Rates of reported child abuse are disproportionately high for black children, a fact that has long been linked to suspected racial bias by a largely white child-protection workforce. But a recently released study by Washington University researchers debunks that allegation, citing poverty as the main reason black children are twice as likely as white children…

The current standoff between William L. Pollard, the president of Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, N.Y., and a one-of-its-kind criminal justice think tank run on that campus by ex-prisoners with doctorates is emblematic of what researchers say is a widespread ambivalence over how to help the formerly incarcerated re-enter society. For almost six years Medgar…

Updated on June 6, 2010. More than two decades after the fact, William David Minor learned what Selma, Ala., prosecutors had concocted to eliminate him as a juror in the 1986 trial of a black man charged with murder. “They said my father was guilty of illegal activity, selling corn whiskey, and that my uncle…

If courtship in college is a kind of laboratory and apprenticeship for getting hitched somewhere down the road, senior psychology major Tiffany Mattaway knows of few who are making the grade. ”Hmmmm. Meaningful relationships? There aren’t that many on this campus. I know of exactly two,” says Philadelphia native Mattaway, set to graduate from Hampton…

Word came last October that the federal government had earmarked more than half the required financing to hook up 10 homes on a Mississippi back road to the municipal water system in the city of Ruleville, six minutes away by car. As lead hell-raiser in the 7-year-old battle to get potable water piped to his…