As Maria Shriver hits the airwaves this week to talk about work-life balance and her new report on women in America, I'm making my own work-life transition.

The harsher sentences for crack cocaine have yielded egregiously severe sentences for low level offenders and unjustifiable racial disparities, as black Americans have borne the brunt of crack cocaine sentences. Reform of federal cocaine sentencing legislation is long overdue.

Two weeks ago, the FBI released annual crime statistics showing that reported rapes were at a 20-year low. But some hard facts are missing from the good news.

Over the weekend, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California vetoed legislation that would have made California the first state in the nation to collect comprehensive data on the physical evidence collected from rape victims that is sitting in police storage facilities.

Every day the U.S. government is forced to grapple with the consequences of harsh and sweeping immigration laws passed by Congress 13 years ago. Under the 1996 laws, detention and deportation are mandatory for thousands of immigrants convicted of nonviolent crimes, and judges are powerless to intervene, even in the most deserving cases.

Julie was a graduate student at the University of Chicago when, in 2007, she was raped by a man she had been introduced to that night as a friend's new boyfriend.

(New York, October 9, 2009) – The award of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to US President Barack Obama should encourage him to apply his stated principles to both foreign and domestic human rights policy.

Plans to reform immigration detention management and oversight, announced today by the US government, should quickly be translated into actual policy change and accountability. The plans focus on centralizing control of facilities used to hold detained immigrants.