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President Obama 'banned the box.' What it means and why you should care.

By 'banning the box,' he's setting a strong example the rest of the nation should follow.

Earlier today, President Obama issued an executive order "banning the box" for federal government employees.

What does this mean? Well, you know how on job applications, there's sometimes a little box that asks whether or not you've been convicted of a crime? With the wave of a pen, Obama just ordered that box to be removed from applications for jobs within the federal government, saying, "We can't dismiss people out of hand simply because of a mistake they made in the past."


From today's address in Newark, N.J. GIF from The White House.

Why? Here's how MSNBC's Ari Melber explains it:

"While the rule was once seen as a common sense way for employers to screen for criminal backgrounds, it has been increasingly criticized as a hurdle that fosters employment discrimination against former inmates, regardless of the severity of their offense or how long ago it occurred."

The president's move follows a 2012 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission recommendation as to how arrests and convictions should be treated under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In July 2015, President Obama visited the El Reno Federal Correctional Institution in Oklahoma, making him the first sitting president to visit a federal prison. Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images.

Within the first year after their release from prison, 60% to 75% of individuals are unable to find work.

If the goal of prison — if there must be one — is to rehabilitate and reintegrate offenders back into society, "banning the box" helps accomplish that. If employers are able to quickly exclude anyone who has ever been convicted of a crime from the job pool, those with criminal records become significantly less likely (nearly 50%, according to one study) to receive an interview or job offer, and it becomes much tougher for ex-offenders to land employment.

Job-seekers attend a California job expo in 2008, when unemployment was on the rise. Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.

We spend $80 billion a year on incarceration.

When people are unable to find a job, they're more likely to find a source of income outside the law. And that puts us right back on square one, with these same individuals back in prison. No one wants that.

And even if this doesn't appeal to you on a humanitarian level, how about in terms of taking a look at how our tax dollars are spent? The truth is that it's really expensive to keep people locked up. We should be taking every step we can to ensure that people have every available opportunity to reintegrate into society upon release, and yes, that includes eliminating barriers that prevent applications from being seen.

A protester at a 2013 rally near the White House holds a sign urging the president to take action on criminal justice reform and end the War on Drugs. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images.

19 states have banned the box for public sector jobs; 7 states have banned it in all hiring.

California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Virginia make up the states where jobs for state employees cannot ask about criminal histories on applications. Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oregon, and Rhode Island have eliminated the box for private employers.

On Oct. 26, 2015, more than 130,000 signatures were delivered to the White House asking the president to issue an executive order banning the box. Photo by Larry French/Getty Images for ColorOfChange.org.

Banning the box is just part of the president's plan for criminal justice reform push.

The president is also calling on Congress to pass the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2015, which would address mandatory minimum sentences, the use of solitary confinement, and development of a system to assess the risk level of prisoners. The bill currently rests with the Senate Judiciary Committee.

In today's announcement, however, the president unveiled the creation of Department of Education adult re-entry education grants, new guidelines from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, increased training and education opportunities for people with criminal records, the creation of a "National Clean Slate Clearinghouse" for ex-offenders, and a number of other new reform initiatives.

Watch President Obama's comments about today's executive order below.

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We're one of the only countries where new mothers don't get paid time off. John Oliver looks at why.

"Paid maternity leave is a bit like having hockey on in the background at a bar. It's not hurting anyone, and a couple of people are actually really into it."

In his latest in a long line of epic segments, John Oliver made the case for paid family leave on "Last Week Tonight."

The whole thing is worth watching, but if you don't have the 12 minutes to do so, I've recapped it below.

The United States is one of very few countries in the world without any form of paid time off for new mothers.

Here in the U.S., new mothers are not guaranteed any paid time off after giving birth. However, they are able to take unpaid time off. While that's better than nothing, not all mothers can afford to forgo a paycheck, especially with a newborn.

As part of the Family and Medical Leave Act, employees can take that unpaid time off — if they meet some rather restrictive criteria.

FMLA only applies to people who have worked for the same employer for 12 months, have logged at least 1,250 hours in the past year (an average of at least 24 hours per week), and work for a company with more than 50 employees within 75 miles of the worker's location.

Also, this doesn't apply to contractors, freelancers, or employees at small businesses (fewer than 50 workers).

In 2013, NPR reported that this leaves roughly 40% of the workforce without even FMLA coverage.

Family leave is important to fathers, too. Sadly, the idea that women take care of the children while men work has made the prospect of paternity leave a challenge.

Because, you know, in some families, both parents work. In others, the mother works while the father stays home. Or it's a family with two mothers. Or a family with two fathers. Or ... well, you get the picture.

Society's one-size-fits-all, old-school approach to parenting just doesn't cut it anymore.

As an example of what happens when a father dares to take leave from work to be with his newborn child, Oliver pointed to Daniel Murphy of the New York Mets.

At the very start of the 2014 season, Murphy's wife went into labor with the couple's first child, their son Noah. Like most loving husbands and fathers, Murphy wanted to be there. To do this, he had to miss the first two games of the season (out of 162, mind you).


Daniel Murphy giving up two games of 162 doesn't seem like asking too much. Photo by Rob Foldy/Getty Images.

Critics came out in full force to criticize Murphy, including former NFL quarterback Boomer Esiason and radio talk show host Mike Francesca.

Murphy handled it as well as could be expected. He even spoke at the White House Working Families Summit.

