incarceration; out of all developed countries, we imprison the most people , and not very cheaply . Close to half of those incarcerated in federal and state prisons are there because of drugs , but that hasn’t solved the nation’s ongoing drug crisis. And even though America is safer now than ever before, putting a glut of people behind bars isn’t the reason why . The failures in the American justice system to tackle...

Could saying “thank you” help you to live longer? For many decades, behavioral cardiology studied only the impact of so-called “negative traits”—such as stress, depression , and anxiety—on people with cardiovascular disease. The field got its start in the late 1950s with the work of cardiologists Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman , who found that “Type A” behavior—characterized by hostility, time urgency, and competitiveness—doubled the risk of coronary heart disease. Over the next five...

Hello! I’m a Community Manager for the Practicing Resilience for Self-Care & Healing community. This is an introduction to me and this new community. I graduated with a B.S. in Public Health from Santa Clara University June 2017. And I’m interested in preventing chronic diseases, such as type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol, at the community and population level by addressing biological, psychological, and social factors that affect chronic disease outcomes. As the...