“Dear Mr. Cole,” the letter began. “My name is Jerry Wayne Johnson. I’m presently a Texas prisoner. You may recall my name from your 1986 rape trial in Lubbock.”

Ruby Session was shaking as she read on. The year was 2007, and the letter was addressed to her son Timothy Cole. “I have been trying to locate you since 1995 to tell you I wish to confess I did in fact commit the rape Lubbock wrongly convicted you of.”

Ruby sat down, stood up. A picture of Tim in a tuxedo, taken at his junior prom, smiled from the mantle. Before his trial the prosecutor had offered him a deal to plead to lesser charges. “Mother,” Tim had said, “I am not pleading guilty to something I didn’t do.” He was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Thirteen years later, he died behind bars.

The Texas criminal-justice system has long had a harsh reputation, but it has drawn renewed scrutiny with Gov. Rick Perry’s run for president. During the past 11 years, Perry has presided over 238 executions, including the infamous case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was put to death based on a dubious arson investigation. In a September debate, Perry famously said that he had lost no sleep over the possibility of an innocent man being executed on his watch.

Yet during his governorship, Texas has exonerated no fewer than 56 people. All had served years, sometimes decades, in prison; five were on death row. As Perry sees it, these exonerations don’t suggest a problem with the system—they demonstrate that it’s working. “We have a very lengthy and methodical process of appeals,” he said in March 2010. “And that is a great and good mark for Texas.”

Perry made those remarks during an extraordinary ceremony in which he handed down the first posthumous pardon in Texas history. Timothy Cole, imprisoned while a 26-year-old student at Texas Tech University, had been failed by the justice system at every turn. But what makes his story particularly gut-wrenching is that he perished in prison even as the real rapist, Jerry Johnson, tried repeatedly to confess to the crime. By the time Johnson’s story was heard, Cole had been dead nearly a decade.

The tale of Tim Cole and Jerry Johnson, which I investigated for more than a year, reveals a system in which an innocent man, once convicted, has virtually no chance of redemption—even with the guilty man fighting for it. For the thousands of Americans spending years of their lives in prison for crimes they did not commit, the odds couldn’t be much bleaker.

On the night of March 24, 1985, Texas Tech sophomore Michele Murray was parking her car near campus when a tall black man in a yellow terry-cloth shirt approached and asked her for jumper cables. He reached into the window, unlocked the door, and shoved Murray to the passenger side. He forced her head down onto the seat and held a knife to her neck. He told her that if she kept screaming she wouldn’t come back alive.

He smoked while he drove. He asked her name, her major. He took her to a field outside of town and raped her. He smoked when he was done. Then he made her drive him back to town, stole her jewelry and money, and took off on foot.

It was the fifth rape on or around the Texas Tech campus in four months. Female students were frantic. Police were on high alert. In all the cases, a young woman was approached in her car by a tall black man—identified as a smoker by three of the victims—who drove her outside of town at knifepoint and raped her. Composite sketches of the “Tech rapist” in the local papers seemed to change daily. Only about 500 of the 22,000 students on campus were black, and it became a grim joke among them: Don’t walk around campus at night or they’ll say you’re the rapist.

The shoddy police investigation and sensational trial that followed were capped by a remarkable coincidence. When Cole was taken to the Lubbock County Jail after his sentencing, in September 1986, the real rapist was right there in a nearby cell. Johnson, who was awaiting trial for two other rapes and a murder, had followed Cole’s story in the paper. He listened to Cole cry. “It was terrible to learn that Tim was…on trial for something I knew he hadn’t done,” Johnson wrote to me in a letter in 2010. “Seeing him cry his first night in jail and seeing him leave to be taken to prison was difficult, I cried.” But he did nothing. He was already facing the death penalty. “I knew it wasn’t good to say anything before I went to trial.” Later he would learn in the prison library that there was also the statute of limitations to consider. So he kept his mouth shut—for nine years.

Johnson grew up in the 1960s on the east side of Lubbock, an impoverished neighborhood of cotton fields and ramshackle houses. He was raised mostly by his great-grandmother; his mother, JoNell Johnson, and grandmother lived nearby, as did his estranged father, Lorenzo Harris. “Sometimes Jerry would come over to the house, be out there at the fence,” Harris recalls. “He knew I was his daddy, but my wife would run him off.”

