criminal justice

July 22, 2016 - A multimillion-dollar settlement has been reached in a lawsuit over a Missouri community's jailing of poor people unable to pay court fines and fees. Similar lawsuits have been filed over debtors' prisons in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi.

June 17, 2016 - I recently had the opportunity to go to Washington to advocate for Central American youth who have been detained in Georgia. Their stories helped me understand the larger issue at hand: Black and Brown youth across the South are being criminalized.

February 26, 2016 - With millions of Americans disqualified for good-paying jobs because of criminal pasts, a growing number of states and local governments across the South are joining the movement to end the practice of asking about convictions on job applications.

October 9, 2015 - A recent symposium held in North Carolina discussed momentum towards dismantling mass incarceration across the South.

August 7, 2015 - Fifty years after President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, African Americans still face voter suppression and other forms of discrimination. The NAACP and allies are marching through the South for 46 days to demand voter protections and other civil rights.

March 27, 2015 - Looming over today's mass incarceration crisis are the shadows of slavery and of the brutal and profitable convict lease system that arose after slavery's end.

February 12, 2015 - States have laws about parental drug use. But Tennessee's law handcuffs new mothers, including ones who are poor, upon delivery. Treatment for those seeking help is rare.

March 13, 2014 - This week Glenn Ford, a black man wrongfully convicted of murder by an all-white jury in Louisiana, was freed after spending 30 years on death row at the state's notorious Angola penitentiary. What did he endure in a place where a federal judge has ruled conditions amount to "cruel and unusual punishment"?

December 17, 2013 - The private prison industry is fueling high incarceration rates in Mississippi and elsewhere in the United States. It's a way to keep an indentured class in a state and nation built on slavery.

January 11, 2013 - The Koch brother from another mother overseeing the state budget. A man found guilty of assaulting children running the Department of Public Safety. A science skeptic chosen to protect the environment. What is Gov. Pat McCrory thinking?