Links of Interest

How the Aging Population is Changing Prison

Published: | 2:16 pm | Posted in: Older Inmates

By Lori Gonzalez, Ph.D. (2021) The U.S. prison population is aging- raising questions about just deserts and containing costs associated with housing older people. Those who are 55 and older have become the fastest growing segment of the U.S. prison population, growing 280 percent between 1999 and 2016 and projected to make up 1/3 of […]

Continue reading "How the Aging Population is Changing Prison"

The US police department that decided to hire social workers

Published: | 8:41 am | Posted in: Mental Health

The Alexandria police chief, Mike Ward, was “sick and tired” of sending his officers to respond to 911 calls that they lacked the skills and time to handle. In this small Kentucky town of 10,000 people 15 miles south of Cincinnati, Ohio, two-thirds of the calls police responded to were not criminal – instead, they were mental […]

Continue reading "The US police department that decided to hire social workers"

‘We were shocked’: RAND study uncovers massive income shift to the top 1%

Published: | 8:58 am | Posted in: Welfare, Inequality, and Poverty

Just how far has the working class been left behind by the winner-take-all economy? A new analysis by the RAND Corporation examines what rising inequality has cost Americans in lost income—and the results are stunning. A full-time worker whose taxable income is at the median—with half the population making more and half making less—now pulls […]

Continue reading "‘We were shocked’: RAND study uncovers massive income shift to the top 1%"

Mental Health And Police Violence: How Crisis Intervention Teams Are Failing

Published: | 8:49 am | Posted in: Mental Health

Nationwide protests over police accountability and racial justice have reenergized longstanding efforts to fundamentally change how police departments respond to someone in a mental health emergency. Many are calling for removing or dramatically reducing law enforcement’s role in responding to those crisis calls unless absolutely necessary. Since 2015, nearly a quarter of all people killed […]

Continue reading "Mental Health And Police Violence: How Crisis Intervention Teams Are Failing"

In Place of Police: The Oregon Experiment

Published: | 8:46 am | Posted in: Mental Health

Every call that is dispatched through the radio, twenty-four hours a day, to the CAHOOTS crisis responders is a tiny mystery, a staticky, incomplete assemblage of details. “White female in her thirties, brown hair, black mid-length shirt, last seen on Sixth, yelling and running into traffic,” for instance, on a recent Saturday evening in late […]

Continue reading "In Place of Police: The Oregon Experiment"