The Senate impeachment trial of President Donald Trump started off with a straitjacket of rules, particularly on communications. No cellphones, no talking allowed for senators in the chamber. For reporters, no “walk and talk” interviews with senators in the hallways. Instead, the media were to be confined to roped-off pens at the Senate exits.

But like water flowing downhill, it’s hard to stop lawmakers and media from finding each other, or senators from getting their message out.

“Any political figure that has something to say will find a way to say it. If they want the press to find them, they will be found,” says Mo Elleithee, former communications director for the Democratic National Committee, and now at Georgetown University.

During an afternoon break on Wednesday, at least seven senators stopped to talk with reporters penned behind ropes and stanchions near a Senate exit. Democratic presidential hopeful Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota advised her Republican colleagues to “start acting like a juror” and allow witnesses in the trial. Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas declared “nothing new” after more than two hours of opening arguments. 

The arguments were a “tour de force!” responded Minority Leader Charles Schumer, waiting for Senator Cornyn to finish so he could have his say. The New Yorker made sure to repeat his message in front of television cameras and other media at a stakeout near the Senate basement.

Senators from both sides are talking informally with reporters in these locations and elsewhere, as well as holding press conferences and doing television interviews. Most notably, many are filing daily updates on Twitter, including sharing tips on how they are enduring hours on end of presentations.

Food and drink other than water (plain or fizzy) or milk (originally for health reasons) are forbidden in the chamber. Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, joked on Twitter that “milk is the big news today,” as his seatmate, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, went for the white stuff. He also shared an impeachment survival trick: “During the short breaks, unwrap a few hard candies and put them in your desk drawer. That way you avoid the noise of unwrapping them when you sneak one mid-trial.”

Many Democrats have been sharing their views of the day’s events in brief, conversational videos that they post to Twitter, speaking directly to constituents. “It was a long, long day and night last night,” started out Sen. Doug Jones of Alabama, the most endangered Democrat in the Senate, on Wednesday.

“Yesterday was bananas,” said Sen. Kamala Harris of California, a Democratic presidential candidate, in another Twitter video. In a brief interview later, she explains that the videos are meant to “keep people engaged, and to remind them that they are part of this process ... and what it’s really like.”

The video strategy fits with today’s reality TV ethos, says Mr. Elleithee, where people want to see more than fixed cameras focused on the Senate chamber. Democrats want voters to be invested in the impeachment process, and they are hoping to speak to a broader electorate that includes independents.

Fewer Republicans have been doing speak-to-camera videos. But they’re still finding ways to get their messages out. 

Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida has been tweeting out a daily diary of sorts. “House began presenting their case over course of 8 hours,” he wrote Wednesday on Twitter. “Offered detailed timeline of the events underpinning their case. We heard recorded testimony of witnesses, supplemented by transcripts & evidence gathered from press & social media. Will continue tomorrow.”

These individual takes, of course, are only each lawmaker’s opinion. They aren’t reported pieces with comments from both sides and relevant context. They don’t give Americans the full picture of this historic trial, however partisan it may be.

Which is why journalists have objected so strenuously to the restrictions imposed on them by the Senate Republican leadership and the sergeant-at-arms.

Under normal circumstances, the Hill is the most accessible reporting spot on government in Washington. A hard congressional pass allows reporters to roam freely in the corridors of the Capitol and its office buildings. During the trial, senators can visit a pen – if they choose. But reporters aren’t able to find other viewpoints when they’re locked into a few square feet for 30 minutes or an hour during a break.

Lawmakers can jump over the media, but “what we say has more credibility, I would hope,” says veteran New York Times reporter Carl Hulse. “We’re serving a real purpose here, trying to sort out a pretty confusing mess that a lot of people don’t understand.” 

The restrictions have forced news organizations to adjust, taking more time to try to reach senators by phone and adding reporters to be in more places to try to catch them. That’s doable for a news giant like The New York Times, but it’s harder for smaller outlets.

Take the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. It has one reporter on the Hill, Daniel Moore. “The restrictions make it really difficult,” he says, preventing him from getting “anything meaningful” from either of the senators he covers from the swing state of Pennsylvania – Republican Pat Toomey and Democrat Bob Casey.

As of Day 3 of the trial, Mr. Moore had not been able to reach either senator during a break or on the phone. Normally, he’s got great access, he says, but in this case he has had to rely on the senators’ public comments.

Senator Toomey, who won his last race by a close margin, has offered up very little. When swarmed by reporters as he entered the Capitol’s internal subway, the senator commented only that the candy in the Senate cloakroom was running low.

Mr. Moore had better success on Thursday, speaking with Senator Casey on a phone press conference for Pennsylvania reporters, and gleaning some insight on Senator Toomey’s views from a television interview.

“I don’t want this to sound just like reporters whining,” says Sarah Wire, who is chair of the Standing Committee of Correspondents on the Hill. “We have a responsibility to the American people, to our readers and to viewers, and that’s my concern.”

