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According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in 2018, there were 67,367 drug overdose deaths in the United States. The ramifications of these statistics are not only felt by the victim and their loved ones, but also extends to doctors, drug distribution companies, and dealers.

The Justice Department recently announced that it would begin the nationwide collection data on police shootings and other violent encounters with the public in 2017. The news comes after a series of protests and investigations since 2014 stemming from several deadly episodes. The project, reported by the New York Times, is the most ambitious federal […]

The DEA has constructed a massive wiretapping operation in the Los Angeles suburbs, which secretly intercepts tens of thousands of Americans’ phone calls and texts in order to monitor drug traffickers across the U.S. This goes on despite the objections of the Justice Department’s attorneys who think the practice may not be legal. This could […]

Connecticut Governor Dannel P. Malloy recently announced in a proposed policy on bail reform and juvenile justice that he would divert thousands of people aged 18 to 20 from the adult to that juvenile corrections system. He said he wants to consider other options to handle those under 25 who commit less-serious offenses. Roughly 11,000 […]

The situation is all too familiar: the police race to a home in response to a 911 call. It’s a domestic disturbance, another fight. Autumn Steele and her husband were once again fighting again, and he makes the emergency phone call. Things happen fast and the officer arrives, pulls out his gun and then — […]

The spread of amateur video footage recording police arrests and sometimes the deaths of civilians has the public concerned not only about the use of force by the police, but also about officer credibility. Footage from bystanders’ cellphones and from security cameras has shown the police version of incidents is in some cases inaccurate at […]

Long before United States Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy denounced the “human toll” of solitary confinement in U.S. prisons in his concurring opinion in Davis v. Ayala this past June (see “Eight Principles for Reforming Solitary Confinement” in the Fall 2015 issue of the American Prospect), Dickens reached the same conclusion. Dickens found that our […]

Here’s a startling statistic: someone dies of a drug overdose every 12 minutes in the United States. An addiction to a prescription drug such as like Vicodin, OxyContin, or Percocet can lead to heroin abuse or the possession of a controlled substance—and the increasing number of deaths and injuries this causes is alarming. So much […]

It seems like technology is everywhere we turn. Sometimes this is a good thing, and other times it can have serious negative effects. There is secret code in our criminal justice system. But courts are refusing to publish the source code for forensic software, making it impossible for third parties to inspect—even when that code […]

Citizens in Louisiana couldn’t believe there was still a debtor’s prison in the U.S. They were abolished almost 200 years ago. As the name implies, those without money who failed to pay their debts were sent to prison. This was, in effect, still happening in New Orleans where the court system funded itself through an […]