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On his way back to his housing unit one day, my FirstWatch teammate Eric “Maserati E” told me he was pulled over and searched for a random pat-down. A Correctional Officer (C.O.) told Eric to put his hands on the wall as the officer took items from Eric’s pockets. The other officers stood close by and watched. Once the random stop and frisk was over, the C.O. handed back the few items Eric had in his pockets (identification card, pens, guitar pick, and a couple of FirstWatch and Re:store...

PBS will be airing a documentary series on ACE's. If you do not have this station at home, each episode is available to watch online after it has aired (https://www.tpt.org/whole-people/). The Documentary Series Whole People airs Sunday nights on TPT MN at 7 p.m. (CST) beginning January 13 running through February 10, 2019. The documentary series is the result of a three-year partnership between CentraCare and TPT MN. Watch the Documentaries Episode #1 (January 13th) Episode #2 (January...

Merriam-Webster defines an elegy as " a song or poem expressing sorrow or lamentation especially for one who is dead." As a college-educated, middle-class white woman I had no idea what that word meant, I had to look it up. I thought it was interesting that the author, J.D. Vance, chose to use a word most hillbillies would have no understanding of as part of his title. But maybe this book isn't intended for a hillbilly, but for those of us that are not and do not understand the first thing...

Adapted from Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and The Courage to Stand Alone: by Brené Brown, Ph.D., LMSW. Today, our culture is in crisis. Many people have retreated to their ideological bunkers to hate from afar, dehumanizing others rather than risk having real, meaningful conversations across their differences. How will we find our way back to each other? It’s not by staying in our factions and echo chambers, pressured to conform to whatever viewpoints and ways of...

A long-term study of 1,420 people finds that childhood trauma is more commonplace than is often assumed, and that its effects upon the transition to adulthood and adult functioning are not only confined to post-traumatic stress symptoms and depression but are more broadly based. These conclusions were reported November 9, 2018 by a team led by 2009 BBRF Young Investigator William E. Copeland, Ph.D. , of the Vermont Center for Children, Youth and Families at the University of Vermont. He and...

Dr. @Gabor Maté, a well-known addiction specialist and author, spent 12 years working in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, a neighborhood with a large concentration of hardcore drug users. The agency where he worked operates residential hotels for people with addictions, a detox center and a pioneering injection facility , where drug users are permitted to shoot up and can get clean needles, medical care and counseling. Born to a Jewish family in Budapest at the time of the...

Loitering. Trespassing. Petty theft. Commit one of these low-level crimes, and you might be charged with a misdemeanor. A minor offense. Alexandra Natapoff , professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, says about 13 million misdemeanor cases are filed every year in the United States. That’s compared with just 3 or 4 million felony cases. [For more on this story by The Takeaway, go to...

With unemployment rates at record lows and the federal budget deficit up 17 percent year-over-year, the Trump administration will turn back to a familiar target in Republican cost-cutting maneuvers: entitlement programs . In the final days of 2018, the Department of Agriculture announced that it would take steps to institute a series of rule changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—still known colloquially as food stamps—designed to "restore the [nutrition assistance] system...

The partial U.S. government shutdown is now in its third week, due largely to President Trump’s insistence that Congress give him more than $5 billion for a border wall he says will keep criminals from entering the country through Mexico. Meanwhile, the federal employees tasked with keeping the nation safe from people convicted of crimes—prison guards—are laboring without pay. Because the federal Bureau of Prisons is operating without funding, it has furloughed up to half of its...

As the costs of college have climbed, some students have gone hungry. When they’ve voiced frustration , they’ve often been ridiculed : “Ramen is cheap,” or “Just eat cereal.” But the blight of food insecurity among college students is real, and a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), a nonpartisan congressional watchdog, highlights the breadth of those affected. There are potentially millions of students at risk of being food insecure, which means they do not have...

You may not be ready to hear this, but if you are, the message is sure to be healing: Sooner or later you will have to lose all hope in gaining any real or lasting happiness, fulfillment and satisfaction from any worldly condition. When this level of loss happens we plunge into depression, not realizing that this loss heralds the greatest gain of all. For, just because you finally realize that you cannot gain any lasting happiness from any worldly condition, that does not mean that you...

Cyntoia Brown was sitting in the visiting room at the Tennessee Prison for Women on Monday morning when her lawyers walked in with the life-changing news. "You're getting out in August," Charles Bone said as soon as he saw her. Her reaction was immediate. [For more on this story by Adam Tamburin and Anita Wadhwani, go to https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2019/01/07/cyntoia-brown-clemency-case-facts-story-bill-haslam/2267025002/ ]