August 2016

Among the many reforms recommended by scathing reports on police in Baltimore and Chicago were changes in the departments’ recruitment of officers. Police agencies throughout the country have had trouble finding enough applicants, much less well-qualified and racially diverse applicants. How can the nation’s police do a better job of recruiting new officers? [For more go to http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/08/17/how-can-police-do-a-better-job-of-recruiting-officers]

It looked like any other college class — students clustered together, organizing information and exchanging ideas — all while preparing their final presentations. Outside, the walls were topped with razor wire, but inside, the synergy was palpable, honest and filled with promise. For four weeks, 11 University of Washington students visited the Twin Rivers Unit (TRU) at the Monroe Correctional Complex (MCC), to participate in collaborative work-study sessions with a group of seven TRU...

As we work on solutions to community violence, it is important to remember that current events are only the most recent causes of stress. The stress of abuse and violence that we experience or witness replays in our brains and still lives in our bodies. Over the past several years, more and more people are becoming aware of the effects of trauma and violence on individuals. In the mid-1990s, Kaiser Permanente and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began a large study.

The two friends were leaving the movie theater when CJ received a phone call from his irate father. The boys rushed to his home, and after the door slammed, his friend heard a series of loud noises, like something being thrown against a hard surface. The actors froze and the director asked the audience if someone wanted to step into the role of the friend: “What would you have done?” “This feels so déjà vu,” one of the audience members mumbled under his breath, but didn’t volunteer to get on...

Is crime in America rising or falling? The answer is not nearly as simple as politicians sometimes make it out to be, because of how the FBI collects and handles crime data from the country’s more than 18,000 police agencies. Those local reports are voluntary and sometimes inconsistent. And the bureau takes months or years to crunch the numbers, so the national data lags behind the current state of crime. To present a fuller picture of crime in America, The Marshall Project collected and...

The United States government just sounded a death knell for the prison-industrial complex. The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Thursday that it plans on ending the continued use of private prison facilities after officials “concluded the facilities are both less safe and less effective at providing correctional services than those run by the government,” the Washington Post reports . The announcement comes one week after the DOJ’s inspector general published a scathing report on the...

For years human- and immigrants-rights advocacy groups have accused U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) of holding people who illegally crossed the Southwest border in processing-facility cells that are too small, dirty, and kept so cold the cells have earned the nickname hieleras, or iceboxes. The problem has always been that few people besides those held inside and CBP officers have seen the cells. But this week, for the first time, CBP released still images taken from video monitors...

Last April, The New York Times reported that there were 1.5 million African-American men “missing” due to early deaths or incarceration. Or, as NYT summarized it: “More than one out of every six black men who today should be between 25 and 54 years old have disappeared from daily life.” These are men who should be alive and accounted for, but who have instead been vanished due to multiple strains of racism enshrined in the nation’s health and criminal justice systems. The impacts of their...

One-fourth of all online comments at the end of news articles about sexual assault and rape include victim-blaming statements, new research out of the University of Southern California shows. The study examined 52 articles and found that only one did not contain comments offering support for the accused perpetrator, the study said. Victim-blaming statements appeared in 1,097 of the 4,239 comments ― or just over 25 percent of them. “I was surprised that so many people were so mean about these...

Thirty years ago, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Doris Lessing gave a series of lectures, later published in a book, “ Prisons We Choose to Live Inside ,” in which she reflected on the brutality in the world and asked how individuals and societies could evolve into something better. It’s a sobering book, but Lessing is hopeful — and her main source of hope stems from the capacity of human beings to study themselves and learn from their own behavior. “I think when people look back at our...

Let’s start with a story from Jon Muth’s book “Zen Shorts:” Two traveling monks reached a town where there was a young woman waiting to step out of her sedan chair. The rains had made deep puddles and she couldn’t step across without spoiling her silken robes. She stood there, looking very cross and impatient. She was scolding her attendants. They had nowhere to place the packages they held for her, so they couldn’t help her across the puddle. The younger monk noticed the woman, said...

“Forgiveness does not excuse anything. You may have to declare your forgiveness a hundred times the first day and the second day, but the third day will be less and each day after, until one day you will realize that you have forgiven completely. And then one day you will pray for his wholeness.” ― Wm. Paul Young , The Shack I have to give credit where credit is due. Wm. Paul Young , with this, beautifully penned, group of thoughts has brought together words for forgiveness for me. He has...