Special Report

The crowning achievement in urban health came in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, when a series of broad changes transformed the social and material environment for millions of inner-city Americans. Important policies aimed at improving children’s health, working conditions, housing, and public sanitation translated into dramatic improvements in the health of the average American. And […]

On a typically bright and sunny day on the corner of 24th and Mission in San Francisco, the trade in forged birth certificates and Social Security cards flows with the same efficiency as the burrito shops that surround the BART rail station. On this day I watched three people order or pick up their papers […]

It’s hard to remember how popular the environmental idea was at the end of the 1980s. The movement had survived the crude efforts of the Reagan administration to kill it off. (Remember James Watt? Remember Treasury Secretary Don Regan advising that the best defense against a thinning ozone layer was a baseball cap and a […]

A year ago, two committed activists with serious credentials in the environmental movement released a report proclaiming “the death of environmentalism.” In so doing, they sparked a debate that continues to this day. While some have suggested that both the authors and their accusations emerged from nowhere, they in fact put a spotlight on some […]

For the environmental community, “The Death of Environmentalism” hit last year with the force of a tsunami, leaving its audience so taken aback by its sweeping, cocksure condemnation of their decades of selfless struggle that they could barely think about it rationally, even when they accepted its basic truth. On the other hand, among progressives […]

In the absence of federal progress, state and local governments have emerged as key arenas for policies to address global warming. These policies include strategies to encourage the use of cleaner cars, renewable energy, high-performance buildings, and, most importantly, the proposal to cap carbon-dioxide emissions from utilities in the Northeast. State and local programs won’t […]

Like a born politician, Mark Steward, director of Missouri’s Division of Youth Services, seldom forgets a name. Ambling through the gleaming halls of the Hogan Street Regional Youth Center in St. Louis on a recent summer afternoon, Steward stopped in several classrooms to shake hands and chat with the teenage residents, who are also some […]

For thousands of children with debilitating mental illnesses, the get-tough juvenile-justice culture of the 1990s could not have come at a worse time. The new punitive policies emerged in tandem with the slow breakdown of the public mental-health system, and the confluence has led to a pervasive criminalization of juvenile mental illness. The excesses of […]

The former correctional officer mops sweat off his brow as he plays two-on-one basketball against kids he would have once called offenders. Michael Gaines gestures toward the man who’s trying to block a layup by one of the kids. “In the old days, he would have just stood here in his uniform and watched while […]

As an attorney for the Youth Law Center, litigating largely over conditions of confinement, James Bell spent some 20 years in courtrooms across America. The scene was always much the same: Even in communities that were overwhelmingly white, those arrested, detained, and convicted were overwhelmingly black and brown. Nonwhites, as Bell saw it, were being […]