Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/author/daryl-khan/)
Next Tuesday’s election for seats to the East Ramapo Central School District’s board isn’t about politics in the traditional sense, it’s about the divisions between the black and Latino residents who see the public school system as a civic stepladder to a better life, and the Hasidim, a mystical religious sect, that sees it as a threat to its way of life. Continue Reading →
In Ramapo, New York, a town divided by race, religion, and culture, a demographic split has allowed public money to pour into private religious schools, resulting in huge cuts to the already decimated public school system. Community leaders fear that the cuts, which will essentially eliminate all non state-mandated programs like music, sports and art, will create a school-to-prison pipeline. Continue Reading →
NEW YORK -- Next to a bookstand furnished with self help books and a shiny new computer station, a young man wearing a plaid button up and khakis shyly stepped up to the podium and took a folded piece of notebook paper from his pocket. He wants to be an architect, but that’s a goal for the future. Continue Reading →
This story was produced in partnership with the Center for Public Integrity
When Minerva Dickson first saw her high school she thought it looked like a prison. After her first week she realized how right her initial impressions were. Every day when she arrived at the Thomas Jefferson Campus in Brownsville, Brooklyn, she waited in a line that snaked out onto Pennsylvania Avenue. She would shuffle up two steps passing beneath words from Abraham Lincoln inscribed on the neo-classical pediment: “Let Reverence for the Laws Become the Political Religion of the Nation.”
Next, she reached into her pocket for her identification card and slid it through a machine. When it recognized her, it blurted an approving beep and a green light would flash. Continue Reading →
NEW YORK — As Ara Oshagan rocked his first-born son to sleep he prepared to meet monsters. While he bounced and cooed his boy, Sebouh, to sleep to the achingly plaintive melody of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata he was the image of a doting father, but in his mind he was quietly bracing himself to meet some of what many considered to be California’s youngest and most dangerous criminals. The geo-physicist turned documentary photographer had never been behind the walls of the juvenile detention facilities that dot the outskirts of Los Angeles along the spine of Interstate 5 in the Central Valley, but the following morning he was going to take his camera, walk in, and take pictures of killers and gangsters. “I expected the worst,” he said. “The worst of the worst; The ones glaring at you in those orange jumpsuits. Continue Reading →
