Fairness and Justice

BY MARYROSE MAZZOLA “Two police officers, a court advocate, and a social worker walk into a room,” might sound like the beginning of a bad joke, but in Edinburgh, Scotland, it’s a new policy norm. This is what’s known as a MARAC (Multi-Agency Risk Assessment Committee) meeting. Here, up to a dozen domestic abuse service […]

BY VIRIDIANA RIOS, PH.D While the emergence of civilian self-defense groups in Mexico has gained the most attention as a strategy to fight drug cartels, the most profound change in that country’s security strategy has largely passed unnoticed. Early on 2014, Mexico approved an entirely new national code of judicial procedures that will transform the […]

BY RORY GERBERG As a female graduate student at the Kennedy School, I use Boston’s public transportation system. Last Wednesday, I wore a skirt. You might ask, was it long or short, loose or tight? Would my answer impact my rights? I consented to wearing an article of clothing and to boarding a bus, not […]

Latinos voted for Barack Obama in throngs in 2008. The landslide turnout of Latino voters was due in large part to the promise of comprehensive immigration reform. I was among those Latinos. Many of us knew that change would not come easily, but we did not expect the plight of immigrants to actually worsen—as it has under the radical expansion of the federal program Secure Communities

“I urge you to be more innovative. When it comes to emerging threats such as cyber- crime, environmental crime, and counterfeiting, we must stay one step ahead of the criminals,” affirmed Ban Ki-moon, secretary-general of the United Nations, in a speech read by a representative at the Twelfth United Nations Congress on Crime Prevention and […]

In May 2012, eleven students of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University visited El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, as part of a Leadership Service Seminar (LSS) program sponsored by the Center for Public Leadership and the offices of the Academic Dean and the Dean of Students.

Shifting global demographics continue to produce political discourses on immigration. In the United States, history continues to repeat itself through the forged rhetorical relationship between individuals who speak English and individuals who are considered “American.” As the debate over immigration reform intensifies, so do efforts to regulate/restrict all languages deemed “foreign.” In Arizona, both officeholders and seekers who do not read, write, speak and understand English “sufficiently well” risk having their candidacy revoked. This was the case with former city-council candidate in the southern Arizona border city of San Luis, Alejandrina Cabrera. This essay argues that the political history of Arizona, as it pertains to matters of an English-only society, has historically operated within the restricted parameters of a paranoid style whereby the Cabrera case illustrates its modern metamorphosis.

BY MARK DLUGASH It was described as a fortress: a “brand new, state of the art, top-security prison.” Fortified by inner and outer perimeters, topped with razor wires, and circumscribed by a huge fence, it was protected by a hair-trigger alarm system and omnipresent security cameras. It was built not outside of Washington, DC, or […]

BY MARK DIAZ TRUMAN I heard about the Connecticut shooting early in the day, but the full effect of it didn’t hit me until I got home late on Friday night. It was too much to process, too close to the Oregon shooting on Tuesday that left two dead and one wounded at a Happy […]

BY CASEY SCHUTTE The law does not trust them to vote. It forbids them from watching certain movies in the theater or signing up for a credit card on their own. Consuming alcohol is certainly off limits, as is smoking cigarettes. Society proscribes certain activities for these people because, the thinking goes, they lack the […]