Girls usually enter the criminal justice system after abuse
After being kicked out of her house and expelled from school, a 16-year-old girl, Mea, learns to survive on her own.
Author: Andrea Hagan
The fields confessed
A federal judge agreed that Angola works men into the ground in unconstitutional heat. Then he said he could not make it stop. “The fields did not change,” writes Andrea Hagan. “The law that was supposed to govern them did.”
The fields have a stadium now
The NAACP should help top Black student athletes forgo SEC money and honor the NAACP voting-rights boycott — without having to take a back seat.
The fields are still there: red beans and resistance
My mother has been saying it my whole life. Fifty-one years of hearing it. And on May 16, 2026, the same day she passed away and left me with the torch to continue this work, 800,000 people proved she was not just warning us.
The boy in the video, the boy in the mugshot: Louisiana met Markel Lee twice
A Baton Rouge teenager once appeared on camera as proof that violence prevention could work. Two years later, he is charged in a shooting that killed 17-year-old Martha Odom. Their stories are not separate tragedies. They are connected by the same policy choices, budget cuts and abandoned promises that leave one child dead and another held by a system that failed to hold him sooner.
90% of Louisiana foster youth face re-victimization. One senator believes that the state could do better by abolishing DCFS altogether.
Louisiana's child welfare system was built to protect children. For Black girls, it has become another door into the pipeline.
The classroom as first courtroom: Jada’s story
Jada and other Black girls often take the first steps toward the delinquency pipeline in the schoolroom, where teachers too often misread curiosity as sassiness—or as Louisiana law describes it, "willful disobedience."
The girlhood to prison pipeline: how Louisiana policy fails Black girls
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.
