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Stark disparities in prisoners’ treatment are embedded into criminal-justice systems at the city, county, state, and federal levels, and have disproportionate, negative effects on men of color. A new analysis from the Association of State Correctional Administrators and Yale Law School provides a fresh trove of information with which to explore the racial dynamics in state and federal prisons—specifically through their findings on solitary confinement. “People of color are overrepresented in...

H ere’s what you don’t want to do late on a Sunday night. You do not want to type seven letters into Google. That’s all I did. I typed: “a-r-e”. And then “j-e-w-s”. Since 2008, Google has attempted to predict what question you might be asking and offers you a choice. And this is what it did. It offered me a choice of potential questions it thought I might want to ask: “are jews a race?”, “are jews white?”, “are jews christians?”, and finally, “are jews evil?” [For more of this story, written...

The NRA and Charlton Heston gifted us the slogan, “You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.” Replace “gun” with “privilege” and I can’t think of a better way to describe how Americans feel about our culture of privilege and the prospect of losing it. Privilege exists, not because of anything we have done or failed to do. Instead, privilege reflects how society assigns disparate value to all of us based on social identities and how we, consciously or unconsciously, assign...

Many Americans deny the existence of privilege even while we see it, hear it, and feel it tear us apart. To end the destruction, we need to recognize that having privilege harms the privileged, talk about it so we can get over it, and make the New Privilege a reality. The Privilege is Real People are uncomfortable talking about, even thinking about privilege — particularly their own. I mean avoid eye contact, short of breath uncomfortable. I see this as I work around the country training...

The increasingly brutal police response to protests over the construction of The Dakota Access Pipeline has pushed the debate over the safety of oil infrastructure into the national spotlight. From the beginning of their anti-pipeline organizing, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has voiced their concerns about the environmental impact of the project, pointing to the fact that an earlier proposal for the pipeline route was rejected due to concerns over potential contamination of Bismarck, North...

In the final weeks of the 114 th Congress, Senator Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) welcomed her colleague Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) as a new host in the third and final briefing on addressing adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). The December 1 briefing focused on public policies to improve coordination, prevention and response to childhood trauma. In addition to joining forces to raise awareness of the impact of ACEs, Senators Heitkamp and Durbin are drafting legislation based on a framework they...

Maybe you've seen this story circulating about the goat soothed by wearing the duck costume. If you haven't, please check it out. It's rare that a story about anxiety can warm the heart as much as this one does. What I love about it besides the "too much cuteness" factor is that it's also so compassionate and kind. It could be shared with children as well as adults who are struggling with anxiety. That's powerful. But to me, the most pressing question is this: what if we were all this...

A federal survey shows that Texas has reduced the number of homeless people needing shelter by 42 percent since 2007. (bodnarchuk/iStockphoto) AUSTIN, Texas – Advocates for Texas' homeless population are celebrating a federal report showing a significant reduction in the number of Texans who are homeless over the past decade. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development's annual count , homelessness in Texas dropped by almost 42 percent from 2007 to 2016 - a period when the...

At last, mainstream America seems to be talking about solitary confinement. Over the last decade, journalists and politicians have, more than ever before, discussed the perils of the practice: how enforced isolation damages the mind, how quickly it incites and exacerbates mental illness, how frequently it encourages self-mutilation and suicide — and how disproportionately it is used for non-white prisoners. Pope Francis condemned the practice. President Barack Obama pointedly questioned its...

When Donald Trump this week tapped a surgeon-turned-congressman to run the Department of Health and Human Services, the nation’s largest physicians group swiftly endorsed the choice. The blowback started almost at once. Liberal doctors peppered the American Medical Association with furious tweets decrying the group’s endorsement of Representative Tom Price as a betrayal of patients and physicians. And by Wednesday night, 500 doctors had signed an online open letter titled “The AMA Does Not...

The Justice Department on Wednesday announced a series of prison reforms intended to help former inmates return successfully to their communities. The federal government plans to set up a school district within the federal prison system; pay for state-issued IDs before inmates are released; regulate federal halfway houses and "explore alternative models"; and finally, enhance mental health and substance-abuse programs for female inmates. “Helping incarcerated individuals prepare for life...

“I’m going to bring jobs back to the United States like no one else can.” These words, spoken by President-elect Donald Trump during his campaign, were music to the ears of many of the working-class voters outside the nation’s trendy metro economies. These workers and their communities have suffered mightily from the decline of good jobs, especially in manufacturing, that only required a high-school education. President-elect Trump attributed the massive losses in these jobs to trade deals,...