Still, since the trial started, things have loosened up a bit – both on the Senate floor and with journalists. Senators are no longer glued to their seats, but are disappearing for a moment (or quite a bit longer). They’re standing or stretching their legs at the back of the chamber. They can be seen munching on candy bars and chewing gum. Some even say they welcome being untethered from their cellphones.

Reporters are seeing fewer instances of Capitol police interrupting interviews mid-conversation, according to Ms. Wire, who writes for the Los Angeles Times. They’re also discovering other places to intercept senators.

“That’s what we do for a living,” she says. During the Clinton impeachment, reporters were not allowed on the same floor as the Senate chamber, which is how the underground stakeout by the subway cars got started, she explains. And indeed, during that five-week trial, restrictions on journalists eased.

“That trial went on for a very long time,” says Mr. Hulse. “It’s very hard to sustain that level of red alert.”

Staff writer Timmy Broderick contributed to this story.

On the wall of David Keith’s airy, book-lined office in Harvard University’s engineering school is a faded 3-by-3-inch card. The framed typewritten label is the badge worn by his father to the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972. The badge is a signpost in the long march toward global action on the environment and on climate change, which many believe has become the existential crisis of our time. Since then, scientists have mapped out the cumulative risks that a warming planet poses to humans and other species. Nations have come together to set goals for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. 

News flash: The world is failing to meet them and failing fast. By almost all accounts, the cuts aren’t happening quickly enough to stop the accumulation of gases in the atmosphere at levels that are already starting to play havoc with our climate, from Sacramento to Sydney.  

So Dr. Keith, a Canadian scientist-philosopher, has a radical alternative. It’s not a solution to climate change, more of a last resort, and he’s troubled that we may even need to risk it. 

His answer: Turn down the Earth’s thermostat. 

Dr. Keith is among the most prominent of a small group of climate scientists working on solar geoengineering. He calls it a “brutally ugly technical fix” that offers near-term salvation in a way that could rewrite the rules of geopolitics just as nuclear weapons did in the 20th century. 

He envisions a fleet of high-flying planes releasing sulfur or other chemical compounds in the stratosphere that then form an aerosol mist around the globe. These aerosols would deflect incoming sunlight, dimming the skies below. Think volcanic eruptions that blot out the sun or the meteorite dust kicked up 65 million years ago that may have led to the demise of dinosaurs. 

The objective of solar geoengineering would be to slow the warming of the Earth, buying time for humans to finally stop burning fossil fuels and build zero-emission economies. Assuming the idea actually works, it would require an open-ended commitment to maintaining the dimming of the sun; an abrupt stop would crank up the thermostat at a dangerous clip. Polluting the stratosphere also risks more holes in the ozone layer, unpredictable rainfall – and perhaps other unforeseen calamities. Again, remember the dinosaurs.

Research amid skepticism

If it all sounds crazy to you, you’re not alone. Solar geoengineering was a fringe concept for most of Dr. Keith’s scientific career, one that environmentalists and most climate scientists saw as a dangerous distraction from reducing harmful emissions. He’s had death threats over his work. To critics opposed to all such research, he’s a “pantomime villain,” says Andy Parker, a climate policy researcher in the United Kingdom. 

That opprobrium hasn’t stopped him from exploring solar geoengineering as well as its implications for human society. Indeed, the thorniest questions surrounding the idea lie in the realm of morality, ethics, law, and politics. Dr. Keith believes if the world ever does have to resort to using it, people should know what they’re doing – and what the effects of blotting out the sun might be.

And interest in the concept is growing. Over the past decade, solar geoengineering has moved from the cubicles of a few ridiculed researchers to the broader halls of scientific inquiry. Several countries now have research programs. In the United States most inquiries are privately funded, though in late December Congress approved $4 million to assess potential “solar climate interventions.” Dr. Keith’s program at Harvard is supported by Bill Gates and philanthropic foundations. A committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine is due to release a two-year study in June into solar geoengineering and how it should be governed, which could unlock new federal research dollars.

“You have to be honest and look at the gap between where we are in terms of continued emissions and where we need to be, and open the door to ask whether and under what conditions we should consider these technologies,” says Peter Frumhoff, the chief climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit science advocacy group, and a member of the committee. “It is the worst possible way to address climate change that we need to take seriously.”

We may be able to hack the planetary thermostat. But should we? And who is “we”? 

Thibault Camus/AP/File

Activists press for action on global warming at a rally at the Eiffel Tower in Paris during a United Nations climate conference in 2015.

Looking for truths

With his beard, angular face, and spare 6-foot-2-inch frame, Dr. Keith would look at home on an Arctic trail or a rock face. Put him in a stovepipe hat and Victorian suit, and he could pass for Abraham Lincoln. 

He grew up in Ottawa, Ontario, an only child. His father was a British-born, U.S.-educated field biologist who guided Canada’s regulation of DDT, an insecticide once hailed as a miracle substance but which became infamous for its toxic effects on the environment and humans.