Johnson was 12 years old the night in 1971 when his mother shot and killed a boyfriend after he assaulted her with a pool cue. (She was eventually sentenced to 10 years’ probation.) He dropped out of high school but managed steady employment in blue-collar jobs. He had two children and got married in the early 1980s. But by 1985, Johnson says, he had lost control. “Obviously I had a psychological breakdown,” he says. “Why, I don’t know.” When pressed, he demurs. “I cannot form a reason or cause for my actions.”

Johnson raped Murray in March, he now admits, but investigators never pursued him as a suspect. He was arrested that July, however, for raping a woman he met at a party. In October, out on bond, he was arrested for kidnapping and raping a 15-year-old girl from Estacado High School; two years later, he was convicted of those crimes and sentenced to life in prison. He was also charged with murdering an insurance saleswoman, but those charges were dropped.

Johnson and I had been corresponding for about a year when we finally met in March 2010, in a bright, empty visitation room at the Price Daniel correctional facility in Snyder, Texas. Tall and thickly built, Johnson was dressed in the facility’s standard white cotton shirt and pants and was soft-spoken and polite. Now 52, Johnson is certain he’ll never be free again. “There’s a lot of people live a false life; everything they do is a lie. Never no honesty. And you have those people that go to their death like that. I don’t want to go to mine like that.”

When I ask him about the four other Texas Tech rapes—so similar to Murray’s but never solved—he says, “I don’t have a comment about that stuff.”

Hill View Drive, the leafy middle-class block where Tim Cole and his six younger siblings grew up, was overrun with kids. Cole was a big brother to them all: He organized sports games, led neighborhood jogs, and gave advice. “Tim used to always tell me to be the best I could be,” recalls neighbor Leon Warren. “He would tell me, ‘Make sure you go to a major university and do good,’ and ‘You can make it.’”

From an early age Cole was sure he would play basketball in college—despite his severe asthma, he loved sports—study business, and own his own company. He went to Texas Tech and the University of Texas-San Antonio before joining the Army in 1981; in 1984, he moved in with his younger brother Reggie in Lubbock to go back to school at Tech. He studied long hours, worked as a dishwasher, and partied occasionally. In January 1985, he was robbed outside a party, and when he reported the crime, police found some marijuana and a gun in his pocket. (He was charged with a misdemeanor.)

One night that April, outside a pizza parlor, Cole chatted up a woman named Rosanna. After Cole had driven away, she got into her partner’s squad car, sure she’d found her mark. Rosanna was an undercover police officer—bait for the Tech rapist. Two days later, a detective stopped by Cole’s place. He needed to take a picture, he said, for the investigation of the robbery Cole had reported. Cole looked straight into the camera and the detective snapped a Polaroid.

Later that day, an officer brought a photo lineup over to Murray’s dorm. All but one of the photos were mug shots—men looking away from the camera, holding their book-in cards. Murray hesitated. She pointed to the Polaroid of Cole. “I think that is him,” she said.

“Are you positive?” asked the officer.

“Yes,” she said. “I am positive.”

Eyewitness identification has long been the most powerful tool in a prosecutor’s arsenal. Even when there is a dearth of forensic evidence, juries are swayed by a victim’s certitude—how could she forget the face of the person who raped her? But researchers are learning just how often eyewitnesses are wrong: Nationwide, incorrect identification was a factor in the convictions of more than 75 percent of people eventually exonerated by DNA. Gary Wells, an Iowa State University psychology professor who has studied the issue for decades, says the Lubbock police did exactly the things that can influence an eyewitness to choose the wrong guy. In a good lineup, he says, the witness must be warned that the perpetrator might not be in the lineup at all. “The tendency is to pick the person who looks most like the perpetrator—relative to the other lineup members,” Wells explains. He also argues that the process must be double blind: Neither the officer nor the witness should know which photo shows the true suspect. “It’s so natural for the lineup administrator, if you pick the person they had in mind, to smile, react, to reinforce.”

For his 2011 book, Convicting the Innocent, University of Virginia law professor Brandon Garrett examined hundreds of DNA exonerations and found that in at least a third of the cases the victim was shown a “stacked lineup” like Cole’s, where the actual suspect was highlighted. Even if victims were uncertain initially, he says, “by the time of trial, almost all of them were absolutely sure they were identifying the right person.”

