Problems viewing this email? View it in your web browser.

Friday, June 12, 2020

A Hidden Change in the CARES Act Undermines Privacy for Addiction Patients
By Elizabeth Brico
The stimulus package made it a lot easier to access people’s addiction treatment history.

The Criminal Justice System Should Be Trying to Trying to Put Itself Out of Business
By Marlon Peterson
In Case You Missed It: We spend $270 billion annually on the criminal justice system. It doesn't make us safer.

Congress Must Strengthen SNAP To Support Essential Workers During the Coronavirus Crisis
By Areeba Haider
From our partner, the Center for American Progress: Essential workers are nearly twice as likely to use SNAP as everyone else.

American Plague, feat. Jamil Smith
Rebecca talks to Jamil Smith about his latest column for Rolling Stone, “American Plague”; the George Floyd protests; the movement to end policing as we know it; this moment as a reminder of why we need more diversity in the media; and more.

Listen Online

Subscribe on iTunes

What We’re Reading

Inside and Out. Ferguson activist Joshua Williams is serving eight years for taking a bag of chips and setting a trash can on fire. Makeda Davis spent seven years in prison and is having a rocky adjustment to life on the outside. For those on parole, GPS monitoring costs hundreds of dollars a month and is extremely buggy.

End of the (Blue) Line? Americans are engaged in a complicated conversation about the future of policing, with defunding proposals gaining traction in some cities. Atlanta’s mayor just asked for another $13 million in the police budget, even as four officers were just fired for excessive force. As protests over the death of George Floyd continue, a read on Minnesota’s history of police violence.

Living While Black. The pandemic has not been kind to LGBTQ bars, especially those owned by the BIPOC community, and New York is losing yet another safe gathering space. Your home isn’t always safer: Black journalists and activists are speaking out about surveillance by law enforcement. Commentator Rich Benjamin is experiencing déjà vu as he watches racial inequalities play out yet again.

Stranger Fruit

Black photographer Jon Henry’s haunting Stranger Fruit photographs Black mothers with and without their children, putting “the senseless murders of Black men across the nation by police violence” into an intensely emotional context. As George Floyd reminded us, each of these dead children had a momma, and every Black mother lives in fear of losing her child. You can see more of Henry’s work on Instagram.

Interested in writing for TalkPoverty.org?
Send us an email and let’s talk.

TalkPoverty.org is a project of

Did someone forward this to you?
Subscribe to Talkpoverty to get these stories every week.

This email was sent to [email protected].