Dr. Keith joined his father and stepmother, a biologist, on their field trips, and roamed 500 acres of woodland that his family partly owned. One of his uncles helped create the American Birding Association. His father’s colleague at the Canadian Wildlife Service who studied polar bears was a regular visitor at the family house. In high school, he hiked the Appalachian Trail in New Hampshire solo. 

 In 1989, as a physics Ph.D. student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he landed on the idea of solar geoengineering as part of a group of ambitious science and policy graduate students at Harvard and MIT exploring climate change. “It was a pretty unusual group. We were kind of ahead of our professors,” he says. “I started work on this topic simply because it was a topic somebody brought up and nobody was working on it.” 

Soviet scientists at the Institute of Rainmaking in Leningrad had already studied the release of particulates in the atmosphere to reflect sunlight. But it was an idea that seemed to belong more to science fiction – a fantastical parable of hubris – than to the research academy. 

That didn’t deter Dr. Keith, says Hadi Dowlatabadi, who at the time was a professor of climate policy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and a family friend. Dr. Dowlatabadi agreed to work with Dr. Keith on a paper that tried to model a deliberate intervention in the climate system. The report, published in 1992, found a global cooling effect that previous studies had not. Solar geoengineering, in other words, appeared to work. This was not a popular idea at the time, says Dr. Dowlatabadi, who is now at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. 

“What David has always been keen on doing is trying to understand where the truth really lies, regardless of the political implications,” he says. 

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

After completing his doctorate at MIT, Dr. Keith moved into other climate-related fields, from policy analysis to designing spectrometers for NASA aircraft. He also developed new ways to capture and store atmospheric carbon dioxide as a way to limit the effects of climate change. In 2009, he founded a Canadian startup, Carbon Engineering, backed by Mr. Gates, that builds giant fans to suck carbon from the air. 

He circled back to solar geoengineering after joining Harvard in 2011 as a professor of engineering and public policy. In 2017, he became co-director of its Solar Geoengineering Research Program, which has raised $16 million so far. This has made him a lightning rod for critics of his lonely frontier of climate research.

Dr. Keith is an agile and forceful debater, and his blunt talk can raise hackles. “Many people find him to be too direct and sure of his position. But it’s rare to find that he’s wrong in his position,” says Dr. Dowlatabadi. As a scientist, though, he’s drawn to data and what can be proved.

“He comes across as having strong opinions,” says Frank Keutsch, an atmospheric chemist at Harvard. “But he’s entirely convincible.”

A volcanic effect

On July 20, 1816, The Morning Post in London informed its readers that they were not alone in experiencing a chilly, damp summer. “We continue to receive the most melancholy news from Germany on the extraordinary weather that afflicts nearly the whole of Europe.” 

That month, Mary and Percy Shelley arrived in Geneva after crossing a wintry France. “Never was a scene more awfully desperate,” she wrote. The weather kept them indoors and inspired a candlelit evening of writing ghost stories at the villa of fellow poet Lord Byron. That night, Ms. Shelley conjured up a Gothic tale about a scientist whose creation escapes his control: “Frankenstein.” 

The “year without a summer” was a global weather event triggered by the eruption a year earlier of Mount Tambora in Indonesia. It burped clouds of volcanic ash into the upper atmosphere that over the next year would dim the skies over Europe, Asia, and the Americas. 

Iwan Setiyawan/Kompas Images/AP/File

In 1815, the eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora (shown here in 2010) burped clouds of volcanic ash that altered the world’s climate.

Nearly two centuries later, Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines, spewing billions of tons of sulfur and other chemicals. Scientists estimate that eruption, in April 1991, lowered global average temperatures by 0.5 degrees Celsius, roughly half the amount of warming seen over the past century. 

Stratospheric clouds formed from volcanic matter are a form of naturally occurring solar geoengineering. Yet they are still an imperfect analog for what Dr. Keith is proposing. For his concept to be tested, he needs to get outside the lab. “The only way you learn about the real world is to do experiments,” he says. “That’s how science works.”  

For the past seven years he has been trying to do just that at Harvard. The Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment, or SCoPEx, would be the first such release of particles in the upper atmosphere; other experiments have occurred in Earth’s lower atmosphere. The idea is to release tiny plumes of sulfur or limestone that can be monitored to see how they behave, data that researchers can then plug into computer models to determine the effects of large-scale geoengineering. 

“There’s a number of things we don’t know,” says Dr. Keutsch, who is leading SCoPEx. “How do we get to this nice, even blanket [of particles] that we put in the [computer] model? Is that even feasible?”

Diamonds and sulfur

Which chemicals to release is a matter of debate. Volcanic plumes have shown that sulfur will form reflective clouds, but it is a pollutant that destroys the ozone, which filters harmful sunlight. Dr. Keith is excited by the idea of dispersing finely milled diamonds instead. Like limestone, diamonds may form reflective clouds that do the job just as well, without the sulfur side effects. 

But diamonds wouldn’t stay up there forever. They would fall to the Earth, just as sulfur does as acid rain. Would diamond particles in the soil pose health risks? How could we know?