At trial, Cole faced a jury that included one member whose ex-wife had recently been a victim of sexual assault. His brother Reggie and his friends testified that on the night of the rape they were home, partying, while Cole sat at the dining room table all night studying. Reggie also testified that his brother never smoked due to his asthma. But the prosecutor, Jim Bob Darnell, portrayed them as liars who would say anything to save Cole.

No evidence tied Cole to the rape. His attorney, Mike Brown, brought up Jerry Johnson several times and even submitted a picture of him as evidence. Johnson had been charged with two rapes by then, and Brown recognized similarities with those assaults. It didn’t matter. “What the jurors saw, and heard, was a courageous young woman unshakeable in her belief of who had raped her,” District Court Judge Charlie Baird would write many years later in exonerating Cole. “What they did not know was how that belief had been shaped and formed by the police.”

Ruby Session chokes with sorrow as she recalls the moments after her son was sentenced, when he fell to the courtroom floor and cried. She got off her chair and down on the floor with him. She hugged him and rocked him. “My son, a 26-year-old man, lying in his mother’s arms. And that’s all I could do. And that’s the last time my baby was in my arms like that.”

Johnson’s plan from the start, he says, was to contact Cole directly. “I believed at some point I would connect with him,” he says, “and he would probably send a lawyer to talk with me and try to get himself out.” He began by writing letters to everyone he knew in prison, asking if they’d run into a guy named Tim Cole. It was a fool’s errand—Cole could have been among any one of more than 100 prison units. But Johnson says he couldn’t think of another way to find him.

Johnson did not approach the authorities until years after the statute of limitations for the Murray rape had run out. Then, in 1995, he petitioned the court to appoint an attorney for him so he could confess. He copied the petition both to Brown and the district attorney. He got no response.

For five years Johnson worked on his own appeals and helped other prisoners with their legal paperwork. “Never during this time period did I not think about Tim and the petition or a way to contact him,” he says. But he took no further action.

Then, in 2000, Johnson sent the court a letter: “Judge I believe I have properly raised an important issue the court should have long ago addressed. Certainly the convicted man would want to see his name finally cleared.” In January 2001, he got a two-line order in the mail, with no explanation. It simply said, “Denied.”

Most appeals in Texas criminal cases end up at the Court of Criminal Appeals, which consists primarily of former prosecutors elected to the bench. The court rarely reverses a case, even in the face of glaring errors or unfairness—in one case, it upheld the conviction of a man cleared by DNA evidence—and its conduct has prompted the US Supreme Court to rebuke it several times.

The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles is similarly stacked with former law enforcement officials and prosecutors. They rarely meet in person, typically passing a file from one office to the next for an up-or-down vote. The inmate has no right to demand a hearing from the board or receive an explanation. “Either they hire a lawyer or they pray to God,” says William T. Habern, former executive director of the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Project. “They can write something in if they want to, but who do you think the board is going to believe? Some inmate?” When Cole was up for parole in 1996, Texas considered 1,024 cases classified as SB-45, or “Extraordinary Vote,” which include certain types of sexual abuse and violent crimes, and require a vote by the full board. Among those 1,024 cases, not a single prisoner was granted parole and released.

Until the advent of DNA technology, wrongful convictions were thought to be extremely rare. But as the number of DNA exonerations rises—at least 281 as of this writing—we confront the uncomfortable truth that the number of innocent people behind bars is far higher than we realize. The vast majority of DNA exonerations are in rape cases. In many felony cases—robberies, shootings, murders, drug-related crimes—there is no DNA to test. Even in rape cases, forensic evidence often is lost or destroyed.

DNA testing provides false assurance, then, that there is recourse for people failed by the justice system. What it really does is underscore what a true solution would require: a system equipped to deal with the significant number of people locked up for crimes they did not commit. Experts say that number is nearly impossible to nail down. But a conservative estimate, extrapolating from research on eyewitness identification and DNA exonerations, ranges from at least a few thousand to more than 20,000 people wrongly imprisoned nationwide.

A string of devastating stories has put Texas justice, in particular, under a cloud. In addition to Cole’s postmortem exoneration and the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham, chronicled in The New Yorker in 2009, there is also the case of Anthony Graves, who served 18 years for a gruesome murder while the true killer confessed again and again. Graves was finally freed in 2010 following a Texas Monthly exposé.

