March 2019

Ivanka Trump has waded into the child care debate again with vocal support for a proposed one-time influx of $1 billion to the federal Child Care Development Fund, which provides states with money for subsidizing care. The money, which is listed in addition to the $5.3 billion for child care also included in the White House’s proposed budget, would be available to states willing to compete for it in part by eliminating requirements or regulations that can make it harder to run child care...

As head of New York City's correctional health services, Dr. Homer Venters spent nine years overseeing the care of thousands of inmates in the jails on Rikers Island. Though he left Rikers in 2017, what he witnessed on the job has stayed with him. "What's important to consider about jail settings is that they are incredibly dehumanizing, and they dehumanize the individuals who pass through them," Venters says. "There is not really a true respect for the rights of the detained." Venters is...

An oft-told urban success story is that of Medellín, Colombia. Under Pablo Escobar, the notorious drug lord that inspired the Netflix show Narcos, the city was one of the most violent places on Earth in the 1980s and early '90s. And then it became one of the most innovative —a " model city ." The reasons for that transformation are complicated. But one key driver was the local government's focus on changing the socio-cultural narrative, which gave rise to the concept of cultura ciudadana or...

Over the past 30 years I have worked in and created nearly a dozen addiction, co-occurring disorder, and mental health hospitals, intensive outpatient programs, and residential treatment centers around the US and overseas. And guess what? Over the years I’ve seen a lot of things that bother me. Here’s a quick sample of what’s gone wrong over the last few decades in addiction healthcare. (And I’m sure that many of you have your own thoughts to add.) Extraordinary treatment programs have...

“T he average age of a gunshot victim in Chicago is about 27 years old. Everybody thinks it’s younger , and that means that gun violence prevention efforts are not nearly as targeted and effective as they could be.” Sociology professor Andrew Papachristos has been interested in criminal justice ever since childhood, when his Greek immigrant parents were the victims of gang violence on Chicago’s North Side. Now, his research applies public health concepts and network science to map gun...

To many people, prejudice seems to be rising in American society. In 2009, around a quarter of Americans identified racism as a “big problem.” By 2015, that number had doubled. Since then, we’ve seen a measurable jump in reported hate crimes. Today, six in ten Americans believe gay and lesbian people face a lot of discrimination . But research by Harvard psychologists Tessa Charlesworth and Mahzarin Banaji suggests a paradox: Even as Americans grow more aware of bias, we appear to be...

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday adopted a strict interpretation of a federal immigration law, saying it required the detention of immigrants facing deportation without the possibility of bail if they had committed crimes, including minor ones, no matter how long ago they had been released from criminal custody. The vote was 5 to 4, with the court’s more conservative justices in the majority. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., writing for the majority, said the plain language of a federal...

In 2015, Dr. Beth Pletcher, a pediatrician and associate professor specializing in genetics, was at the annual conference of the American Academy of Pediatrics in Washington D.C. when she heard two speakers that forever changed her work with medical students. Dr. Beth Pletcher “I went to two talks on adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) that were so mind-boggling to me that I decided on my drive back to New Jersey that I had to do something about it,”says Pletcher, director of the Division...

Change can begin with anyone, but it is especially powerful when it is designed and led by the people who will be most affected by it. The In the Arena with NOW podcast seeks to celebrate and share the stories of these leaders. The Networks of Opportunity for Child Wellbeing (NOW), an initiative of the Vital Village Network at Boston Medical Center, is designed to create space and conditions for local coalitions to build their capacity to drive transformation in their communities -...

On April 27, 2015, Shantay Guy was driving her 13-year-old son home across Baltimore from a doctor’s appointment when something — a rock, a brick, she wasn’t sure what — hit her car. Her phone was turned off, so she had not realized that protests and violence had broken out in the city that afternoon, following the funeral of Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old man who drew national attention eight days earlier when he died after suffering injuries in police custody. As she saw what was happening...

The two police officers who shot and killed Stephon Clark behind his grandmother’s home in Sacramento last March recounted their actions in interviews with police investigators later that night. Officers Terrence Mercadal and Jared Robinet described the frenzied seconds when they pursued Mr. Clark after responding to a report of a suspect breaking car windows on the city’s south side. As a police helicopter swirled overhead, the officers spotted him at the side of the house and ordered him...

I’ m an “elder orphan,” a solo ager, someone who is aging alone. That may sound depressing until you learn that the American Geriatrics Society calls me and my ilk “unbefriended.” Yikes. An elder orphan is someone “of an age” who has no immediate family in their life. No parents, spouse, siblings, children, or grandchildren. They may have immediate family, but the relatives live too far away to be of assistance in times of crisis. There’s another scenario, as in my case, where my immediate...