“This might actually mean that sulfur is the right thing [to use] despite all these other exciting things because ... it really is the devil we know,” says Dr. Keith. 

The experiment also poses significant engineering challenges. Dr. Keutsch is building a self-propelling gondola the size of a four-poster queen bed into which scientific instruments can fit. A balloon will loft it 12 miles into the air. After the release of the particles, the gondola then has to steer back and forth over the plumes to measure the results. 

SCoPEx wouldn’t pose any danger. The aerosols released would be tiny. In fact, your last airplane flight emitted more sulfur than this experiment would. But to critics of geoengineering, SCoPEx is frightening for what it symbolizes: a privately funded stealth move toward capricious climatic meddling. 

“If there’s widespread recognition that this technology is not going to solve the climate crisis ... it makes little sense to invest in experimentation,” argues Carroll Muffett, head of the Center for International Environmental Law, a Washington-based advocacy group. 

Moreover, he says, SCoPEx is testing the hardware needed for a future program, while Dr. Keith and others “continue to publish papers on the economics of widespread deployment.” 

“Slow and right”

To defuse these and other ethical questions, an external advisory committee will review the experiment before it can proceed, and its advice, and the Harvard team’s responses, must be published. That could mean shelving a penciled-in launch in fall 2020. “I think it’s more important to do this slow and right than rush into something,” says Dr. Keutsch. Otherwise it could become “much harder for anybody else to do future experiments.” 

Geoengineering is a broad term that encompasses many different ideas about how to intervene in the Earth’s climate system. One way is to seed oceanic clouds, which would help block the sun. Another is to spread silica beads over the polar ice caps to reflect the sun’s rays. Fertilizing ocean algae, a third option, could enhance the Earth’s absorption of carbon.

Some of these methods, such as cloud seeding, would theoretically cool targeted areas of the Earth. Dr. Keith’s stratospheric approach would have global effects. 

The argument for solar geoengineering is brutally utilitarian: the need to release pollutants to darken the skies, however risky, if the world doesn’t do enough to curb climate-related ecological devastation and human suffering.

Matthias Schrader/AP/File

Workers cover a glacier on Germany’s highest mountain with plastic sheets to reflect sunlight back into space and keep the ice from melting. It’s a form of geoengineering – deliberate human intervention in the climate of the Earth.

Affordable stopgap?

By most accounts, the sand is already pouring through the climatic hourglass. Despite fitful efforts by many nations, global emissions are still rising – the 2010s was the warmest decade on record – and rapid decarbonization seems a political non-starter in many countries. Perhaps more ominous, the planet could warm past the danger levels of 2 degrees C above preindustrial averages with just the stock of greenhouse gases that already exists in the atmosphere. 

“Even if we got emissions to zero tomorrow, we’ve still got a big climate problem,” says Dr. Keith. 

At best, solar geoengineering might buy the world more decades for a social, economic, and technological transformation.

Part of the allure of the idea is that it’s relatively cheap. In a 2018 paper, Wake Smith, a former aerospace executive who teaches at Yale University, estimated the development costs of a stratospheric fleet of sulfur-releasing aircraft at $3.5 billion. This theoretical program would start in 2033 with two aircraft and 4,000 annual flights, increasing over 15 years to nearly 100 aircraft flying hundreds of flights a week. With annual operating costs of roughly $2.25 billion, or slightly more than one-quarter of what Americans spend on pet food per year, such a program would be within the means of dozens of small and large countries, or even a rich individual. 

To conservatives repelled by Green New Deal-style makeovers of the U.S. economy, that’s an attractive proposition. Last September, a Wall Street Journal columnist wrote a scathing review of the solutions of Democratic presidential candidates to climate change and zeroed in on solar geoengineering – “throw a bunch of particles into the atmosphere, at a cost of perhaps $2 billion a year” – as science’s answer. 

Social media and Stephen Colbert

Gernot Wagner, an associate professor of environmental studies at New York University and co-author of the 2018 paper, recalls how its findings, recast as a “solution” to climate change, ricocheted on social media. “It went viral,” he says. “It was literally trending with the Kardashians for 18 hours.” 

At the time, Dr. Wagner was co-director with Dr. Keith of Harvard’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program. “One of my biggest nightmares ... was Trump waking up one day at 4 a.m. ‘Right. Found a solution to climate change. Told you so.’” 

In 2013, Dr. Keith published a book-length essay, “A Case for Climate Engineering.” The book was far more equivocal than its title, but it earned him a slot on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” which Dr. Keith calls “one of the more intimidating things that I’ve done.” 

That night, Dr. Keith wore a dark suit and a colorful shirt with no tie. Behind his desk, Mr. Colbert cut to the chase: “How will we save the planet?” Dr. Keith outlined the basic idea behind releasing a shroud of sulfur particles in the stratosphere and what it might do to global temperatures. 

“Blanketing the Earth in sulfuric acid,” says Mr. Colbert, in a mock growl, his hands tracing a sphere. “Because I’m all for it. This is the all-chocolate dinner. I still get to have my CO₂ and I just need to spray sulfuric acid all over the Earth.”