Cole, Willingham, and Graves were all convicted under prior Texas governors. But Perry has done little to improve the state’s criminal-justice system, which has almost a million people in its grip. In 2001, he vetoed a bill banning the execution of the mentally disabled. In 2003, he cut the prison system’s budget by $230 million, slashing education programs, drug treatment, and food; when an independent auditor warned that was untenable, Perry cut the auditor’s office too. In 2007, his administration backed a bill making some child sex offenders eligible for the death penalty. While Perry has signed legislative reforms covering eyewitness identification and access to DNA testing, the system still offers scant options for the many people imprisoned for crimes they did not commit.

During his years behind bars, Cole tried to keep himself busy. He took business classes, corresponded with family, and subscribed to magazines like Nature, Jet, and Money. “I want to become vindicated as well as totally exonerated in order to receive a Pardon from the Governor of the State of Texas in order to place it on my wall in my future office or the den of my home,” he wrote in one letter. As he told his mother to stay strong and his brothers to study hard and go to college, he repeated this phrase like a mantra: “vindicated and totally exonerated.”

In 1991, Cole won an appeal on procedural grounds, but the Court of Criminal Appeals still ruled his conviction would stand. In 1992, his case was considered by the pardon and parole board. He was asked if he was sorry for what he did. He said he didn’t do anything. He was denied parole. He kept up on emerging DNA technology, and in 1995 he wrote a letter to the newly founded Innocence Project in New York City, but the organization did not take his case. In 1996, he was denied parole again.

Cole was running out of options. The dust, heat, and poor ventilation had brought back his asthma, and he was shuttled between hospital wards and prison cells—twice he was found unconscious and rushed to the emergency room.

In Cole’s letters, upbeat sentiments like “I will continue to patiently wait for this unfortunate matter to resolve itself” began to give way to “How far does this miscarriage of justice have to go before I can prove my innocence?” And finally, “I don’t have any more dreams.”

On December 2, 1999, Tim Cole was on his way to the infirmary with chest pain when he collapsed on the floor and never woke up again. He was 39.

There is no formal legal means in Texas to confess to a crime for which someone else has been convicted. “I guess you can contact whatever law enforcement agency handled the case,” says Lubbock District Attorney Matt Powell. That, of course, is precisely what Johnson did when he copied his petition to the district attorney in 1995.

“Here you’ve got a guilty guy saying, ‘I did this crime,’” says Jeff Blackburn, chief counsel for the Innocence Project of Texas. “All the ears went deaf and all the eyes went blind.”

The Innocence Project of Texas itself receives thousands of letters each year from inmates claiming to be innocent, and Blackburn says that has fine-tuned his BS detector. Even guilty prisoners have nothing to lose by trying; indeed, Johnson wrote to the Innocence Project about Cole in 2005, but his confession was buried in a diatribe about other issues and got no traction. Johnson also fired off letters to newspaper reporters, law professors, and even a private investigation firm. Some were angry rants about Lubbock law enforcement; some asked for help with his own innocence claim; some expressed a wish to confess. Many of the letters contained all these things, perhaps making them difficult to take seriously.

But then, in 2006, Cole’s former attorney, Mike Brown, received one of Johnson’s letters. (Brown says he doesn’t recall ever receiving a copy of Johnson’s 1995 petition.) He forwarded it to Powell, who sent an investigator to look into it, not expecting much.

By April 2007, Johnson still had gotten nowhere. But then, while looking through some old papers, an idea struck him. He had his stepmother look up Cole’s jail book-in card, which contained Cole’s home address. Soon afterward, Ruby Session held Johnson’s letter to her son in her hands.

After recovering from the shock, Session sent a copy of Johnson’s letter to the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, which during her son’s trial had run his name under headlines referring to the “Tech rapist.” Now, the paper noted: “The family of Timothy Brian Cole, who was 26 when he was convicted of rape in 1986 and died in prison while serving a 25-year sentence, hope a letter they received last week from a man imprisoned for two brutal rapes around the same time will finally clear the former Tech student’s name.”

Reading the paper in his cell, Johnson was stunned. He’d had no idea Cole had died. “I remember not coming off my bunk the rest of that night,” he says. “I reread and reread that article.”

