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.

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.

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.

New US government figures showing slower growth in the prison population are cause for hope that the United States may be turning away from its longstanding policies of mass incarceration.

The day before Thanksgiving, at a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden, President Obama officially "pardoned" two turkeys, sparing them from the chopping block and sending them to live out their days in Disneyland. This is one of those uniquely American traditions that must have our foreign friends scratching their heads. What can you say about a country where turkeys receive a presidential reprieve, while more than 3,000 human beings are awaiting death at the hands of the state?

In 2004, a teenage girl incarcerated at the Illinois Youth Center in Warrenville was sexually abused by a male employee at the facility. The abuse consisted of repeated acts of oral sex and sexual intercourse. There was no doubt that the abuse occurred, and the employee ultimately pleaded guilty to two counts of criminal sexual assault.