California Gov. Jerry Brown signs overhaul of bail system, saying now ‘rich and poor alike are treated fairly’, By Jazmine Ulloa, August 28, 2018, Los Angeles Times: “California Gov. Jerry Brown has championed legislation and ballot measures downgrading drug crimes, expanding chances of early release for prisoners and easing punishment for juvenile offenders. On Tuesday, he ushered in one of the most sweeping criminal justice reforms of his administration, signing a bill abolishing the state’s current money bail system, and replacing it with one that grants judges greater power to decide who should remain incarcerated ahead of trial…”
Day: August 30, 2018
Neglected Tropical Diseases in the Southern US
In rural Africa, lessons for the U.S. South about eradicating poverty-related diseases, By Lyndsey Gilpin, August 30, 2018, Montgomery Advertiser: “It’s been a decade since Dr. Adamu Keana Sallau saw the last case of guinea worm in Nigeria. But he talks about the medical breakthrough as if it happened yesterday. In the early 1990s, Sallau began traveling to remote villages throughout his home country to research nearly 700,000 cases of guinea worm, a neglected tropical disease transmitted when villagers drank stagnant water contaminated with the worm’s larvae…”
Job Corps Program
$1.7 Billion federal job training program is ‘failing the students’, By Glenn Thrush, August 26, 2018, New York Times: “The North Texas Job Corps Center squats behind a chain-link fence here in a suburb north of Dallas, accessible only through a gate manned 24 hours a day by guards hired to keep out intruders — and to keep in the center’s 436 students. ‘It’s a little bit like prison,’ said Donnell Strange, 17, who joined the electrical apprenticeship program about six months ago after struggling in school back home in Mansfield, near Dallas. This is not what the founders of a flagship federal program with a $1.7 billion annual budget — an iconic Great Society program meant to prepare impoverished young people for the work force — had in mind…”