Insurers call this moral hazard: People tend to take more risks because they know they are covered by insurance. Could progress in geoengineering research lessen the urgency to cut global emissions?

The real work

This is one of the chief criticisms of the concept by environmentalists and others, who see it as a dangerous distraction from the work of cutting global emissions. Critics worry about the uncertainty of it all, too: the damage hacking the climate could do to the planet. Indeed, one Oxford physicist has called solar geoengineering “wildly, utterly, howlingly barking mad.”

Alan Robock, an environmental scientist at Rutgers University, has compiled a list of 27 concerns and risks of stratospheric geoengineering, from human and ecological impacts – disrupted monsoons, reduced solar power generation – to ethics and governance. That doesn’t mean he opposes Dr. Keith’s research. “[We] have to quantify the benefits and the risks,” he says. 

Who decides whether mankind should dim the sun, and under what conditions, are among the trickiest challenges. The Smith-Wagner study describes a slow ramp-up after 15 years of preparation for deployment. That could allow time to reach a global consensus on governance – say, with a U.N. resolution – and for cross-border scientific cooperation to foster partnerships.

“The world has to start talking collectively about this issue in an open and transparent way in the next few years, not later,” says Janos Pasztor, a retired U.N. diplomat who directs the Carnegie Climate Geoengineering Governance Project. 

Several countries in Europe and Asia, including China and Japan, already have their own research programs. Dr. Keutsch wants to invite foreign researchers to put instruments on his stratospheric gondola so they can compare findings.

But what if a climate-related disaster strikes before a political consensus is reached? One country, or a group of countries, could decide not to wait. “It’s quite conceivable there will be unilateral action by one or more countries, for different reasons,” says Mr. Pasztor. “That has very substantial geopolitical implications.” 

Indeed, the modest cost of deployment is what makes it hard to imagine that governments would pass up the option in a crisis, knowing that whatever multilateral action is taken on carbon reduction wouldn’t come quickly enough. 

Andres Forza/Reuters/File

Walls of ice calve off a glacier in southern Argentina. To prevent the polar ice caps from melting, some scientists are studying using extreme measures, such as spreading silica beads over the poles to reflect sunlight back into space.

The geopolitical entanglements become even more complicated in deciding how much solar radiation should be deflected and then how to attribute the climatic events that follow. If devastating rains fall in China, is that the result of solar geoengineering or simply global warming? If China decides it’s the former, then it could demand a halt – belligerently. Other countries will want to keep going, not least because a sudden stop would trigger a snapback in temperatures. It may be impossible to find common ground. 

As Dr. Keith put it to Mr. Colbert, “The big fear is that one country will want it one way and one will want it the other way, like two frat boys arguing over the thermostat.” 

Big picture

Back in his office, his wiry frame folded onto a sofa, Dr. Keith praises the young climate activists who are pressing world leaders to act on global warming now. As an environmentalist, he shares their outrage. He also puts a moral value on the stewardship of nature, of saving rainforests and polar habitats, that goes beyond their role in our climate system. Perhaps that argument has gotten lost, he muses, in the progressive pitch to voters that tough emissions cuts will make financial sense down the road. 

“We have tried that argument and it hasn’t worked,” he says. “I’ve got to believe that people care about more than just their immediate self-interest.”

In the end, the difficulty in finding a legitimate way to assess the risks of geoengineering and geopolitical conflict could mean that Dr. Keith’s research never leaves the lab. He says he’s fine with that. Perhaps carbon capture – his other passion – could take off, coupled with the rapid rollout of zero-carbon fuels powered by solar cells. The darkest near-term climatic scenarios may be averted.

But you can’t kill an idea. “Even if we all collectively decided in our generation that ... we better not go down this road and we passed a treaty saying we should never do it, that doesn’t actually bind the hands of [people in] the future. They can still do it,” he says.

This story was produced with support from an Energy Foundation grant to cover the environment.

Gabrielle Lurie/San Francisco Chronicle/AP/File

Captain Jason Jackson gives a tour of County Jail 4 in the Hall of Justice in San Francisco, Nov. 1, 2018.

It’s come as a surprise to many: Racial disparities in the criminal justice system have declined dramatically since the start of the millennium.

At times, the disparities have seemed like an intractable problem, tied to issues ranging from uneven drug sentencing laws and implicit bias to poverty and crime trends. But now, the Council on Criminal Justice in Atlanta has presented new evidence of a shift. It found a narrowing of the large gaps between the incarceration rates for white people and those for black and Hispanic people. The same went for gaps in jails, probation, and parole.

In 2016, for instance, the black-white ratio in state prisons was 5.1-to-1, down from 8.3-to-1 in 2000.

SOURCE:

Council on Criminal Justice

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Karen Norris/Staff

“We were aware of the direction of the change but didn’t really have any sense of the magnitude,” says Adam Gelb, the council's CEO and president. “This is a situation that’s gone from worse to bad. If we’re serious about shrinking these gaps further, we’ve got to have a deeper understanding of what lies behind these trends.”

