Sandy Hook

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There’s a stretch of road in Newtown, Connecticut, 524 paces long. It leads from the official town Christmas tree at the corner of Riverside Drive and Washington Avenue up a hill and down again to a soft bend in the road at Dickinson Court where a sign hangs from a wooden post decorated with curling back wrought-ironwork that reads:
Sandy Hook School
1956
Visitors Welcome
There, next to a staging area for emergency workers and police investigators, sits a sprawling memorial to the 20 children shot and killed by a young man who was barely an adult himself. Law enforcement officials are still piecing together what happened that morning, but for now they say that Adam Lanza, 20, after killing his mother and armed with an assault rifle and some handguns shot and his way into the Sandy Hook School. He killed six staff, 20 children, and then himself. What used to be a nondescript road that connected the struggling heart of this small central Connecticut town to a municipal building has been transformed into an almost sacred path divided by a long line of orange emergency cones.

Sandy Hook

By |

There’s a stretch of road in Newtown, Connecticut, 524 paces long. It leads from the official town Christmas tree at the corner of Riverside Drive and Washington Avenue up a hill and down again to a soft bend in the road at Dickinson Court where a sign hangs from a wooden post decorated with curling back wrought-ironwork that reads:
Sandy Hook School
1956
Visitors Welcome
There, next to a staging area for emergency workers and police investigators, sits a sprawling memorial to the 20 children shot and killed by a young man who was barely an adult himself. Law enforcement officials are still piecing together what happened that morning, but for now they say that Adam Lanza, 20, after killing his mother and armed with an assault rifle and some handguns shot and his way into the Sandy Hook School. He killed six staff, 20 children, and then himself. What used to be a nondescript road that connected the struggling heart of this small central Connecticut town to a municipal building has been transformed into an almost sacred path divided by a long line of orange emergency cones.

Perps or Pupils? Safety Policy Creates Prisonlike New York City Schools

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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.

Exhibit Examines the Lives of Former Foster Children

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Richard Wilkerson needs two hands to count the number of families he had as a boy. On a recent, unusually temperate summer morning, Wilkerson, 28, sat at a picnic table in the courtyard of the Long Island Children’s Museum and counted them off. All around him children scampered and squealed, shepherded around by attentive parents and summer camp counselors. There were his grandparents and the long trips from Hollis, Queens to upstate New York when he would stare out the bus window, a city kid dazzled by all that space, on his way to visit his mother in prison. Years later, there was a stint with his mother after she was released that involved a trip to a crack house that ended abruptly when he tripped on an uneven plank in the floor and was sent home bleeding.

Snapshots From the Inside, A Powerful Photo Exhibit Explores the Cruelty of Juvenile and Adult Detention

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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.