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I had a fascinating breakfast conversation with my 11-year-old daughter a few days back. The night before I had a fitful dream—one that was short on plot and imagery, but chock-full of emotion. In this case, the feeling was of a deep, immovable sorrow. When I awoke, it didn’t take long to recognize that the article I’d been working on—this article—was definitely working on me, too. During breakfast I knew my daughter could tell I wasn’t on solid ground. She’s a sensitive soul, and I figured...

“Together, we will face this challenge as a national family.” On Thursday, President Trump gave a forceful—and at times surprising—speech outlining the White House’s new response to the opioid crisis and the announcement of a national public health emergency. The speech, delivered in tandem with a speech from First Lady Melania Trump to survivors of drug abuse, at times featured uncharacteristic signaling of empathy from the president on the issue of drug use. But whether those displays of...

The impact of America’s punishment policies is often measured in numbers: there are now 2.2 million people in our jails and prisons; one in a hundred and fifteen adults is confined behind bars; our inmate population is 4 times larger than it was in 1980. We Are Witnesses, a collection of short videos, offers a very different sort of calculation: the human cost of locking up so many citizens for so many years. The project comprises 18 videos, each between two and six minutes long. Taken...

Laura Kiesel was only six years old when she became a parent to her infant brother. At home, his crib was placed directly next to her bed, so that when he cried at night, she was the one to pick him up and sing him back to sleep. She says she was also in charge of changing his diapers and making sure he was fed every day. For the majority of her early childhood, she remembers that she tended to his needs while her own mother was in the depths of heroin addiction. From as early as she can...

Earlier this year, Lake Effect spoke with researchers Dmitri Topitzes and Joshua Mersky about their research on the effects of Adverse Childhood Experiences, also known as ACEs. These encompass a variety of things that can happen in childhood - including different forms of abuse, neglect, and household dysfunctions. Research has found that ACEs can have a huge impact on a person’s ability to succeed later in life. Dr. Dmitri Topitzes and Dr. Joshua Mersky are both associate professors at the...

Seventeen-year-old Jaylan Banks punched a guard at the Illinois Youth Center at Harrisburg as they struggled over a bottle of body wash. David Hayes, 18, spat in a guard’s face. And 18-year-old Lavell Staples was accused of shoving a guard as he tried to force his way out of his room. A few years ago, these incidents would have cost the teenagers their privileges, earned them a stint in solitary confinement or added time to their juvenile sentences. But these young men are among almost a...

Matt Hannon was in preschool when he started getting into trouble. Teachers quickly labeled his mischievous behavior — like cutting his hair under the table — problematic. His kindergarten teacher warned that if Matt didn’t stop using “potty words,” she would make him do his work in the bathroom. His first-grade teacher forced Matt to copy the phrase “I will not blurt out in circle” 100 times. Matt began to dread school and developed serious separation anxiety. His acting-out got worse. “I...

Risk-assessment tools are on the rise in courts across the country, causing a fierce debate over whether justice should be meted out via algorithm. Sunday, The Marshall Project published a piece of commentary by Adam Neufeld, a senior fellow at Georgetown Law’s Institute for Technology Policy and Law and the Beeck Center for Social Impact & Innovation. In it, Neufeld comes down in favor of risk-assessment tools, arguing that algorithms can help the criminal justice system, “but only...

It's a Sunday morning at the Abyssinian Baptist Church , a famous African-American church in the Harlem area of New York City. The organist plays as hundreds of worshippers stream into the pews. The Rev. Dr. Calvin O. Butts III steps to the pulpit. "Now may we stand for our call to worship," says Butts, as he begins a powerful three-hour service filed with music, dancing, prayers and preaching. "How good and pleasant it is when all of God's children get together." Then, about an hour into...

A scathing report recently made public by the Los Angeles County Probation Department paints a troubling picture of the agency that oversees the county’s juvenile justice system. The report describes long-standing department-wide problems, including decrepit and out-of-date conditions at its three juvenile halls, widespread racial disparities for youth overseen by the department, numerous staffing and training issues and continuing failures to re-direct money to work with community-based...

NORRKÖPING, Sweden—When Beate Autrum first heard that she and hundreds of other employees were getting laid off from the Whirlpool factory where she worked, she was terrified. Autrum, a single mother, had uprooted her whole life to move to Sweden from Germany to work for Whirlpool, and she worried about her immigration status, how she would support her daughter, and whether she’d find a new job again. It was 2014, a tough time to lose a job in this industrial Swedish town, as other companies...

When visiting Sullivan’s Island off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina, a few years ago, designer Walter Hood came across an interesting pattern or tapestry of some sort in a small museum there. As he looked closer, he realized that it wasn’t a pattern: It was the outlines of bodies lined up next to each other. He was looking at the Brooks Map , the document that shows how enslaved Africans were packed into the bottom of slave ships. Sullivan’s Island was a slave ship hub; it was where...