The paper also quoted a skeptical Jeff Blackburn of the Innocence Project. “We’ve had several of these guys,” he said. “None of them have checked out.” Cole’s youngest brother, Cory, took exception to Blackburn’s comments and called to tell him. The two men soon became friends. After the Innocence Project sent a lawyer to interview Johnson, Blackburn agreed to represent the family to clear Cole’s name. With public pressure mounting, the DA’s office discovered that the original rape kit was still in storage; it conducted DNA testing with Johnson’s cooperation and soon confirmed that he was indeed the rapist.

The proceeding to posthumously exonerate Cole took place in Austin in February 2009. Michele Murray (now Mallin) was there to confront Johnson for the first time since 1985. She and Session hugged and cried, and she told Johnson that she hoped he’d suffer for what he’d done to her, and to Cole. “No man—no person—deserves what that young man got,” she said.

Cole’s brother Sean rocked in his chair and cried as Judge Baird read his ruling: “I find to a 100 percent moral, factual, and legal certainty that Timothy Cole did not sexually assault Michele Murray Mallin.”

Session listened, expressionless.

“I find that Timothy Cole’s reputation was wrongly injured, that his reputation must be restored, and that his good name must be vindicated.”

Cole’s brother Reggie pumped both fists in the air.

“I find that Tim Cole shall be and is hereby exonerated and freed from any guilt or blame related to the sexual assault of Michele Murray Mallin.”

It was all over the news. Texans in their living rooms heard about it, the Board of Pardons and Paroles heard about it, legislators heard about it. The Tim Cole Act, establishing one of the nation’s most generous compensation programs for the wrongfully convicted, passed three months later.

On a windy day in March 2010, Rick Perry, impeccably groomed in a camel-colored jacket and green tie, stood in a hotel conference room in downtown Fort Worth. Perry quoted from Proverbs and flashed a solemn grin around a room filled with family members, reporters, and exonerated convicts. “Ruby, it means the world to me to be here today to look you in the eye and tell you that your son is pardoned,” he said. He commended her for her “graceful persuasiveness” and called her a “wonderful, loving, Christian woman.” Then Perry leaned in to hug her, adding, “And I want to say: I love you.”

But if Perry learned anything from the exoneration of Tim Cole, it was not in evidence 18 months later, when he went on national television and declared his absolute faith in the Texas justice system. Ruby Session clearly had not shared that faith as she received Perry’s pardon, somber-faced. That night she went home and, next to her son’s junior-prom picture, carefully placed on the mantle the piece of paper he had died waiting for.

January/February 2012

Before we talk about how many people may be behind bars for crimes they did not commit, we must acknowledge that it’s nearly impossible to know—only broad estimates are possible. There are several key reasons, experts say, why a number is so hard to ascertain. Because the sprawling criminal justice system is a patchwork of federal, state, county, and municipal courts, prisons, and jails—each with its own system (or lack thereof) of record-keeping and data-reporting—we don’t even know how many people are convicted, let alone wrongfully convicted, of crimes in the United States. “We don’t even have a denominator,” says University of Virginia law professor Brandon Garrett. “But the wrongful convictions we do know about suggest that there’s a big problem.”

Extrapolating from the 281 known DNA exonerations in the US since the late 1980s, a conservative estimate is that 1 percent of the US prison population, approximately 20,000 people, are falsely convicted.

In fact, since the late 1980s there have been as many as 850 exonerations nationwide, according to University of Michigan law professor Samuel Gross, a leading researcher in the field. Many of them float under the radar, Gross says, unlike the highly publicized DNA exonerations.

These cases are the tip of an iceberg. “One difficulty in making generalizations about false convictions is that the ones we know about, exonerations, are clearly a small and unrepresentative sample of all false convictions,” wrote Gross in his 2008 paper, “Frequency and Predictors of False Conviction.” There are several reasons why the known exoneration cases are unrepresentative:

• Because the average time from conviction to exoneration is about 13 years, only those sentenced to serious crimes with decades-long prison terms are likely to even bother undertaking the long, arduous, and resource-intensive process of clearing their names.
• The vast majority of DNA exonerations are in a tiny sliver of cases: aggravated rape and rape-murders that occurred in the 1980s. That’s because it’s almost exclusively rape cases in which there is DNA available to test—and because these types of wrongful convictions rarely occur anymore.
• Now, prosecutors typically test DNA before charging a suspect. In one study in which the FBI did DNA testing during the course of its investigations, 25 percent of suspects were ruled out by the DNA testing. Before the advent of DNA testing, some of these suspects may well have gone on to be tried, and, possibly, convicted.