The state imprisonment gaps declined across all types of crimes, but most sharply with drug offenses. The 15-to-1 black-white divide dropped to below 5-to-1 for drug-related imprisonment.

The trend is particularly notable among women. The black-white ratio for women in state prison dropped from 6-to-1 in 2000 to 2-to-1 in 2016.

That translates to over 12,000 fewer black women in prison, with the reductions happening mostly in the category of drug offenses.

But reductions for black women have been happening alongside an increase in white women serving time. Advocates say they’d prefer to see gaps closing in the context of a reduction in crime and imprisonment among all racial categories.

SOURCE:

Council on Criminal Justice

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Karen Norris/Staff

One hypothesis for some of the decline in drug-imprisonment disparities, says Mr. Gelb, is that prior to the age of smartphone and internet ubiquity, urban drug crimes tended to be out on the street corner, prompting neighbors to call the police and contributing to more arrests of black and Hispanic residents.

There are still strong concerns about underlying injustices factoring in to people of color being arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned at higher rates than white people, says Nazgol Ghandnoosh, a senior research analyst at The Sentencing Project in Washington, D.C.

“If those disparities are unwarranted and they don’t stem from differences in crime rates ... communities of color will feel that they’re being discriminated against by the justice system and be less likely to cooperate,” she says.

A number of reforms could be contributing to leveling imprisonment rates.

Changes in drug-free school zone sentencing laws are one example. Because more residents of color go about their daily lives in dense neighborhoods within the wide radius of a neighborhood school, some cities and states have begun to narrow those zones or give judges more discretion over sentencing. New Jersey modified its law in 2010, for instance, and judges in the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester have worked with prosecutors to reduce disparities involving school-zone sentencing, The Sentencing Project reports. 

States such as New Jersey, Connecticut, and Iowa have required that before a criminal justice law is passed, an analysis must be done on any potential for disparate racial impact.

Critics say the focus on racial gaps is misplaced. “The premise of an enterprise like racial impact statements is that any disparity in the criminal justice system, with regard to the end results of incarceration rates, grows out of some sort of hidden racial bias. In fact, the disparities in the criminal justice system grow out of disparities in behavior,” says Heather Mac Donald, author of “The War on Cops” and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “When you try to mold policies to avoid racial disparities, you are going to be twisting them to avoid penalizing criminal behavior – and [those] victimized by that are going to be law-abiding residents in minority communities.”

Within the overall decline, states’ racial disparities vary significantly.

SOURCE:

The Sentencing Project

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Karen Norris/Staff

Racial gaps in federal prisons have also declined, though not as dramatically. That’s partly due to the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, which adjusted an imbalance in prison terms for possession of crack or powder cocaine. Further reductions could be on the way because prisoners can now apply to make adjustments for sentences given before 2010 – an opportunity embedded in the bipartisan First Step Act passed by Congress in 2018.

“Ideally in our society,” says Ms. Ghandnoosh, “we would have equality in opportunities and equality in outcomes so that we don’t see differences in criminal offending, and so that we don’t have to think that if you’re white or not, if you’re rich or not, you will have a very different likelihood of contacting the justice system.”

Laszlo Balogh/Reuters/File

Hasidic Jewish pilgrims commemorate the anniversary of the death of Rebbe Shaya’la, in Bodrogkeresztúr, Hungary, on April 29, 2017.

This Hungarian hamlet offers many attractions to visitors from abroad: a picturesque landscape, historical sights. The region in which it lies is even recognized as part of UNESCO’s world heritage program for its centuries-long culture of winemaking.

But the latest influx of visitors to Bodrogkeresztúr are coming for a very different reason – and are shining a light on the village’s history.

Bodrogkeresztúr is fast becoming a major pilgrimage site for Jews around the world who want to pray at the grave of a rabbi in hopes of miraculous intervention. Their presence in the village – which had a significant Jewish population until its deportation in 1944 – has sparked a delicate debate among the locals. Some would like them gone, viewing them as foreigners as well as Jews. Others argue that they have a right to return.

The debate is particularly loaded in Hungary, where far-right politicians often say that Jews have no place. Such views resonate strongly in poorer, rural communities. Estimates of the prevalence of anti-Semitism among Hungarians vary: András Kovács, a professor at Central European University in Budapest says about 30% hold such views, while the New York-based Anti-Defamation League puts the rate at 42%.

Judit Kuknyó, a mother of four who regularly crosses paths with the religious Jewish groups at the local food store, is not concerned by the newcomers. “They have their traditions and holidays, we have ours,” she says. She is baffled by peers who cast them as “strangers.”

“I think they are afraid of the unknown and forget that this used to be a Jewish village,” she says. “[The villagers] just want to come back to what used to be theirs.”

The draw of the wonder rabbi

Yeshaya Steiner, also known as Rebbe Shaya’la, lived in Bodrogkeresztúr in the early 20th century. The Jews of Kerestir – the Yiddish name of this verdant village – were ardent believers in his wisdom. Rebbe Shaya’la gained fame as a miracle worker; tens of thousands of Central European Hasidic Jews visited his court regularly until his death in 1925. Miracles ascribed to him fill three books: They range from curing sick children to saving marriages.

