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In 2010, a 16-year-old named Kalief Browder from the Bronx was accused of stealing a backpack. He was sent to Rikers Island to await trial, where he reportedly endured unspeakable violence at the hands of inmates and guards — and spent nearly two years in solitary confinement. In 2013, Kalief was released, having never stood trial. He completed a successful semester at Bronx Community College. But life was a constant struggle to recover from the trauma of being locked up alone for 23...

I never had a student change his behavior for the better because he was suspended. Most of the time students returned and reoffended. Time away from school seemed to exacerbate problems, not fix them. As a public school leader, I was in charge of major disciplinary actions — suspensions and expulsions. My school was for older, disconnected youth, some with violent and criminal backgrounds. We had to suspend students for all types of reasons: theft, fighting, threatening, bringing a...

A n NHS counsellor lets out a deep sigh as she puts the phone down. Her latest caller has revealed a further bout of self-harming. She fans her face to cool down after another tough counselling session on the frontline of Britain’s mental health crisis. This cramped call centre in an industrial park in west Oxford is one of dozens of locations where the NHS is finally starting to grapple on a mass scale with illnesses such as depression and anxiety. [For more of this story, written by...

Ta-Nehisi Coates has done a public service with his essay “The Case for Reparations,” and the service he has done is to show that there is not much of a case for reparations. Mr. Coates’s beautifully written monograph is intelligent and sometimes moving, and the moral and political case he makes is not to be discounted lightly, but it is not a persuasive case for converting the liberal Anglo-American tradition of justice into a system of racial apportionment. Mr. Coates and...

David Guizar was 10 years old when police found the oldest of his four siblings, Oscar Martinez, 17, dead on a sidewalk in South Central Los Angeles, shot in a presumed gang attack. The baby of the family, Guizar grew up without a father and idolized his oldest brother. “I didn’t understand what happened,” he says. “I saw my mom going through shock, crying and screaming and disowning her belief in God and all these different things. And I’m just sitting there,...

Last week Bernie Sanders was asked whether he was in favor of “reparations for slavery.” It is worth considering Sanders’s response in full: No, I don’t think so. First of all, its likelihood of getting through Congress is nil. Second of all, I think it would be very divisive. The real issue is when we look at the poverty rate among the African American community, when we look at the high unemployment rate within the African American community, we have a lot of work...

Giggles and the pitter patter of little feet echo through the halls of Providence Mount St. Vincent in Seattle—not exactly the sounds you’d expect to hear in a living-care community for older adults. Then again, “the Mount,” as it’s known, isn’t your typical nursing home. Five days a week, residents and staff share the 300,000 square-foot facility with up to 125 children, ages zero to five. These children and their teachers make up the Mount’s...

New episodes of depression in expectant dads may significantly increase the risk for a very premature birth, according to a new study published in BJOG: an International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. It is well-established that depression in expectant mothers is tied to low birth weight and increased risk of premature birth. This may be due to extreme stress, the death of a loved one, lack of social support, or a difficult or abusive relationship. However, there has been little...

In this series, professionals predict the ideas and trends that will shape 2016. Read the posts here , then write your own (use #BigIdeas2016 in your piece). Every year, U.S. businesses lose more than $225 billion because of sick and absent workers. In an effort to figure out why, the Vitality Institute  published a study a few months ago aggregating health data such as obesity, smoking rates and heart disease from more than 3,100 counties, cross-referenced with workforce data from...

“Ch-ch-tsss. Ch-ch-tsss.” On a chilly Wednesday morning, Baja Poindexter sounded out the steps of the rumba to a classroom of fifth-graders at West Athens Elementary School, located in one of Los Angeles’s most violent neighborhoods . She encouraged her class of mostly Latino students to do the same. They tenuously clasped each other’s hands in ballroom dance “frame,” or body position, and swayed to the music at “Miss Baja’s” command.

For years she had tried to be the perfect wife and mother but now, divorced, with two sons, having gone through another break-up and in despair about her future, she felt as if she’d failed at it all, and she was tired of it. On June 6, 2007, Debbie Hampton, of Greensboro, North Carolina, took an overdose. That afternoon, she’d written a note on her computer: “I’ve screwed up this life so bad that there is no place here for me and nothing I can contribute.”...

For centuries, the idea of “healing thoughts” has held sway over the faithful. In recent decades it’s fascinated the followers of all manner of self-help movements, including those whose main purpose seems to be separating the sick from their money. Now, though, a growing body of scientific research suggests that our mind can play an important role in healing our body — or in staying healthy in the first place. In the book Cure , the veteran science journalist Jo...