Our 21 year old took a summer job in a tattoo shop. It seemed perfect at the time because he was an alternative, artistic kind of a guy. That was until the night when “Oh hell, he came home with a r…[more]

I don’t remember when I first heard of The Angolite, the only uncensored prison publication in the country. It was sometime during the late eighties. Since 1976, prisoners incarcerated at Louisiana…[more]

Got up early this morning and began my daily reflection with my cup of coffee in hand and it hit me—there is an interesting paradox about how we use the adolescent brain research. On one hand, t…[more]

Like most teachers I’ve gotten some praise from my high school students over my 26 years of teaching—a lesson “wasn’t bad,” or a particular class was “sorta interesting.” I’ve even bee…[more]

Not long ago in Georgia, a six-year-old named Salecia Johnson was handcuffed and taken from her elementary school to the local police station. The school chose to do this, instead of sending her to …[more]

A friend of mine called me last week from prison. We hadn’t spoken in a few months, so we did a lot of catching up, mostly talking about how things were at the prison, friends, and the many turns my…[more]

Bart Lubow, who has been working for more than 20 years to reduce the number of youth being sent to detention centers, told a gathering of 700 attendees at the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiati…[more]

Scott State Prison, in Milledgeville, Ga., was originally built as a hospital during the Great Depression. I was there for a few years, until it closed in 2004. One of the unique features of this plac…[more]

Living with eight men can have the flavor of living in a fraternity house – literally. There’s often an overabundance of socks left in the living room, garbage flowing from the can to the floor an…[more]

California is embarking on an ambitious and deep-rooted reform of its corrections system, an effort that has come to be know as realignment. Gov. Jerry Brown’s main aims in this undertaking is to re…[more]

 I was 18 years old when I was arrested and sent to jail. But the real hell of my life to come started on my 19th birthday, when the state shipped me off to a place called Alto, a notorious youth pri…[more]

Robotripping, dank, bath salts, spice, triple C’s, skittles, Roxies, Oxys, Xanibars, K2, if these names don’t sound familiar, the current trends in juvenile drug abuse are as surprising to you as …[more]

On March 22nd, 2012, The Lens welcomed five panelists and over 100 attendees to its third salon at the Ashe Cultural Arts Center, which focused on the status of the juvenile justice system in the N…[more]

Reading saved my life. I can only guess at how many books I read in my nearly 25 years of incarceration. I feel certain that it is easily over a thousand. For me, the longer and more detailed the book…[more]

For 10 years the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been tracking the increase in diagnoses of autism in kids. Last month, the CDC released data showing that one in 88 children in the Unit…[more]