When LA Times writer Joe Mozingo came to guest lecture at my Annenberg class last fall, he mentioned that, for months, between other assignments, he’d been working somewhat obsessively on a story about his personal heritage. Joe had taken it into his head to find out the origin of his last name, Mozingo, which his dad had always told him was Italian.
The search seemed fine as a personal journey but not terrible promising as a work of journalism.
But then Joe told us some of the rest of the story—like his discovery of the part of the family history that had long been deliberately buried, and that some branches of the family were not delighted to see uncovered.
The result is a terrific three-part series that began on Sunday, with additional parts Monday and Tuesday.
(My bet is that it will be up for prizes come next awards season.)
Here’s a clip from the beginning to give you the flavor.
I set out last year to learn our story, traveling from the Tidewater of Virginia to the hollows of Kentucky and southeastern Indiana and beyond. At times, I struggled to absorb what I was finding, and I met Mozingos who were skeptical of it, or ambivalent, or fiercely resistant.
I learned that our early ancestry reflected not so much a quirk of American history as the messy start of it, seeding a furious internal conflict that continues today.
With us, the whole battle was embodied in a family — and a name.
NEW REPORT SAYS JAILS & PRISONS ARE AMERICA’S MAIN PSYCH HOSPITALS
The National Sheriff’s Association along with the Treatment Advocacy Center has just released a report showing that Americans with severe mental illnesses are three times more likely to be in jail or prison than in a psychiatric hospital, according to “More Mentally Ill Persons Are in Jails and Prisons Than Hospitals: A Survey of the States.”
“America’s jails and prisons have once again become our mental hospitals,” said James Pavle, executive director of the Treatment Advocacy Center, a nonprofit dedicated to removing barriers to timely and effective treatment of severe mental illnesses. “With minimal exception, incarceration has replaced hospitalization for thousands of individuals in every single state.”
The odds of a seriously mentally ill individual being imprisoned rather than hospitalized are 3.2 to 1, state data shows. The report compares statistics from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Bureau of Justice Statistics collected during 2004 and 2005, respectively. The report also found a very strong correlation between those states that have more mentally ill persons in jails and prisons and those states that are spending less money on mental health services.
Of course we already know that LA County jail is the largest mental health facility in the U.S. But evidently the trend is not limited to our fair state.
THOUSANDS OF CHILD ABUSE REPORTS IN LA GO UNINVESTIGATED
The LA Times’ Garrett Therolf reports that DCFS-–the Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services—has a backlog of more than 18,000 tips of child abuse that have not been investigated within the mandated 30 days, leaving children potentially dangerously at risk.
Read the rest here.
WHO CAUSED THE GULF OIL SPILL DISASTER?
Two segments on Sunday’s 60 Minutes were devoted to the catastrophic oil rig explosion in the gulf, that killed 11, causing the ongoing oil leak in the waters off of Louisiana. The story centers around the experiences of a crewmember on the rig Deepwater Horizon and his account of how the disaster had been building for weeks in a series of mishaps—yet that BP management adamantly declined to act.
60 Minutes also reported they have learned from a second BP insider, who said that there is a new worry about another BP facility in the Gulf, the platform “Atlantis,” which the insider is said—if certain safety fixes are not made— is a far greater threat than the Deepwater Horizon.
Watch the video.
Read the transcript.
Photo by Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times