Tobias Winright’s first exposure to the life of a police officer came from a somewhat unlikely source: his mother. After his parents divorced when he was 10...
Restorative justice
Bobby Garcia still remembers walking into prison carrying the bedroll and hygiene kit that the state of California had issued him. It was 1993. The 17-year-old...
By J. Peter Nixon This article appeared in the March 2005 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 70, No. 3, pages 24-28). He was six feet tall, with a blond crew cut and...
The shooting of Walter Scott by South Carolina police officer Michael Slager is one event in an ongoing string of police shootings that have dominated...
In 2007 New Jersey became the first state to abolish the death penalty since it was reinstated in 1976, joining 12 other states that never reintroduced the...
In 1982, Sister Helen Prejean began a correspondence with two death row inmates in her home state of Louisiana. She eventually became the spiritual adviser to...
The death penalty is still legal in most states, but little by little, the laws that allow executions are being chipped away. Leroy Wright was forced to endure...
We need to weed through the pros and cons of marijuana use before rushing into a decision on its legalization. Sounding Boards are one person’s take on a...
Each year on Good Friday we listen to the account of the events surrounding Jesus’ death: the trial, the boisterous crowd, the journey to Golgotha. The...
One woman’s experience of incarceration exposed her to many of the issues emblematic of our country’s problems with prisons. Jenny Wagner is a former heroin...