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It's no secret that our nation's jails and prisons house individuals charged with or convicted of crimes. What most Americans don't know is that more Americans with a mental illness or addiction reside in jail and prison than in health care institutions. Sixty-five percent of inmates meet the criteria for a substance abuse disorder (a rate seven times higher than the general population) and more than half have a mental health problem. Many are incarcerated for nonviolent offenses related to...

Mental health courts are popular in many communities, and it’s easy to understand why. Rather than sending someone who’s mentally ill to an overcrowded jail that is poorly equipped to manage his condition, mental health courts offer treatment and help with housing and other social services. The community saves on the cost of locking someone up and offenders get support to stay healthy and may have their charges expunged. Everybody wins, right? [For more of...

On June 22, Anita Krajnc, a Canadian animal rights advocate, stood on the side of the road leading to Fearmans Pork Incorporated, a slaughter plant in Burlington, Ontario. Krajnc was, as she puts it, “keeping vigil” with a few other activists as truckloads of pigs were hauled to an abattoir that processes between 8,000 and 10,000 animals daily. The afternoon was unusually hot—Ontario was in the midst of a heat wave—and, through the slats of a truck sitting at a red...

Besieged by reports that Jehovah’s Witnesses shield child sexual abusers from prosecution, the religion’s top leadership appears to have settled on a strategy: “Let the story die.” A Portuguese news documentary released in October was yet another report from across the globe to detail the Witnesses’ policy of not reporting child abusers to law enforcement. As in other media reports, top officials refused to speak to the journalists who produced it. After it...

Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced new guidance Tuesday designed to help law enforcement prevent gender bias when responding to sexual assault and domestic violence incidents. "We know that sometimes this bias, whether implicit or explicit, can stand in the way of effective law enforcement and can severely undermine law enforcement’s ability to hold the offenders accountable," Lynch said. "We have seen situations where false assumptions about things like alcohol use, or the...

Christine White was a preteen when she went on her first diet. At school, she was bubbly and sociable, an honors student immersed in social causes. But at home, she would carefully ration her food. By the time she was 14, she had developed bulimia. It was easier to hide the purging from her family than it was to explain why she wasn’t eating. In her darkest moments, she would scribble her anxieties into a blue-lined journal. “When I eat food now I feel guilty,” she wrote in...

Nearly one in four people that responded to an informal survey conducted by the Kanawha-Charleston Health Department reported having at least four or more adverse experiences during childhood. More than 500 people, mostly in the Kanawha-Putnam County region, took the Adverse Childhood Experiences Survey that was made available through the department’s website from Nov. 12-28. Dr. Michael Brumage, the executive director and health officer at KCHD, said 28.2 percent of respondents had an...

A new study shows that more California college students are seeking mental health treatment — and that’s a positive trend according to the authors. Researchers from the nonprofit RAND Corporation report in the study published Thursday that the proportion of students at the state’s public universities and community colleges increased by more than 10 percent between 2013 and last spring. During that time, county governments directed a combined average of $8.7 million a year...

It’s that time of year again. Online retailers spam your inbox with holiday deals and gift ideas. You click, and click, and click, and soon find yourself bleary-eyed and weary. The Marshall Project is here for you. We’ve compiled a gift guide unlike any out there: specifically, gifts for people in your life who care about criminal justice. Most of the items were produced in programs providing prisoners with work experience, job skills, and, sometimes, the opportunity to earn a...

Brent Wager lined up with a few dozen other people in a Vancouver alleyway on a smudgy October afternoon, waiting to get into the small, peaked-roof house with a tiny balcony facing the lane. Queued up with him were young couples, some with toddlers, older couples without, and a mix of all kinds of people in between. The crowd had gathered to inspect what has become a Vancouver phenomenon: little houses built in the backyards of single-family homes. They’re the product of an innovative...

For the first time, improving the educational outcomes of foster youth is part of the nation’s education law. The reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, signed Thursday by President Barack Obama, requires states to track achievement test and graduation data for foster youth as a separate subgroup. It follows what California has already done for foster youth through legislation such as the Local Control Funding Formula. “Without California, these things...

While mass in­car­cer­a­tion in Amer­ica came to dom­in­ate the do­mest­ic polit­ic­al and policy de­bate this year, the im­pact of im­prisoned par­ents on chil­dren has largely re­mained a side is­sue. Two new re­ports make a strong case for cen­ter­ing chil­dren and fam­il­ies more squarely in the fore­ground of dis­cus­sions on crim­in­al justice —and with­in...