Moreover, a tiny amount of total criminal cases actually go to trial. Nineteen out of twenty, or 95 percent, of convictions in the US are by plea bargain—and so we know little about them. They “generate virtually no records that can be retrieved,” writes Gross: “no trial transcripts, no appeals, frequently no court hearings of any sort, in many cases no description of the investigation at all beyond a single police report, which (if it could be found) might include little factual information of any value.”

The only cases for which we know the denominator, and for which we almost always have trial transcripts, are death penalty cases. However, the wrongful conviction rate in death penalty cases is probably higher than that of other cases, Gross says, for two reasons: First, capital cases are high-profile, emotional cases in which prosecutors face a lot of pressure to secure a conviction. On the other hand, because of the seriousness of the crime, capital defendants are afforded many more legal protections than those facing lesser penalties—unlike other defendants, they are provided lawyers for every step of the appeals process, and their cases receive major scrutiny from innocence projects and other advocates.

Gross’ 2008 analysis found that the rate of exoneration for all capital defendants in the recent era is 2.3 percent. If the rate of exoneration for all non-death-row crimes (which is unknown) were the same, then there could have been as many as 87,000 exonerations of that kind from 1989-2003.

Read my related post on the Boston Daily blog.

IT’S TUESDAY AFTERNOON just before fourth period, and groups of teenagers are smoking cigarettes outside their high school. Standing among them is Billy, who has the smooth cheeks and soft-edged features of a typical 16-year-old. But there’s also a hardness to him. His hazel eyes are impassive. His dark hair is buzzed close to his head, and he has a wispy goatee and his last name tattooed in black script on his forearm.

When Billy was 14, his father, Bill Sr., went to jail on drug-related charges, and the family lost their house and split up. Billy stayed with his mother in a homeless shelter and a series of hotels, each of them trying to hide their drug use from the other. Eventually they stopped pretending and started hustling together to come up with the money for their $200-per-day heroin habit.

At most schools, an adolescent heroin junkie would be a pariah, and probably even be expelled or arrested. But Billy goes to Northshore Recovery High in Beverly, one of three state-funded schools attended exclusively by teenage drug and alcohol addicts. And according to his teachers and principal, he’s been thriving — it’s the first time he’s consistently shown up for school since seventh grade. Having completed a 90-day residential treatment program for his heroin use, he’s now living with his father, who was recently released from jail, and his uncle. (His mother also sought treatment, but eventually relapsed and is now locked up.) He met his girlfriend, Lexi, at the school, and the two of them help each other stay sober. Billy and his father both agree that if he weren’t at Northshore, he wouldn’t be in school at all.

It may sound like trouble — a bunch of teen addicts spending their days together in an alternative school — but Harvard psychologist John Kelly, the associate director of the Center for Addiction Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, says a recovery high school can “provide a safe social context,” which helps teenagers resist temptations.

Perhaps that’s so, but resisting temptation can apparently mean different things to different people. Billy may be attending a school specially designed to help him overcome his drug addiction, but he and Lexi openly admit that they regularly smoke pot. In fact, Billy keeps failing the drug tests that are required at the school. After each positive test, he sits down with his principal and the school’s recovery counselor, and they call in his father or uncle for a group discussion on how to help him stay sober. The school’s approach has been to focus on the major concern — heroin — first. Billy says the message he’s been given is “We’re not really worried about you failing for weed. Opiates are the problem right now.”

Most recovery schools across the country require students to commit to sobriety in order to enroll. But Northshore director Michelle Lipinski, who functions essentially as the principal, takes a much different approach. She believes that even if students are using, her school provides them with a safe environment to work through the recovery process. If they’re struggling with drug use, she reasons, better they do so at Northshore than on the streets. “These are the kids who will eventually be the dropouts of our society, not just our schools, if we don’t do something for them,” she says. “Sobriety isn’t how I measure success.”

NORTHSHORE RECOVERY HIGH occupies the ground floor of an old public school in Beverly, and the hallways are filled with the familiar sound of sneakers squeaking on linoleum and lockers slamming. Students curse freely and wander in and out of class without much reprimand. During gym, they are allowed to “take a walk” (i.e., go outside to smoke). At one point during math class, the teacher looks up from drawing sine waves on the board to discover there are only four students at their desks. “Where did everyone go?” he asks.

