It’s nearly impossible to say how many homeless people there are in New Hampshire. And the biggest reason is that most people without a home in this state aren’t on the street or in shelters—they actually have a roof over their heads.
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Drive the highway between Manchester and Concord, and maybe you’ll catch a glimpse of the tarps and tents lining sections of the Merrimack River and the train tracks. When winter shelters close, homeless people find refuge outdoors, in public—but that’s an act that’s often against the law.
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This past winter a car struck and killed a homeless man in Concord. His name was Gene Parker - he lived on the streets for five years and in that time his friends and advocates fought hard to get him into an apartment. But he died before that could happen.
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Democrats are having success like never before, scoring wins that would have been unimaginable just two decades ago. But despite that shift, there’s one place where Republicans still have a leg up on Election Day: the state Legislature. And there’s a reason for this, an invisible force that drives everything in politics, that you probably won’t hear mentioned on the campaign trail: redistricting.
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Olmer Villavicencio talks to his daughter, Jocelyn, about what he's struggling with. These days, that’s how to get his neighbors to see their voice matters this election. Olmer's not an organizer or a politician. He's a guy who knows everybody and, living in New Hampshire, has a front-row seat to the presidential race. He says it's just about getting fellow Latinos to see it that way.
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Level 6 of New Mexico's state penitentiary in Santa Fe is a dense complex of prison cells, stacked tight. As the gate opens, men's faces press against narrow glass windows. They spend 23 hours a day in solitary.
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People in St. Lawrence County know his face: the smiling, golden-haired 12-year-old boy, Garrett Phillips. It’s going on four years since his murder, and the posters demanding "Justice for Garrett" are still in the hardware store and the laundromat windows, on bumper stickers and front lawns.
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“This Must Be the Place” is a multi-media story series exploring off-the-beaten-path people and places across the North Country.
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Across the country, it's common practice to handcuff a pregnant prisoner to her hospital bed while she gives birth.
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Most people in the town of Old Forge, N.Y., want to refrain from feeding black bears. The trouble is, without the bears coming around as often as they do, the town could stand to lose a lot of its tourism.
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Aaron Hinton says the 40-year drug war in Brownsville has almost made spending time behind bars normal. “It’s subliminally attacking out minds and making us believe that socially this is acceptable.” One out of every 50 men in New York’s prisons comes from Brownsville. The state of New York spends $40 million a year – and this has been going on for generations — locking up black and Hispanic men from this one neighborhood. What does that do to a community?
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It's travel time for a lot of people this week. But one family from the North Country recently made a bigger journey than most—all the way to sunny California, and they did the whole trip by train. The family had a one way ticket, taking them out to a new life on the west coast.
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Over the last four decades, New York’s prison population has soared, with many people serving long mandatory sentences for low-level crimes. As a result, the number of elderly inmates is surging—growing by almost eighty percent from 2000 through 2009.
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Every August for the past 50 years, people from all around the world have made the journey to Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario to hear the howl of the Eastern Timber Wolf, once a ubiquitous sound in the wild.
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American chestnuts once made up a quarter of all the forest between Maine and Georgia. Animals depended on the tree for its fruit and humans used the wood. But at the beginning of the last century, a blight wiped out almost all of the chestnut trees. A few survive, including one specimen in upstate New York. The family that planted that tree 27 years ago enjoys its blooms each year at this time.
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The number of women in American prisons has gone up by 800 percent over the past thirty years, according to the Federal Bureau of Justice. Most of these women are mothers, and about one in twenty of them are pregnant. In New York State, a woman who gives birth while serving time has the chance to stay with her baby in a prison nursery for up to one year, or eighteen months if the mother is eligible for parole by then.
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Two years ago, Moriah Shock Prison near Port Henry was next on the list of correctional facilities New York State wanted to close. Camp Gabriels near Saranac Lake and the Summit Shock Prison near Albany had already been shut down, and the prisons in Lyon Mountain and Ogdensburg were also on the chopping block. But the local community and Essex County officials rallied enough support to keep Moriah open. Today, 188 men live on the spartan campus, set in a former mining facility at the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains.
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On some Saturday nights, when no one's watching, one young man comes up to the top floor of the St. Lawrence University student center and plays the piano.
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Yesterday evening Venus made its last journey across the face of the sun, as seen from Earth, until the year 2117. People of all ages covered the southeast corner of the St. Lawrence University practice fields to get their look at earth’s closest neighboring planet, peering through one of the big telescopes or a pair of safe solar glasses.
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