Why Youthful Indiscretions Shouldn’t Result in Jail Sentences, How to Save Babies Born with Opioid Addictions and More

 
A Prosecutor’s Vision For A Better Justice System, TED
Adam Foss, a prosecutor with the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office in Boston, recently asked a group of TED participants how many had ever drank underage, tried an illegal drug, shoplifted or gotten into a physical fight. While viewed by most as youthful indiscretions, these same offenses often land black and brown youth in criminal court, viewed as being dangerous to society. Which is why Foss is using prosecutorial discretion to dismiss minor cases that aren’t worthy of a criminal record.
Tiny Opioid Patients Need Help Easing Into Life, Kaiser Health News and NPR
In this country, addiction to heroin and prescription painkillers like hydrocodone, oxycodone or morphine continues to rise, even afflicting new moms. During pregnancy, these mothers must decide between getting clean and risking a miscarriage or delivering a baby that’s likely to experience drug withdrawal. With about 21,000 infants suffering from withdrawal each year, doctors in Rhode Island, nurses in Connecticut, researchers in Pennsylvania and public health officials in Ohio are all working on solutions to help these new families.

Website Seeks to Make Government Data Easier to Sift Through, New York Times
Just because the government releases endless pages of data to the public doesn’t mean it’s easy to turn those statistics into something that you can actually comprehend and use. DataUSA, an open source brainchild coming from the M.I.T. Media Lab, organizes and visualizes the information, presenting it in charts, graphs and written synopses. Thanks to this project, instead of just hearing a statistic of how many people in Flint, Mich., live in poverty, for example,  you can see it visually represented on a map.

Shaka Senghor Doesn’t Let Mistakes Define Him

Shaka Senghor is a motivational speaker, a Director’s Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab and the author of six books. At age 19, however, he shot and killed a man.
“I was a young drug dealer with a quick temper and a semi-automatic pistol,” he reveals during a TED Talk in March.

Twenty-three years ago, that was Senghor’s story. With the support of his family, mentors, literature and a newfound passion for writing, Senghor changed his narrative.

His story begins like any other American child growing up. He was a scholarship student on the honor roll with aspirations of becoming a doctor. But his parents’ separation and divorce affected his upbringing, leading him to spiral down a dark path.

As a 17-year-old drug dealer working the corner on the streets of Detroit, Senghor was shot three times. A brief trip to the hospital led him directly back to the neighborhood with a bitter outlook.

“Throughout this ordeal, no one hugged me, no one counseled me, no one told me I would be okay,” he recalls. “No one told me that I would live in fear, that I would become paranoid, or that I would react hyper-violently to being shot. No one told me that one day, I would become the person behind the trigger.”

Violence is a vicious cycle, and for criminals it’s exacerbated by an incarceration system that perpetuates recidivism rather than affording inmates opportunities to turn their lives around.

“…the majority of men and women who are incarcerated are redeemable, and the fact is, 90 percent of the men and women who are incarcerated will at some point return to the community,” Senghor notes, “and we have a role in determining what kind of men and women return to our community.”

Hostility over his situation led Senghor to continue his criminal activities behind prison walls, ultimately landing him in solitary confinement for seven and a half years. But one day, Senghor received a letter from his son, which read, ‘”My mama told me why you was in prison: murder. Dad, don’t kill. Jesus watches what you do. Pray to Him.”
The sobering realization that his son identified him as a murderer forced introspection, and for Senghor to finally confront his actions. With guidance from mentors he met inside prison, delving into texts by inspirational authors like Malcolm X, unwavering support from his family and a penchant for journaling, Senghor was afforded an opportunity to leave behind his troubled past.
In the four short years since his release, that checkered history has been replaced with a bright future.
Among his other achievements, Senghor is a 2014 W.K. Kellogg Community Leadership Network Fellow, teaches at the University of Michigan and serves as a national spokesperson for Black Male Engagement (BMe), a network of black males engaged in their communities.
His personal transformation, he adds, was possible because of three components: acknowledgement of hurting himself and others, apologizing to those he hurt and atonement for his actions. For Senghor, atoning helps at-risk youth and former inmates transform their lives.

“Anybody can have a transformation if we create the space for that to happen,” he says. “So what I’m asking today is that you envision a world where men and women aren’t held hostage to their pasts, where misdeeds and mistakes don’t define you for the rest of your life.”

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MORE: How a Second Chance Can Benefit Prisoners and Taxpayers
 

Meet the Engineer Who Got a Boston Marathon Bombing Survivor Dancing Again

Adrianne Haslet-Davis, a professional ballroom dancer, suffered a devastating and potentially career-ending injury in the Boston Marathon bombing. Haslet-Davis and her husband, Adam Davis, a U.S. airman, were on the sidelines watching the marathon when the bomb went off. “We sat up and I said, ‘Wait, my foot hurts,’” Haslet-Davis recalled to ABC News a week after the tragedy. The blast from the bomb had torn off her left foot, and as a result, her leg needed to be amputated at mid-calf.

Despite the devastating loss, Haslet-Davis, a ballroom instructor at Boston’s Arthur Murray Studios, was determined to dance again. And last week, less than a year after the tragic bombing, she did.

During a TED2014 Talk by Hugh Herr, director of the Biomechatronics Group at the MIT Media Lab, Haslet-Davis was invited on stage, along with her dance partner Christian Lightner. She wore a short, white, flowing dress, but her best accessory was her new, state-of-the-art bionic limb designed and created especially for her by MIT researchers.

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Haslet-Davis and Lightner performed an intricate rumba to the tune of Enrique Iglesias’s “Ring My Bells.” She moved perfectly, unhindered by her prosthetic. And that was the point. Herr — a double-amputee himself — met Haslet-Davis at a Boston rehab hospital and immediately wanted to use his knowledge of prosthetics to build her a bionic limb. For 200 days, Herr’s team studied the dynamics of dance and tweaked the prosthetic so that it would move seamlessly during performance. ““Bionics are not only about making people stronger and faster,” he said. “Our expression, our humanity can be embedded into our electromechanics.”

Herr lost both of his legs after getting frostbite during a rock climbing accident in 1982, but even then, he didn’t view his body as broken. “I thought: Technology is broken. Technology is inadequate,” he said. “This simple but powerful idea was a call to arms to advance technology to the elimination of my own disability, and ultimately the disabilities of others.”

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Through his work at the Center for Extreme Bionics at the MIT Media Lab, Herr and his team have developed prosthetics that allowed him to return to rock climbing. He boasts that he’s even better at it now than he was before. They’ve focused on addressing three areas of improvement: mechanical, dynamic and electrical. They’ve reengineered how prosthetics attach to the body, how to make them “move like flesh and bone”, and how to connect them to the nervous system. The result has been the most innovative prosthetics out there. Now, Herr’s greatest challenge is getting his creations to the masses — and at an affordable cost.

“The basic levels of physiological function should be part of basic human rights,” Herr said. “It’s not well appreciated, but over half the world’s population suffers from some kind of cognitive, emotional, sensory or motor condition. Every person should have the right to live without disability, if they choose to.”

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