Blog

The United States isn’t exactly an international role model when it comes to incarceration; out of all developed countries, we imprison the most people , and not very cheaply . Close to half of those incarcerated in federal and state prisons are there because of drugs , but that hasn’t solved the nation’s ongoing drug crisis. And even though America is safer now than ever before, putting a glut of people behind bars isn’t the reason why . The failures in the American justice system to tackle...

Could saying “thank you” help you to live longer? For many decades, behavioral cardiology studied only the impact of so-called “negative traits”—such as stress, depression , and anxiety—on people with cardiovascular disease. The field got its start in the late 1950s with the work of cardiologists Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman , who found that “Type A” behavior—characterized by hostility, time urgency, and competitiveness—doubled the risk of coronary heart disease. Over the next five...

Hello! I’m a Community Manager for the Practicing Resilience for Self-Care & Healing community. This is an introduction to me and this new community. I graduated with a B.S. in Public Health from Santa Clara University June 2017. And I’m interested in preventing chronic diseases, such as type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol, at the community and population level by addressing biological, psychological, and social factors that affect chronic disease outcomes. As the...

The urban revival of the past two decades has led to a striking contradiction. As high-tech talent and industry have moved back to many cities, increasing their economic output and lowering unemployment rates, these cities have become increasingly unequal. Now a new study documents in meticulous detail the extent to which rising innovation and deepening economic segregation in cities are two sides of the same coin. The study , by economists Enrico Berkes of Northwestern University and my...

One night in May, 2015, an accountant named Renata Singleton arrived home from work and changed into lounge pants. Singleton, a polite, bespectacled woman in her mid-thirties, who kept the books for a local New Orleans charter school, intended to have a quiet evening with her three children. She was surprised when two uniformed police officers knocked on the door. “Can we speak to you away from your kids?” one of the cops asked. Singleton stepped outside to join the officers and recalls one...

Can less populated cities on the outskirts of larger metropolitan areas be too small to succeed ? Are urban municipalities with fewer than 100,000 people vestiges of a bygone era? Should small “inner-ring” cities even exist? These questions are being posed with greater frequency across the country. “Merger with the central city is an option more physically contiguous inner-ring suburbs should consider,” writes Aaron Renn, a researcher at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.

On October 15th, Governor Jerry Brown wrapped up the first year of a two-year legislative session by signing some bills and vetoing others. Three of those signed bills had been supported by 150 individuals from all around the state on Policymaker Education Day in July, as part of the California Campaign to Counter Childhood Adversity ( 4CA ): AB 340 (Arambula): Creates a statewide advisory body to review how trauma is detected in children as early as possible. Specifically, it brings...

Crawford and Erie County in Northwest Pennsylvania joined together again this fall to host the 4 th Annual Trauma Informed and Resilient Communities Conference at Edinboro University . This entirely free conference was well attended with approximately 355 participants who sold out the venue in less than one day. Our morning plenary promoted the themes of building community resilience and the Pennsylvania opioid crisis. It began with a brief introduction to ACES through 3 short videos. We...

Slightly under half of the approximately 219,000 women incarcerated in the United States right now are in local jails, and 60 percent of these jailed women have not been convicted, but are still awaiting trial, according to a new report produced jointly by The Prison Policy Initiative and the ACLU’s Campaign for Smart Justice. The report, “Women’s Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2017”- —authored by Aleks Kajstura, the Legal Director of the Prison Policy Initiative—is an addition to a...

The children of immigrants make up less than one-fourth of the nation’s youth population yet account for 30 percent of children living in poverty, a new report finds. More than that, young black and brown Americans were worse off compared to white and Asian-American children, the Annie E. Casey Foundation said. The foundation analyzed youth welfare along several axes, including education, health and economic indicators, to come up with an index of how well young people in various racial and...

Majorities in many ethnic, identity and racial groups in America believe that discrimination exists against their own group, across many areas of people's daily lives, according to a poll from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The poll asked a wide range of questions about where Americans experience discrimination — from the workplace to the doctor's office — and people's perception of it. The groups polled include whites, blacks,...

The time we’re living in requires an extraordinary understanding of who we are, what we’re working toward, and how to get there. As people committed to social justice in the time of Trump, we have a twofold challenge: resisting an administration that came into power through an election won on the dehumanization of marginalized people, while also being mindful not to reproduce the devastating hierarchies that mimic that power. So far, we’ve largely come up short. A new book by Jordan...