Criminal justice reform advocates are getting a thorough airing of their proposals, with some changes in law already passed. Oregon is one of several states where the legislature is considering bills to change the juvenile justice system, so people do not enter the justice system as children and stay there for life. The senate passed a comprehensive overhaul bill, SB 1008, on Tuesday. The bill goes to the house. The ACLU of Oregon is one of the groups pushing for juvenile justice reform.

Human management of the environment is based on a lot of trial and error. Even if we're willing to fix the errors, how far back do we go? The first humans to affect the landscape didn't take notes, so there's a lot of guessing... and no guarantees that we've considered the myriad of variables. Former park/forest ranger Jordan Fisher Smith points out the difficulties in managing wilderness and other land types in his book Engineering Eden , now in paperback.

The legal cannabis industry is certainly making the dollars flow in Northern California. Example: business property that sat vacant for years got buyers--from cannabis-related businesses--soon after legalization. Shasta Gateway Industrial Park in Shasta Lake City sold off its last three undeveloped parcels in the boom. There are some particular twists in the activity in a mostly cash-only industry.

Arguments over water are par for the course in the West, but the situation in Mount Shasta has dragged on for a while. That's where Crystal Geyser plans to open a bottled-water plant, but is meeting opposition. The City of Mount Shasta's recent issuance of an industrial waste discharge permit moved things a step further, and drew protest from the group that uses the acronym W.A.T.E.R. and the Winnemem Wintu tribe.

Josephine Ensign dedicated herself to helping homeless people by giving them health care at a free clinic. Then her entire life turned upside-down, and she too ended up homeless for a time. She is back under a roof, the author of the book Catching Homelessness , and the head of a project at the University of Washington that aims to help homeless young people.

Does a change in state gun laws track with a change in homicide and suicide by gun? It does, shows an analysis of gun laws and gun data for all 50 states, from 1991 to 2016. It's a huge volume of data to process, but a team affiliated with the National Institute of Health put it all together in research recently published. The team can't say for sure that the relationship is causal, but there is a relationship.

New products for skin care and adornment debut all the time, making all kinds of claims about their scientific foundations. But the practices are very old, in some cases. The Rogue Valley's Neeta Singh learned techniques and substances from her mother and grandmother that may date back five thousand years. And she built a business on them, Neeta Naturals Ayurvedic Beauty & Wellness . Neeta Naturals and its founder are this month's focus in our business/entrepreneur segment, the Ground Floor.

Laurie Halse Anderson 's groundbreaking 1999 novel, "Speak," is credited with opening a new phase in the national dialogue about sexual assault and consent. In a unique memoir told in free-verse poetry, Shout , Anderson shares her own experience of sexual assault. The book denounces society's failures in dealing with sexual aggression, and boosts the people with the courage to speak up in the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements.

The animals that walk the Earth today are survivors; their ancestors adapted or moved to stay alive. So maybe rats will inherit the Earth, because they sure know how to live in a variety of environments. And you notice: they're usually not far from people and all the things they use/eat/drop. Emma Marris is a freelance journalist based in Klamath Falls; she got knee-deep in rats (so to speak) for a recent piece in National Geographic .

It is not unusual for a person who has suffered from mental illness to have at least considered suicide. Several of the members of Southern Oregon Compass House who have told their stories on our Compass Radio segment described suicidal feelings. Media outlets around Oregon join forces April 7 to 14 in a campaign called "Breaking the Silence," to speak out loud about suicide and contributing factors. So this month's edition of Compass Radio visits with a member who can help us understand