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For rent: brand new one-bedroom apartments in the shadow of downtown Dallas, a short walk from one of the city’s trendiest areas. On-site concierge. Successful applicants will be homeless, mentally ill and possess criminal records. These are strange-sounding tenant requirements, but The Cottages at Hickory Crossing is an unusual kind of project. It is a “housing first” strategy: find the homeless a permanent place of their own before trying to solve their problems, rather than the other way...

Imagine back to when you were a young teenager. What would it be like to be removed from your parents’ home? Your parents were hitting you and often weren’t taking care of you. Child welfare officials placed you in a foster home where you felt lost. The foster mother was nice, but you didn’t want to be there and you felt like a guest. You go to school but you are not doing well. You don’t feel like the other kids accept you and you feel isolated. You are getting in trouble on a regular...

SPRINGFIELD, Mass.—The sheriff here, whom the White House hailed as a “Champion of Change” for his re-entry innovations, is about to retire, leaving many to fret about the future of those successful criminal-justice reforms. Michael Ashe Jr. was elected Hampden County Sheriff in 1974, and has run unopposed ever since. His political prominence is especially on display at his annual clambake, an obligatory campaign stop for local and state candidates seeking his endorsement. His efforts to...

It's normal for millennials to still live at home these days. But what if you're a millennial who doesn't have a home to go back to? Growing up, Alkeisha Porter says, she didn't like her mom's husband, and her dad had a drug problem. So at 16, she moved out and became homeless. "I was basically just house-hopping from friends to some family members. Hey, it was comfortable to me. It wasn't cold. I wasn't sleeping outside," says Porter, now 23. Young people — 18- to 24-year-olds — make up one...

“The danger of the Republican party being taken over by the lily-white-ist conservatives is more serious than many people realize,” Jackie Robinson cautioned in his syndicated column in August 1963. He was worried about the rise of Barry Goldwater, whose 1964 presidential bid laid the foundation for the modern conservative movement. Today, Goldwater’s shadow looms over Donald Trump’s campaign for the Republican Party’s nomination. “During my life, I have had a few nightmares which happened...

Researchers in London have found evidence of a surprisingly effective treatment for anxiety and depression, one that even alters the inflammatory immune responses that may underlie these disorders. Prozac? Actually, percussion. An "exploratory examination" found 10 weeks of group drumming provided significant benefits for a group of people who had sought help for mental-health issues. What's more, the improvements persisted for at least three months after the sessions concluded. " This study...

The following is a script from "The Resurrection of St. Benedict's" which aired on March 20, 2016. Scott Pelley is the correspondent. Guy Campanile, producer. St. Benedict's Prep was 100 years old when time ran out on Newark, New Jersey. It was 1967 and all hell broke loose around the very proper, very white Catholic boy's school. Unemployment, racism, and police brutality had ignited the inner city. And even the monks who ran St. Benedict's, lost faith. But the school's namesake, the patron...

The epidemic of drug overdoses in the U.S. has reached crisis levels, according to newly published data from the County Health Rankings & Roadmaps project . The following map shows the spread in per-capita drug overdoses from 2002 to 2014, the most recent year for which data is available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Because it’s difficult to determine the number of overdoses in small-population counties, the figures in this map represent the CDC’s...

In a society driven by globalization, the world has become increasingly interconnected. Ties among nations and cities have strengthened as leaders band together to come up with solutions to some of the world’s most pressing issues, like terrorism, the Zika outbreak, and climate change. Diplomacy itself now comes in many forms—there’s koala diplomacy , soccer diplomacy , and the emerging field of gastrodiplomacy , to name just a few—that fall outside traditional embassies and ambassadors. To...

Since January, the Walworth County Child Advocacy Center has seen double the number of drug-endangered children than in all of 2015, manager Paula Hocking said. The reasons are more drugs in the community and more awareness of the effects drugs in the home can have on children, Hocking said. “I think what credits us in Walworth County is we're not afraid to talk about it, and we're not afraid to let everybody know the concerns,” Hocking said. “I think that is part of the prevention. If you...

It was 11 o’clock on a Friday night in mid-December and Lessie Gardner had already taken a bus 100 miles from her home in Washington, D.C., to the Richmond, Va., Greyhound station. Soon she would board a 15-passenger van for a seven-hour drive to a small town near the Kentucky border. Her ultimate destination was a supermax state prison called Red Onion. It holds 800 inmates, one of whom was her son, Michael. She had not seen him in 15 years. Their prolonged separation is a familiar story to...

In the nearly four years since the U.S. Supreme Court decided that juveniles can’t be subject to mandatory life-without-parole sentences, hundreds of juvenile offenders have been given a chance at eventual release. Evan Miller — whose name is on that decision — isn’t one of them. Miller has been locked up since he was 14 for the July 2003 killing of a neighbor, Cole Cannon. The 52-year-old Cannon was beaten, robbed and left for dead in his mobile home, which Miller and another teen set...