|
April, 2013
She could tell by the way the phone rang.“I was at work. I was actually in a meeting. Something about the way the phone rang. … I said, ‘Let me get this phone call,’” Cleopatra Cowley-Pendleton recalled.She picked up the phone. What would follow was a story that became known across the nation. The call was from a friend of her daughter, Hadiya. “She was screaming and crying—and the squeals and...
|
March, 2013
It could have been Drew. That thought has been my personal preoccupation lately. I think often about my younger brother, who could have been a casualty of multiple wars—in Afghanistan, Iraq, and right at our back door—on the South Side of Chicago.Drew could be just another number, one of the 506 people killed in Chicago last year.On Dec. 31, Sgt. First Class Andrew N. Washington Jr. officially...
|
February, 2013
For the last three and a half years, Ondelee Perteet has been fighting his own body. He was shot in the jaw in September 2009, the bullet severing his spine. The doctors diagnosed him a quadriplegic and said he’d never again be able to move anything below his neck.But Perteet has been winning one small battle after another. The movement of a finger on his left hand has led to the use of that...
|
|
February, 2013
|
January, 2013
Chicago has become America's homicide leader--and by plenty.In 2012, not only did Chicago lead the nation in homicides, it witnessed nearly 100 more murders than New York City, even though the Big Apple has three times as many residents. And Chicago witnessed 215 more murders than Los Angeles--home to more than a million more people.But Chicago’s homicide epidemic is a youth homicide epidemic--...
|
November, 2012
Jemarco Baldon estaba sentado en su clase de música en la secundaria en junio tratando de no quedarse dormido durante la película Chicago cuando un guardia de seguridad le dio un toquecito en el hombro. Un oficial de la policía quería hacerle unas preguntas.“Dicen [que], ‘lo que se hace en la oscuridad, sale a la luz’”, dijo Baldon. El joven de 17 años sabía que había pasado mucho tiempo...
|
|
November, 2012
I would have preferred a direct flight. But on my vacation several weeks ago, the cheapest flight to Barcelona, Spain, required a two-day layover in Helsinki. I had never been, never wanted to go and likely never would have gone to Finland. I hate the cold. But I’m glad I did.In a world of Nordic blue-eyed blondes is a criminal justice system that the Finnish boast as having one of the three...
|
November, 2012
For a few years now, Mississippi’s juvenile justice system and the U.S. Department of Justice have been close acquaintances for all the wrong reasons.One of the first encounters came in 2002, when the justice department looked into two of the state’s facilities for holding juvenile offenders—the Columbia Training School and the Oakley Training School—and discovered harmful conditions, such as...
|
November, 2012
Jemarco Baldon was sitting in his high school music class in June trying not to doze off during the movie Chicago when a security guard tapped him on the shoulder. A police officer wanted to ask him a few questions.“They say, ‘What’s done in the dark comes to light,’” Baldon said. The 17-year-old knew that he’d spent too much time shooting dice and hustling drugs. Even after he got a job at a...
|
