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To great fanfare, California Gov. Jerry Brown this week signed into law the nation’s most radical overhaul of bail, essentially abolishing cash bail and putting bondsmen out of business. In a statement, Brown declared the new law would assure that “that rich and poor alike are treated fairly” when accused of crimes. But even before the governor signed it, the new law was under sharp attack from some surprising voices — criminal justice advocacy organizations that have long sought to overturn...

As California lawmakers struggled this week to address an apparent new normal of epic wildfires, there was an inescapable subtext: Climate change is going to be staggeringly expensive, and virtually every Californian is going to have to pay for it. The day before a special wildfire committee agreed to spend $200 million on tree clearance and let utilities pass on to their customers the multi-billion-dollar costs of just one year’s fire damage, the state released a sobering report detailing...

How many of these bills—which aimed to empower women and combat sexual harassment—win approval from the California Legislature and Gov. Jerry Brown? To read more of Laurel Rosenhall and Antoinette Sui's article, please click here.

What responsibility does government have to protect people with serious mental illnesses who refuse treatment? How should it balance the right to liberty with the need for care? At the heart of the long effort to answer these questions is a law signed in 1967 by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan. Aimed at safeguarding the civil rights of one of society’s most vulnerable populations, the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act put an end to the inappropriate and often indefinite institutionalization of people with...

California Governor Jerry Brown on Tuesday signed legislation that ended money bail in California. The bill abolishes paying money as a condition of release from jail pre-trial. The money-bail system has been consistently criticized as unfair to low-income people: Unable to afford bail, poorer people were forced to spend more time in prison pre-trial. Hoping to resolve these inequalities—and compelled by years of activism —state legislators put forward legislation that sought to replace...

California Care Force will be at the Cal Expo September 21st to September 23rd. California Care Force provides free healthcare services with no insurance and no co-pays required. Please see the attached flyers and distribute them as you deem appropriate.

On any given night in California there are about 134,000 people without a home, according to annual data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. That’s nearly the equivalent to the population of Pasadena or Roseville, sleeping on the street, on a bench or in a shelter. California’s homeless population jumped 13.7 percent between 2016 and 2017. Beginning today, the California Dream media collaboration is rolling out an exploration of why people fall into homelessness—and...

After a very diff icult upbringing and early adulthood, Sabrina Hanes is doing everything she can to overcome the trauma she experienced and give her daughter, Aroara, the best possible life. (Anne Wernikoff/KQED) . Listen to the full 30 min special report on the CA Report by Laura Klivans and Anne Wernikoff. Such a powerful story of a powerful young woman, Sabrina Hanes, a nd a great and thorough overview of the ACE study told from the story of Sabrina. Also read the accompanying article...

Read about the original ACE study as excerpted from THE DEEPEST WELL: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity by Nadine Burke Harris. Copyright © 2018 by Nadine Burke Harris. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Full Article LINKED HERE

'Beauty in the ugliness': Artist turns wood scorched by wildfires into art. To view the 5-minute CBS News video clip, please click HERE.

12.5 percent of people have 4 or more ACEs. FOUR! This statistic really hit me today as I attended my second El Dorado ACEs Collaborative meeting since starting my time with El Dorado County as a Community Health Advocate. I work in the Community Hubs program in which ACEs is at the heart of all we do, and today’s meeting solidified the importance of that. ACEs are a new topic to me but a fascinating one at that. I didn’t realize prior to coming to EDC that so much of a person’s overall...

The addiction treatment program at Highland Hospital’s emergency room is only one way that cities and health care providers are connecting with people in unusual settings. Another is in San Francisco, where city health workers are taking to the streets to find homeless people with opioid use disorder and offering them buprenorphine prescriptions on the spot. The city is spending $6 million on the program in the next two years, partly in response to a striking increase in the number of people...