The woman overseeing this chaos, Michelle Lipinski, has wavy brown hair and a gregarious center-of-attention personality. The familiar, intimate way she relates to her students makes her seem, at 45 years old, more like a mother than a principal. At any hour of the day, and even on weekends, she can be found texting with students and their parents.

Before arriving at Northshore, Lipinski worked as a science teacher at an alternative school in Salem, eventually becoming the school’s director. For years she watched her students leave for rehab, come back looking healthy, and then relapse within weeks. When one of them died of a drug overdose, she says she began “thinking about what we can do differently as a school system to really address the problem.” It’s then that she started to question how well abstinence actually works in a classroom setting.

The country’s first recovery high school opened in Minnesota in 1989, and the model has since spread to about 20 schools in 10 other states. In 2006, Massachusetts opened recovery schools in Beverly, Boston, and Springfield, and one is scheduled to open in Brockton next month. The schools in Massachusetts are small, with no more than a few dozen students at any given time, but collectively they have enrolled some 450 kids in their first five years. Half of them have either graduated or are still in school.

Recovery highs are structured much like traditional schools, with students attending classes taught by certified public school teachers. The kids are referred by parole officers, other schools, fed-up parents, the Department of Children and Families, and rehab and detox centers. Tuition, which averages around $10,000, is paid for by their home school district, while the Department of Public Health provides each recovery high with up to $500,000 a year for substance abuse counseling, drug testing, and training. Students are required to create and follow an individualized recovery plan, which can include anything from attending 12-step meetings to working with a therapist or joining a sober bowling team.

Though most addiction research has focused on adults, studies demonstrate that two aspects of the adolescent brain make teenagers particularly susceptible to problem drug use. The first is that the nucleus accumbens — the brain’s pleasure center — has not yet fully matured in teens, meaning they often look for easy ways of finding excitement and rewards. The second, says psychologist Robert Miranda, an associate professor at Brown University’s Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies, is that the frontal cortex — the part of the brain responsible for caution — is not yet completely developed.

Of course, drug use is a major concern even among teens who don’t qualify as addicts. The National Institute on Drug Abuse has found that nearly half of all 12th graders nationwide have used a drug at some point, and almost a quarter have done so in the past month. More than 5 percent of 12th graders smoke pot every day — the highest rate in three decades — and almost 8 percent of kids ages 12 to 17 used prescription pills like Vicodin to get high last year. Here in Massachusetts, the Department of Public Health reports that about 1,700 kids ages 12 to 17 receive state-funded treatment for substance abuse annually. And they typically relapse within a year.

And it turns out that the younger a person is when he begins using drugs or alcohol, the worse his long-term prognosis. “There is a huge push to try to identify kids with drug problems early on, and try to treat them before they get out of adolescence,” Miranda says. That’s part of the motivation for a national effort to integrate substance abuse support services into schools. “The White House and the Office of National Drug Control Policy are right behind this issue,” says Kelly, the associate director of MGH’s addiction center.

Getting kids sober, in other words, is a major priority. But keeping them that way can be a tricky task. A lifetime of unbroken sobriety is a lot to hope for no matter when you begin the recovery process — scientists believe that falling off the wagon is actually part of recovering — but it’s a particularly long trajectory when you’re starting as a teen. And Kelly points out that while adults tend to relapse in isolation, “adolescents nearly always relapse in social environments. If you can create a social environment where recovery and non-use is the norm, they can do much better.”

But does recovery have to mean non-use? To most experts it does, but a vocal and passionate minority — groups like the Harm Reduction Coalition and the Drug Policy Alliance — argues that, in the long run, insisting on total abstinence is unrealistic at best, harmful at worst. Lipinski comes down on that side of the debate, which makes Northshore Recovery High an outlier within the larger recovery movement: There are no 12 steps, no strict path that students must follow. The notion of safe and sober is not black and white, Lipinski argues. Her students don’t “live in a world that’s safe. They’re in and out of homeless shelters. We would never be able to keep them here if we had that zero-tolerance policy.” Lipinski’s approach is aligned with what’s broadly known as “harm reduction,” which holds that, for better or worse, some people will use drugs no matter what. Needle-exchange programs and “wet houses,” where alcoholics can continue to drink, were born of this philosophy. The idea is that if someone can’t stop or won’t stop using, we should at least make his drug use safer and less harmful, both to him and those around him.

