Portside

Our schools should teach dissent. Indeed, a flourishing democracy depends on an informed and active citizenry who will speak out when they find laws to be unjust.

Today, only a third of all prisons provide ways for incarcerated people to continue their educations beyond high school.

Congress created compassionate release as a way to free certain inmates, such as the terminally ill, when it becomes “inequitable” to keep them in prison any longer. Despite urging from lawmakers of both parties, officials deny or delay the vast majority of requests.

Let's put Black, women of color, Indigenous, anti-capitalist and queer-centered feminist politics at the heart of the overall struggle for justice in the coming year. What could that look like?

This review focuses on a riveting novel about an African American couple caught up in the criminal justice system.

How does our epoch of political polarization compare to the decade that was rent over the issue of slavery before the Civil War? Historical analogies can be misleading, but the controversies that bedeviled that age still haunt us. In certain ways, they foreshadow our own divided house.

The Redskins' Name -- Catching Racism. Johnny Cash -- Hurt. Forward 13: Waking Up the American Dream. Emma Watson at United Nations: This Is Feminism. John Oliver: Miss America Pageant.