Force Multipliers
How the criminal, legal, and child welfare systems cooperate to punish families By Emma Peyton Williams The harmful effects of the criminal legal system on children are well-established. For years, evidence has shown that a…
Injustice
Prison Lockdowns Are Becoming More Frequent
and More Brutal By Silja J.A. Talvi Every morning, Mary Frances Barbee wakes up and experiences a “microsecond of happiness before the terror sets in.” Barbee had a heart attack, transient ischemic attack and then…
Pride Has Always Been About Ending Mass Incarceration
By Andrea Woods, qainat khan We celebrate Pride [2023] in defiance of the almost 500 anti-LGBTQ bills pending or passed in state legislatures around the country. Unsurprisingly, these attacks are turning to the criminal legal…
Bail Reform: What’s at Stake
On any given day in 2020, roughly 630,000 people were locked up in local jails. The majority of them had not been convicted of a crime. After an arrest—wrongful or not—a person’s ability to leave…
It’s Time to Abolish Grand Juries Once and for All
Chava Shapiro and James Clark On August 29, a grand jury in Fulton County, Ga., issued an indictment against 61 alleged participants in the movement to defend Atlanta’s Weelaunee Forest and stop the building of…
Bordering on the Ridiculous
Cynical hypocrisy on immigration policy Commentary by Rob Schofield As with so many other problems afflicting modern America—the climate emergency, economic inequality, the federal debt, gun violence, racism, our threadbare public education system—there’s plenty of…
Rethink Drug Legalization
Commentary by Carl Hintz Many people support the legalization of marijuana, and few people believe that tobacco, alcohol, or caffeine should be illegal. However, “hard drugs” such as cocaine, methamphetamine, and opioids should also be…
Oregon Officials Seek to Ban Public Drug Use
By Mike Baker After years of rising overdoses and an exodus of business from central Portland, Gov. Tina Kotek of Oregon said on Monday that state and city officials are proposing to roll back a…
On the Brink
Fighting to keep NC rape crisis centers open By Anna Lynch When I first joined the board of the Orange County Rape Crisis Center, or OCRCC, I never suspected that much of my mental energy…
Migrant Worker’s Death Prompts Calls for
Extreme Heat Labor Laws By Anne Blythe As the sun dipped toward the horizon, pulling the last streaks of daylight from the sky over North Carolina’s capital city, dozens of migrant workers raised flickering tealights….