public health
April 20, 2020 -
With the COVID-19 pandemic raging through correctional facilities, many states have ordered the release of nonviolent offenders in local jails or prison inmates at greater risk from the virus. But states in the Deep South have been slow to act. Meanwhile, Louisiana is moving its COVID-19-stricken prisoners to the notorious Angola penitentiary — an hour's drive from a hospital with a ventilator.
April 7, 2020 -
Southern states are among those with the nation's highest rates of homelessness. Some places in the region are taking targeted action to protect the unhoused, who are particularly vulnerable to the novel coronavirus.
March 27, 2020 -
As the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic begins making its way into crowded U.S. jails, prisons, and detention centers, prison reform advocates are calling on officials to take action to protect the vulnerable.
March 17, 2017 -
The GOP plan to scrap the Affordable Care Act includes a provision barring the nation's leading reproductive health services provider from taking Medicaid payments. That would take an especially heavy toll in the South, which already suffers the nation's highest rates of sexually transmitted diseases, unintended pregnancies and poverty.
May 19, 2014 -
Legislation to open the state to oil and gas drilling would impose prison time for unauthorized individuals to disclose chemicals in fracking fluids that the industry wants kept secret. At the same time, it fails to address some of fracking's most serious environmental and public health risks.
November 15, 2013 -
Hotter days, rising seas, more diarrhea: An extensive new scientific report released this week outlines what the Southeast can expect over the next century due to climate change.