"When Noah asks me one day, 'What happened? What was it like when I was born?' I could have answered 'Well, [Washington Nationals pitcher] Stephen Strasburg hung me a breaking ball that day, son, and I slammed it into the right-field corner.' But I think it's going to go so much further in that I'm the one who cut his umbilical cord. And long after they tell me that I'm not good enough to play professional baseball anymore, I'll be a father. And I'll be a husband. So that was a reason on the front end that I wanted to be there for my wife and for my son." — Daniel Murphy

But let's get down to the real question: Why do we have such a flawed system? Simply put: lobbyists and legislators.

Oliver broke it down, showing what debates on the floor of the House of Representatives looked like in 1993 as FMLA was being discussed.

Now mind you, this was just to get the current, restrictive, 12 weeks of unpaid leave system in place. We haven't even touched on paid leave.

Did FMLA destroy the American economy as Reps. Ewing, Pryce, and DeLay predicted? No.

Other things may have but not FMLA.

What happens to the economy when we actually take it to the next level — paid leave? Pretty much nothing.

Like the FMLA, a California law offering partial paid leave managed to not destroy the state's economy.

Oliver sums it up best, pointing out the hypocrisy of being overtly, publicly "pro-mom" but then folding when it matters most.

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When heroin users overdose, their friends and family can keep them from dying. Here's how.

Baltimore's streets are a little less deadly because of this program.

True
Open Society Foundations

Deaths from heroin overdose rose to over 8,000 in 2013, the last year with accurate statistics. Some call it a national plague, but the real shame is that it's preventable in most cases simply by providing heroin users and their friends and family with a simple way to bring an overdosed user back to a living, breathing human being.

I know there are people who would rather drug users just go away and stop being a drain on public resources. But guess what? It's not that easy. Whatever their life circumstances were that brought them to this point, they deserve a chance to get into a recovery program and make it out alive.

Fox News 45 in Baltimore made a video about a great example of a city being forward-thinking and preventing overdoses, giving people a chance to fight their way out of addiction. Isn't that the humane thing to do?

I hope I see the day when programs like this are in every major U.S. city and some suburbs and rural areas.

Here's how it works:

They provide needle exchanges to reduce the transmission of HIV, hepatitis, and other diseases. But they also do something pretty marvelous. They train people how to use the generic form of Narcan to save the lives of people who are overdosing on heroin.

The woman who is trying to stay off heroin? She's saved the lives of five people in three years using this method. That's remarkable.

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This Tumblr user perfectly explained why a Minneapolis food bank's new strategy is so important.

A Minneapolis food bank teamed up with the local law enforcement in a program designed to help hungry people find food.

As we all know, food banks are one of the main ways communities fight hunger. But recently, Minnesota food bank Matter started doing something special.

The food bank is teaming up with the Hennepin County Sheriff's Office (encompassing Minneapolis) to help distribute food.

Officers will keep boxes with nutritious food in their cars, and if they come across someone in need over the course of their patrol, they'll be able to provide them with things like raisins, oatmeal, granola bars, and canned vegetables.

There are a lot of people in Minnesota who will benefit from this:

Based on data put out by Feeding America, with a population of more than 5.4 million in Minnesota, there are hundreds of thousands of hungry residents.

As an added bonus, the program will give the police a chance to develop a relationship with members of the community.

"There's no doubt in my mind that we will come across a number of those who are less fortunate, maybe even homeless. This will allow the deputies to build a little rapport, reach out to them, [offer] a healthy alternative to what they might be doing." — Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek, in an interview with Minnesota Public Radio


Some folks have pointed out that small-scale assistance won't put an end to the bigger problems that cause hunger and poverty.

Recently one of my co-workers shared a story of a restaurant owner who put a sign on her door offering a meal to the person she knew was digging through the trash at night looking for leftover food. While the story garnered many positive comments, we were surprised to see how many people (both on our post and on similar stories elsewhere on the Internet) commented saying that these case-by-case examples, whether it's cops handing out granola bars or restaurant owners offering a free meal, aren't doing enough to solve those long-term problems.

It's no secret that, for many homeless people, finding food is a daily struggle.

What's maybe not so obvious is that for many folks, even if they do manage to find food reliably, it can be as big a curse as it is a blessing.

One Tumblr user, who agreed to let me share his story here, responded to those criticisms and offered up some insight on what it's like being homeless and hungry:

It reads (emphasis added):

"When I was homeless, I was so constipated all the time — [a] combo of limited access to restrooms and living on one meal a day from the back door of the pizza place... but you can only live on stale pepperoni deep dish for so long before your guts start to rebel. And that was when i was — what, 19? 20? It's gotta be so much worse for older people, and not everyone's got such a nice restaurant to mooch off of. Eating actual trash will f*ck your stomach up like whoa. You never know how painful gas can be until you eat something that was a little farther past the sell-by date than you thought it was, it turns your stomach into a chemical refinery, and the nearest open public restroom is a mile away."

"Handing out raisins and oatmeal looks, at first glance, like one of those officious 'spend your food stamps on lettuce' clusterf*cks that middle-class people are always perpetrating because they've never been in the shoes of the people they're trying to 'improve'. But actually, it's a great idea, and this is gonna make a lot of people a little healthier in immediate, tangible ways. We're not talking some vague probability-of-heart-disease-in-20-years stuff. We're talking standing a little straighter and breathing a little easier the very next day."

— jumpingjacktrash.tumblr.com



When it comes to solving problems as big as poverty and hunger, we can't just focus on the big picture and we can't just focus on the small-scale stuff. It's only through a combination of both approaches that we'll ever find a way to make things better.

In the meantime, I think the partnership between Matter and the Minneapolis-area sheriff is a fantastic and unique approach that has a lot of benefits for individuals AND for the community, and I hope we see more cities using this as an example soon.

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