Blog

Recently, when Gov. Jerry Brown warned of impending deficits and the perils of committing to new spending in his revised budget proposal, he failed to mention the one area in which he has been consistently profligate: his aggressive expansion of the state’s already vast system of imprisonment. The governor is proposing $250 million for county jail construction, on top of the $2.2 billion he has already poured into expanding county jails since 2008. More than 40 counties are already building...

Young African-American women who live in fear of the violence in their neighborhoods are more likely to become obese when they reach their 20s and 30s, new research from the University of Michigan shows. The community-based study in Flint, Mich., reveals that African-American girls who express fear about their violent surroundings at age 15 experienced a larger increase in body mass index from ages 21 to 32, the U-M School of Public Health researchers found. Among the 681 young men and women...

"Although prevalence estimates vary, there is consensus that high percentages of justice-involved women and men have experienced serious trauma throughout their lifetime. The reverberating effects of traumatic experiences can challenge a person's capacity for recovery and pose significant barriers to accessing services, often resulting in an increased risk of coming into contact with the criminal justice system." – SAMHSA GAINS Center – "How Being Trauma-Informed Improves Criminal Justice...

Discipline in schools has followed that pattern for generations, but a new philosophy of restorative justice is taking hold at schools throughout Durango. “When I was an assistant principal at Durango High School , I found it to be far more effective than more punitive measures,” said Cito Nuhn, principal of Miller Middle School, which is phasing in a restorative-justice model that will begin in the fall. “There are five key parts to restorative practice – respect, responsibility,...

The Oklahoma Partnership for School Readiness/Smart Start Oklahoma board leads the state's early childhood development and education efforts. We comprise 32 members — half are state agency directors and half are appointed by the governor from the private sector. Our mission is to ensure that all children have positive early education opportunities, health and nutrition support, and the nurturing environment they need for success in school and life. We understand the profound challenges faced...

Believe it or not, both the public and policy-makers often get their ideas from the media. When those ideas are formed about something as serious and impactful as posttraumatic stress disorder, it’s important for the media to tell the story in the right way. With that in mind, Drexel researchers examined how the country’s most influential paper, the New York Times , portrayed posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from the year it was first added to the American Psychiatric Association’s...

Vincent Felitti, a Kaiser Permanente physician in San Diego in the 1990s, had a radical idea. Instead of just asking patients about their symptoms, what would happen if doctors asked them about their childhoods? His hypothesis, built on a hunch informed by experience, was that childhood trauma was connected to poor health later in life. Felitti helped lead an exhaustive study of 17,000 patients that seemed to confirm his theory. That was in 1998. But for years Felitti’s study and his...

In a talk titled “The Magnitude of the Solution: Building Self-Healing Communities,” Laura Porter, a national expert on adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), addressed an audience of over 200 clinicians, researchers, teachers, service providers and other community members on April 27, 2016 about the importance of understanding the impact of trauma on health. The talk was hosted by the Illinois ACEs Response Collaborative at Northwestern University’s Chicago Campus through generous support of...

A congressional briefing on the Science of Trauma, organized by U.S. Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) and U.S. Rep. Grace Napolitano (D-CA), will be held at 2:30 pm, Wednesday, May 25, 2016, in 562 Dirksen Senate Office Building, Washington, DC. The Campaign for Trauma-Informed Policy and Practice (CTIPP) is sponsoring the event. CTIPP is a new organization comprising individuals and groups from all sectors and walks of life working together to create a better future by promoting trauma-informed...

The plan U.S. Rep. Todd Rokita, R-Indianapolis, has devised to cut back free and subsidized meals for poor school children reminds me of an old and cruel joke. The joke goes like this. A scientist who wanted to prove a point startedexperimenting with a frog. The scientist cut off one of the frog’s legs and yelled, “Jump!” The frog jumped. The scientist made a note. The scientist lopped off another leg and yelled again. Once more, the frog jumped. The scientist made another note. Another leg...

The judge is chewing gum. Her hair is piled in a messy bun on top of her head, where a pair of sunglasses also rests. She giggles shyly as she walks up to the podium and adjusts the microphone. Teen Court is now in session. A national diversion program, Teen Court is operated locally through the Boys and Girls Club of the Redwoods. The crime is real, the court is real and the sentence is real, although the emphasis is on rehabilitation rather than punishment. The goal is to steer young...

Millions of Americans live with the possibility that, at any moment, their wages or the cash in their bank accounts could be seized over an old debt. It’s an easily ignored part of America’s financial system, in part due to a common attitude that people who don’t pay their debts deserve what’s coming to them. A couple of years ago, we set out to find out more about the growing use of the courts to collect consumer debts. How many lawsuits are filed? Who is filing them? Who is getting sued?