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In 2010, Jan Banning made a trip to Uganda to photograph prisons. A Dutch photographer , Banning had spent much of the previous decade traveling between eight different countries to document the lives of civil servants . Backgrounding that project was a more difficult subject that Banning found increasingly impossible to ignore: the criminal justice system. Banning’s arrival in Uganda marked the beginning of his latest work, Law & Order : The World of Criminal Justice , which he...

The Northeast ― especially Massachusetts ― is the healthiest place in the country for women and children to live, according to the “America’s Health Rankings” report published this month by United Health Foundation. The report compared all 50 states based on 60 health measures in four categories: health behavior of residents, policy, socio-structural factors and health care. The researchers looked specifically at women’s health. They analyzed factors including the rate of sexually...

Scott Web, an ACEsConnection member who works at the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, sends out this list of links every couple of weeks. Most of the links are from posts on ACEsConnection, and, as you can see, they're organized by category. Some of you have asked if the summaries and links we post can be put into categories. Thanks so much, Scott, for sharing this with the ACEsConnection community! ACEs, Adversity's Impact Why we should do everything possible to avoid foster care...

This post originally appeared at TomDispatch . You’ve heard of distracted driving? It causes quite a few auto accidents and it’s illegal in a majority of states. Well, this year, a brave New Jersey state senator, a Democrat, took on the pernicious problem of distracted walking. Faced with the fact that some people can’t tear themselves away from their smartphones long enough to get across a street in safety, Pamela Lampitt of Camden, New Jersey, proposed a law making it a crime to cross a...

This publication introduces an assessment and planning tool to help nonprofits evaluate their parent engagement efforts and chart a path toward deeper partnerships with parents and caregivers. The tool spans just eight pages, with accompanying text outlining how to use it, how to assess its results and what real-world strategies and programs are already in play — and working — to boost parent engagement. [For more go to http://www.aecf.org/resources/engaging-parents-developing-leaders/]

Thirty years ago, when Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports magazine, commissioned the photojournalist Eugene Richards to travel through fourteen American cities and towns to document poverty, he approached the project with the meticulousness of a policy analyst. “We read news articles and sociology texts, studied maps and statistics charts, searching for ways to address the issues of hunger, homelessness, and unemployment,” Richards, who had previously worked as a civil-rights...

Earlier this month , I wrote a story about how Los Angeles County was considering using ridesharing services like Uber to improve “family visitation.” The problem in L.A. and across the country is that it is hard to transport children and their parents to court-ordered visits. My back-of-the-envelope math suggested that if every L.A. foster child were to be afforded one hour of visits a week – way less than court guidelines – that would equal 105 years of visits every year. Yes, a century of...

Here’s a story about a kid with mental health needs. He suffered, ongoing, from significant depression. Sexual abuse and family indifference — perhaps they just didn’t know he had emotional and mental health needs — were part of his mix. Some seemingly poor decisions skidded him to the edge, where if things had gone otherwise he would have landed in “juvie” and his life would have gone south. More troubling for this kid is that he didn’t know what to do. He was lost and had no one to whom he...

Andrew Hsi, MD, has spent most of his medical career trying to help kids who grow up in challenging circumstances to survive – and even thrive. In the early 1990s, he founded the University of New Mexico’s FOCUS program, which supports young children who are at risk due to prematurity, low birth weight and prenatal exposure to drugs and alcohol. Some also face environmental factors like family substance abuse, mental illness, family violence or unsupported teen parenting. A professor in the...

Author and reporter Maia Szalavitz, who writes about substance use and related issues recently spoke with Youth Today and JJIE about her experience and her newest book: “ Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction ,” released in April. Here’s Szalavitz’s take on addiction and its complexities, from her own experience and in her own words. [For more of this story, written by Karen Savage, go to http://jjie.org/kids-and-drugs-a-new-theory/313866/]

Toxic stress in children is a topic Montanans are beginning to hear more about. Researchers have been discovering that children raised with certain traumas -- known as Adverse Childhood Experiences -- can suffer lifelong impacts. Traumatic experiences such as neglect or emotional, physical or sexual abuse cause the child’s brain to flood with cortisol, a chemical the body releases as part of its fight-or-flight response when threatened. When the brain floods with cortisol, it affects the...

When Marc Lamont Hill, a professor and activist who wants to abolish prisons, said that to me recently, I understood where he was coming from. Intellectually, at least. America's criminal justice system, with its machinelike orientation to conviction and incarceration, has grown so many tentacles that it tends to touch the lives of the people in communities of color who are not themselves up to anything shady. The sprawl of that system, and the economy based on it, mean that anyone in those...