The Lockdown Inside the Lockdown
Pandemic precautions have touched off an invisible mental health crisis inside the juvenile detention facilities (October 2021)
The Successful Closing of Youth Prisons Shows A Path To Police Reform
The movement to abolish youth prisons may offer a way forward for “Defund The Police.” (June 2020)
What it looks like to re-enter life in Stockton, California after a long stint in prison. With photographs by award-winnning photojournalist Joe Rodriguez. (April 2018)
Kalief Browder Was a Good Kid. Should That Matter?
Thousands of young people sit today in solitary confinement in juvenile and adult prisons across the country. Many will commit suicide, some inside their cells, and others later on, locked in what some have described as the prison of their minds. We need to stop solitary confinement. (June 2015)
Francine Lucas-Sinclair spent her life hiding the fact that her father was one of the biggest, baddest drug dealers ever. (October 2007)
Teenagers: They’re not what they used to be.. But no amount of happy stats can counter the popular image of the teenage superpredator—or the notion that each generation is worse than the one before. (April 2006)
Children Will Foot the Bill for California's Prison Expansion
The compassionate and strategically wise parts of California's new prison plan are overshadowed by billions of dollars earmarked for new prison beds. The first victims of the state's shortsighted prison budget, will be the incarcerated and, most vulnerably, their children. (July 2006)
The success of a California measure that offers drug offenders treatment before prison points a way out of the drug-war stalemate. (June 2003)
In her remarkable and unsentimental new memoir, "Like Family: Growing Up in Other People's Houses," Paula McLain recalls a tumultuous childhood in the foster care system. (April 2003)
The Drug War’s Littlest Victims
Measures to put drug abusers in rehab instead of jail could rescue their kids from the cycle of addiction, foster care and crime. (October 2002)
Punishment For The Whole Family
California prison officials want to prohibit parents convicted of drug offenses from touching their children -- even infants and toddlers -- for one year. (May 2002)
Is it surprising that foster kids, in the face of forced independence at the age of 18, might go to extraordinary lengths to postpone adulthood? (March 2002)