“The soul lives forever, whoever will come to me to pray after my death, I will help,” he predicted.

The revival of Judaism in Hungary, increasingly digitally savvy believers, and the designation of religious sites on Google Maps and Waze have given him fresh fame. Many here link the publication of a book on Rebbe Shaya’la’s miracles in English to the increase in visitors.

A key stop for pilgrims is the former house of Rebbe Shaya’la on Kossuth Street, which American descendants bought in the 1970s. Since then, relatives have come to pray at the house and his nearby grave.

“My father was born in this house, survived the war, and fled to the States after 1949,” says Ms. Ruben, a great granddaughter of Rebbe Shaya’la who declined to give her first name. “The older I get, the more it hurts to think about what happened to my family here.”

Dorottya Czuk

This 18th-century Jewish cemetery contains the grave of Rebbe Shaya’la, as well as other rabbis. Rebbe Shaya’la is buried in a traditional tabernacle along with his wife and an unknown rabbi.

During the Cold War, visits by religious relatives to communist Hungary tended to be short. Discussing the disappearance of the Jewish community was taboo.

But that has changed. Four years ago, the rebbe’s descendants expanded to the house next door to cater to a growing number of visitors.

On a busy weekend, more than 20,000 religious visitors may tour this village of just 1,000 residents. The Jewish shelter offers lodging, free meals, and places to pray. The owners say these are not business ventures and that they pay for costs that run as high as $5,000 a day. They believe this is a mitzvah, or good deed, from the Hebrew word for commandment.

Female members of the Kerestir community come to Hungary three to four times per year. They split their time between praying and ensuring the smooth administration of the rebbe’s former home and the free kitchen.

An American Hasidic cook and his Hungarian non-Jewish helpers work in perfect harmony despite the language barrier. Together they whip up kosher Hungarian dishes for up to 100 people per day. The food is provided free of charge although donations are accepted.

“It is spiritually uplifting to be here,” says Chayala Hecht-Lasky, mother of four boys. “I have known about this place for quite some time. More and more people hear about the miracles. ... We know some people whom he helped already.”

Jewish pilgrims to Hungary typically follow a 90-plus-mile-long route spanning 10 villages which is known as the “footsteps of the wonder rabbis.” It cuts across small cemeteries, run-down synagogues, ritual baths, houses of famous Jewish families, and former yeshivas (Orthodox Jewish seminaries).

Rebbe Shaya’la is the most famous of five wonder rabbis who lived on this path. Mariann Frank, director of the Hasidic visitors center, says she also receives Christian priests with their congregations. “We are happy to receive people here because it helps to understand the life and the role of the Jewish people in former rural Hungary,” she says.

“They have the right to be here”

Some villagers are unhappy with the Jewish visitors’ arrival though, and their focus on Rebbe Shaya’la’s grave over other local features. Many want them gone.

“They should go back to where they came from. I do not care that they used to live here,” says Timea, a woman in her thirties. “They are coming back and buying up the whole village. They have already bought at least 25 family houses and they don’t want to stop.”

Some worry this influx is affecting property prices and the demographic makeup of the community. Houses are for sale all along the trail. Around 10 buildings in Bodrogkeresztúr have been purchased by Jews who came from abroad. Villagers say that real estate prices went up by 10 to 15 times since large scale arrivals began in 2015.

But some say that’s not the newcomers’ fault. “They have the right to be here as their ancestors were unjustly taken away and killed in 1944,” says Tibor Földesi, a villager. “Hungarians who managed to do business with them like them. Those who couldn’t, don’t.”

He adds that some locals seem to be approaching house sales with Jewish stereotypes in mind. “Most people try to sell their house at very high prices to them, and if they fail, they say it is [the Jews’] fault.”

Moshe Friedlander, a rabbi who supervises a Jewish guesthouse in Bodrogkeresztúr, says that religious Jewish tourism is creating jobs in the village, which could help build bridges. Religious Jews in the village employ non-Jewish people on the Sabbath, the day when they are forbidden to work. And Hungarians work as cooks, waiters, cleaners, drivers, and errand runners even beyond the one holy day of the week. At least a dozen villagers are working for the Hasidic Jews who run guesthouses. Jewish visitors rent cars, pay drivers, sleep at the various hotels, buy local goods, and visit local private doctors.

“I hope that coming back here helps the locals getting to know us again,” says Rabbi Friedlander. “They can see that Jewish people are not like what the Nazis said they were.”

Unpacking Lizzo’s steady and fascinating rise in music proves to be as layered as the artist herself.

Named entertainer of the year for 2019 by both The Associated Press and Time magazine, the singer and rapper is also a contender for the most Grammy awards of any artist at Sunday’s awards show. Three of those are for her song “Truth Hurts,” off her third studio album, released in 2017. Last September, she broke a major Billboard record when the song became the longest-running No. 1 single by a female rapper, without other featured artists, in the chart’s history. She is also the first black solo female R&B singer to hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 since 2012.

