The challenges faced by most mental health professionals working in corrections are daunting: impossibly large caseloads, physically unpleasant facilities, and institutional contexts that are less than sympathetic to the importance of mental health services.

Cyryna Pasion, a transgender girl, landed in a detention center in Hawaii as a young teenager after family tensions over her sexual identity caused her to run away from home. She was first held with girls, then transferred to the boys' unit. There her life was a nightmare.

LD 1611 would impose much-needed limits on the use of segregated confinement in Maine prisons.

The Obama administration should commemorate Guantanamo’s eighth anniversary tomorrow by renewing its pledge to close the prison quickly and responsibly. Prisoners implicated in crimes should be charged and brought to trial before federal courts, and the remainder should be sent home or resettled in other countries.

New government data suggesting high levels of sexual abuse of confined youth in the United States should galvanize the Department of Justice to swiftly issue national standards to end prison rape.

If adopted, the June 2009 standards submitted by the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission would go far toward eliminating rape in adult prisons and jails, juvenile and immigration detention facilities, and community corrections.

One little-known side effect of the prison population explosion has been a sharp increase in the number of elderly people behind bars. According to the Justice Department, in 1980 the United States had about 9,500 prisoners age 55 and older; by 2008, the number had increased tenfold, to 94,800. That same year, the number of prisoners 50 and older was just shy of 200,000 -- about the size of the entire U.S. prison population in the early 1970s.