Read that again. This Louisiana bill forces homeless people to choose between jail and "treatment"—and if they can't pay for the latter, they will be forced to perform unpaid labor.
The historical precedents are clear: convict leasing, Black Codes, debtor's prison.
#TheLensNola🔍 In ‘deeply troubling’ move, senators pass three bills, cutting Duncan’s Orleans clerk position along with 11 New Orleans judges.
✍ Bernard Smith
Full story 🔗: buff.ly/auu8xQK
#calvinduncan #senate #judges
For #LongCovid Awareness Day, we’re releasing the 2026 Long Covid Fact Sheet! This is a list of key statistics about LC, using recent data to reflect contemporary risks.
We hope this will be useful for journalists, policymakers, patients, & others! /1
Deadly Divide will be out next month and you can now pre-order it from UNC press using this 30% off discount code: 01SOCIAL30
"We designed the document to be a guided conversation starter for people with Long COVID & their clinicians...while we wait for the results of clinical trials."
New op-ed on the PLRC/RTHM treatment guide from @leticiasaurus.bsky.social & @jencurtinmd.bsky.social.
thesicktimes.org/2026/03/12/a...
Six years ago WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Despite tens of millions of deaths, the world has not sufficiently addressed the ongoing impacts of COVID-19, and we are more vulnerable to future pandemics due to anti-science officials leading government agencies around the world.
#OPINION The state of Louisiana is building a long-needed door for women leaving prison. But for girls leaving childhood detention, there is no threshold, much less a door.
✍ Andrea Hagan
Read full story🗞: buff.ly/NYJnOnU
#girlhood #prison #blackgirls #TheLensNola🔍 #louisiana
I don’t know whether you know this but my book is Open Access and you can read it for free on your kindle via Amazon (where it is the number one health policy download!). Also totally open access with extra resources online at jimcrowintheasylum.com
Psychiatric hospitals — increasingly owned by for-profit corporations — are illegally turning away patients during crises.
Yet only a handful face penalties, with fines that are trivial, a ProPublica investigation found.
(Published Sept. 2025)
Infographic that says: 80% of women in jails are mothers, and most are the primary or sole caretakers of young children. Source: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2023/10/24/ten-statistics/
80% of women in jails are mothers, and most of them are primary caretakers of their children.
Mass incarceration has a ripple effect, causing trauma that can last generations within a single family.
Sonny Burton is set to be executed by the state of Alabama on Thursday. There is a direct line between a government that murders its own citizens and the devaluing of life abroad. The sin has always started at home.
Learned recently that Guenter Risse died in Seattle a few weeks ago aged 93. A fine historian of medicine, he could be strongly opinionated. But he was good to me. His commitment to medical history stayed strong. When I took over from him at UCSF he'd have been my age now - how senior he seemed!
UNC Press has posted a preview of my forthcoming book on Book2Look. The Intro, Chapter 1, and part of Chapter 2 are available to view for free.
www.book2look.com/book/WnSk18n...
Deeply saddened to learn of Kevin Mumford's death. His 2011 Journal of American Hist. article, "The Trouble with Gay Rights: Race and the Politics of Sexual Orientation in Philadelphia, 1969–1982," helped inspire me to become a historian of race and sexuality. 🗃️ history.illinois.edu/news/2026-02...
Come for the problems, stay for the solutions! @veritenews.org has a story out today about how the city of New Orleans can reduce the level of toxic heavy metal that its residents are exposed to. veritenews.org/2026/02/25/h...
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Gov. Jeff Landry's proposed budget for juvenile justice is $226.6m, almost double what the agency received 7 years ago in 2018/19.
Spending grew under Landry and former Gov. John Bel Edwards, as youth prison populations grow. #lalege
lailluminator.com/2026/02/24/l...
Two months before Calvin Alexander’s parole hearing date, he was told he was no longer eligible.
Why? An algorithm had deemed the nearly blind 70-year-old, who uses a wheelchair, a “moderate risk,” barring him from speaking to the parole board.
(Published April 2025 w/ @veritenews.org)
The online link is here, folks:
www.nola.com/gambit/news/...
Half of all Americans die in hospice care. Easy money and a lack of regulation transformed a crusade to provide death with dignity into an industry rife with fraud and exploitation.
(Published 2022)
HUD wants to displace some 300 elderly and disabled residents from the Guste development in Central City www.nola.com/news/politic...
A judge ruled that groups representing residents of Louisiana’s Cancer Alley can proceed with their landmark lawsuit seeking a pause on toxic industrial plants in two majority‑Black districts
Someone has sure already made this observation but the fact they can convert all those empty warehouses into prison camps means they could have converted them into housing, community centers, job training centers or, hell, libraries or schools all along. It’s always a matter of will not resources.
Book cover for "Starved for Light: The Long Shadow of Rickets and Vitamin D Deficiency" by Christian Warren. Sepia toned photo of children in a bleak dirt-covered space behind a tenement.
Hey, health history readers. Looking for history of rickets that "offers many surprising and valuable insights*," but don't want to pay full pop? Well, @uchicagopress.bsky.social is deeply discounting"Starved for Light" and many other titles. press.uchicago.edu/resource/Sal...
*Lancet
Imperial College London will study 500 people to uncover immune system links between ME and Long Covid.
An estimated 1.3 million in the UK are affected, many children.
Families hope this £1.1m research offers answers where none exist.
www.bbc.com/news/article...
After Exposing Prison Horrors, Incarcerated Whistleblowers Are Moved to Solitary. Story via @theappeal.org.
Mayor Mamdani names criminal justice reformer Stanley Richards as NYC’s new Department of Correction commissioner
Richards is the first formerly incarcerated person to lead the city’s jails system
@gothamist.com @wnyc.org
gothamist.com/news/mamdani...
Despite all the headlines about Denmark, Greenland is governed by Indigenous people. The population is 90% Inuit who have never stopped fighting for their sovereignty. Through a voter referendum, they took over their courts, natural resources, police and language in 2009.
