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For the last five years, a great criminal justice experiment has been underway in California. Decades of "tough on crime" policies had left the state prisonsbuilt to house a maximum of less than 80,000 peopletotally overwhelmed. By 2006, the prison population had climbed to an all time high of roughly 173,000. In 2011, the Supreme Court ruled that the overcrowding in the state's prisons amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. The court ordered the California Department of Corrections and...

The Oscar-nominated film Spotlight follows an investigative team from the Boston Globe as they expose the almost 90 Catholic priests in the area who abused childrenand the wall of lies and trickery that the Church used to cover it up. The movie powerfully highlights that institutions we expect to protect us can actually cause us harm. This happens when institutions, like the Church or the military or universities, do not acknowledge the widespread abuse going on within their confines, do not...

PART I: MOTHERS ON THE INSIDE Tonya Kamara, 54, seems to have the weight of the world on her shoulders. She lives in a one-bedroom apartment in Southeast Washington, DC, with her one-year-old grandson, Anthony, and her 26-year-old nephew, who is between jobs. Her two daughters also live with herwhen they are not incarcerated. Anthonys mother, April, age 32, and her 25-year-old sister, Latonya, both struggle with a history of mental health problems and drug addiction, which has led to cycles...

[Photo by Bryan Jones ] I have two offices, one for answers and another for questions. As a clinical psychiatrist, I begin my day in a room filled with soothing art and soft leather chairs, where my pharmaceutical prescriptions and psychological interventions are intended to meet the pressing needs of my patients. Here, Im supposed to have answers, or at least thats the hope. Then, at some point near noon, I descend 12 floors, cross a cobblestone drive, pass into an old granite building and...

By the time I was 24 I had spent 10 years in and out of juvenile justice programs and prisons in Iowa. Four of those years were spent languishing in solitary confinement cells and one year in Iowas own Supermax unit. From my own experience, I know what works and what fails miserably when working with juveniles. As a practical approach, we need to teach an evidence-based, proven methodology and shape the future juvenile justice workforce. We also need to change our policies on how we treat...

As the drug-related death toll rises in the United States, communities are trying to open more treatment beds. But an ongoing labor shortage among drug treatment staff is slowing those efforts. Each year, roughly one of every four substance-abuse clinicians nationally chooses to leave the job , according to recent research. And that's not just turnover leaving one job for another in the same field. As an Institute of Medicine report documented in 2006, there's been a shortage of addiction...

[Photo by Svein Halvor Halvorsen ] Summary: What is already known about this topic? Short sleep duration (<7 hours per night) is associated with greater likelihoods of obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke, frequent mental distress, and death. What is added by this report? The first state-specific estimates of the prevalence of a 7 hour sleep duration in a 24-hour period show geographic clustering of lower prevalence estimates for this duration of sleep in...

Some musicians score a record deal and immediately buy a luxurious home, a fancy ride, or some other status-symbol indicator. When the New Orleans-based rapper Dee-1 signed with RCA in 2013, he decided to pay off his student loans. Indeed, in his new video Sallie Mae Back , Dee-1 boasts that instead of buying a Mercedes Maybach with his recording contract advance, he burned off his college note. The video was filmed in front of the football stadium at Louisiana State University, where Dee-1...

Making farmers markets more accessible to Americans in food deserts can boost the number of low-income customers who regularly shop there, and may even offer more promise for improving diets than bringing in traditional grocers. That's according to researchers who looked at what happened when the farmers market in Flint, Mich. much of which qualifies as a food desert moved downtown. Availability of nutritious foods is of particular relevance in Flint, where the city's water system is now...

With the Zika virus in the daily headlines, public health authorities should be looking carefully at how they communicate about this latest emerging infectious disease. People need to be alerted, not alarmed. That balance can be hard to strike when the health sources people turn to range from acquaintances on social media to politicians, instead of physicians and other medical professionals. The Ebola outbreak in 2014 demonstrated that many of the old rules about public health communication...

0.4 percent. That's the proportion of global development assistance that goes to mental illness prevention, care and treatment, according to Daniel Vigo. It's $1.5 billion of the $372 billion total health assistance spending around the world over the last 15 years. Vigo, a psychologist and psychiatrist at Harvard, believes that more money is needed. And he also believes that one reason the percentage is so low is that the world doesn't do a good job of assessing the number of people who...

Unhappy Child, Unhealthy Adult (Radio 4) | iPlayer In Therapy (Radio 4) | iPlayer The Forum: Anger (BBC World Service) | iPlayer Of late, the BBC has been focusing on mental health and its felt a little depressing, if you can excuse the term. Not because we shouldnt be talking about it clearly, we should but because the provision for mental health in this country is so utterly inadequate that almost every story you hear is a heartbreaker. Patients being shunted between A&E and police...