Women rappers have been pushing hip-hop culture forward since the genre’s inception. However, what made “Truth Hurts” so popular two years after its release wasn’t just its undeniable catchiness or bold declarations of resilience and self-worth. As a full-figured black woman rapper, Lizzo celebrates her complexity in a society that remains determined to devalue it. She has recently experienced body-shaming from public figures like author Boyce Watkins and fitness guru Jillian Michaels. Their commentary serves as a cruel reminder that the world has a particular vitriol for confident, visible, and successful black women. 

Lizzo has also had to deal with rap’s notorious misogyny and general exclusion of women. The current renaissance finally gives listeners a bevy of female lyricists to choose from, including Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion, Tierra Whack, Rapsody, Noname, and Leikeli47. There is no longer just one domineering presence at the forefront.

Women rappers aren’t expected to stylistically embrace either androgyny or hypersexuality anymore; they are doing what feels natural to them. Lizzo is not only capitalizing on this palpable shift in rap; she is defying – and defining – what it means to be beautiful. 

We saw it at last June’s BET Awards as she sported a white bodice while dancing and playing the flute onstage. (She holds a degree in classical flute performance.) That live rendition of “Truth Hurts” earned her a standing ovation and even brought Rihanna to her feet, gazing in awe. Lizzo continued to showcase her infectious energy at August’s MTV Video Music Awards. Just like at the BET Awards, the stage at the VMAs was full of black female backup dancers of all shapes and sizes, as Lizzo impressed onlookers in a bright yellow leotard. The message of the night – in true alignment with her discography – was one of self-love and empowerment. 

As expected, Lizzo’s rap skills are criticized and called into question more than those of her male counterparts. Pitchfork writer Rawiya Kameir infamously rated “Cuz I Love You” a 6.5 out of 10, saying some songs were “burdened with overwrought production, awkward turns of phrase, and ham-handed rapping.” Lizzo replied, in a now deleted tweet, “PEOPLE WHO ‘REVIEW’ ALBUMS AND DON’T MAKE MUSIC THEMSELVES SHOULD BE UNEMPLOYED.” After public backlash, she sent another tweet inviting music journalists to her studio. 

Lizzo seems wholly aware that creating your own niche in hip-hop as a curvy black woman, in fact, makes you a bigger target. When she pointed out the double standard between herself and male rappers, she was met with ire. But it is more productive to keep making your art than defending it. With a cameo in the film “Hustlers,” a set at last year’s Made in America music festival in which Beyoncé took notice, and a monumental live performance last month on “Saturday Night Live,” Lizzo is rightfully securing her place in music. And her reign shows no sign of letting up.

AP

Myanmar's civilian leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, addresses the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherland, Dec. 11.

Of the many aspects of justice – from truth-telling to retribution to deterrence – perhaps the most difficult is redemption of those guilty. A good example is a decision Thursday by the United Nations’ highest tribunal.

A panel of 17 judges in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered Myanmar to protect the country’s minority Rohingya even while the court continues to weigh whether the military committed “genocidal acts” against the Muslim minority in 2017, during which thousands were killed.

In other words, the ICJ has some faith in the military’s ability to admit its mistakes and refrain from further harm against the 600,000 Rohingya left in Myanmar. The court asked the government to report back within four months.

In their decision, the judges noted Myanmar’s stated attempt to facilitate the return of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, promote ethnic reconciliation with the group, and hold the military accountable for violations of international human rights law. Indeed, seven soldiers were convicted of killing Rohingya in a military tribunal in 2018, although they received light punishment.

The judges may be trying to balance a swift imposition of universal standards against a patient approach toward Myanmar’s internal struggle to reduce the military’s powers, establish a full civilian democracy, and create a justice system based on a democratic consensus on the country’s moral standards.

The ICJ could yet decide that Myanmar did commit genocidal acts. It would then ask the U.N. Security Council to consider punishing the country, although that is doubtful. China or Russia might veto such a step. In the meantime, the court can only nudge Myanmar to speed up its attempts at reform.

In an opinion piece in The Financial Times this week, Aung San Suu Kyi, who effectively runs the civilian – and weaker – side of the government, asked the international community to give Myanmar a chance to discuss “accountability for human rights violations that occurred” and develop “a road map for change.” An official government inquiry has found that members of the military had committed war crimes against the Rohingya. But the panel could not prove genocide.

The Nobel laureate said foreign pressure is undermining the “painstaking domestic efforts to establish co-operation between the military and the civilian government.”

Myanmar’s military has reigned over the country for nearly 60 years. It perceives itself – not Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of the nation’s founder – as the protector of the Burmese people. It has made small steps so far to hold itself accountable for atrocities against minorities. Those steps are being forced both by domestic demands and by foreign entities such as U.N. tribunals. Redemption may come hard for Myanmar’s army. The ICJ decision is showing a path forward. It will be up to the military to walk in it.