Lipinski’s unwillingness to demand that her students remain drug-free pits her against her colleagues. In fact, Lipinski recently resigned from the board of the Association of Recovery Schools, which sets standards and guidelines for recovery schools nationwide, because of what she believes to be its overly rigid approach to adolescent addiction. Traci Bowermaster, the board’s former chair, insists that allowing a young person to use drugs in a recovery environment is detrimental to him and the other addicts in the school. “In order for kids to really be able to embrace a new identity as a person in recovery, they have to remove ties from those who might still be using,” Bowermaster says.

Indeed, most recovery high schools ask students to commit to some version of a 12-step program prior to enrolling. At Boston’s William J. Ostiguy High School, for example, the expectation is abstinence. The school’s philosophy is that a student who is actively using doesn’t belong there. He belongs in treatment. Like Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, the school believes that no drug use is safe, and that total sobriety should be every drug user’s ultimate goal. “This is not a small thing for me,” says Ostiguy principal Roger Oser. “To put us under the same umbrella? I don’t think Ostiguy High and Northshore are recovery highs in the same sense.”

IT’S MONDAY MORNING, just a week into the school year, and all 52 students at Northshore shuffle into the school’s cafeteria and plop down on drab tan couches, arranged in a circle, for their daily check-in. Billy and his friend Alex, both wearing baggy jeans and oversize hoodies, sit together on a couch. Alex, a sweet-faced kid with blond hair and blue eyes, is recovering from an addiction to sedatives. “Alex,” Michelle Lipinski begins, “can you share where you were yesterday and where you are today?”

“Sure,” says Alex, 16. “Last couple weeks, I had the mindset that I was going to just smoke weed, and just control it. Then I talked to my mom, and she started crying. I just couldn’t fucking handle it. So I was like, Fuck it. I’ll just be sober, for now at least.”

“Do you feel like you just stopped a tidal wave from hitting you?” Lipinski asks.

“Yeah,” Alex nods. “But I just want to smoke weed and be a normal teenager, you know?”

Smoking pot is so common at Northshore that Lipinski says “students really do perceive of marijuana as legal.” And like its students, the school treats the drug as different from others, essentially handling it the way the state does — as a misdemeanor. But its ubiquity seems to confuse students about just what being clean means. One young woman who smokes marijuana every day tells the group that she likes to think she’s in control of her daily pot use, but knows that she’s not.

As the meeting continues, a guy tells everyone that his plan to have one or two beers the night he got out of rehab ended with him drinking so much that he burned a hole in his pants with a cigarette. “There’s no way I can have [only] a couple,” he says.

“You’re not alone,” says another classmate. “Everybody wants to be a normal teenager. You know what I mean?”

Lipinski nods from the corner, beaming with pride. “That’s fellowship,” she says. “And that’s where the strength comes.”

At William J. Ostiguy High School in Boston, however, the strength comes from fellowship of a different kind. During the second week of school, principal Roger Oser waits outside as students arrive for the day. The school is housed on the third and fourth floors of the Action for Boston Community Development building in Downtown Crossing, and on the sidewalk outside it’s not unusual to see business people in suits walking past actors in Colonial-era dress taking breaks from reenactments on the Common.

Oser stands with his hands in his pockets and greets each student by name.

“Hey,” one kid says to his friend as he arrives, stopping to smoke a cigarette. “You got a lighter?”

“We don’t say, ‘Good morning’ at Ostiguy,” Oser says. “We say, ‘Got a lighter?’”

The student smiles as his friend tosses him a lighter. “Good morning,” he says.

Oser, 42, is short, with a boyish face, an easy smile, and a wide girth. He’s wearing a shirt and tie, and his cropped gray hair is about the only part of him that recalls the years he spent in the Navy. Before Ostiguy, he worked as a teacher with the Department of Youth Services and then as an administrator in other settings for at-risk youth. He’s playful — the students affectionately call him “Rog” — but also stern. His staffers stress civility, respect, and order: no cursing in school, no revealing clothing, no hats, no phones, no headphones. Those with negative attitudes are evaluated daily to determine whether they’re exhibiting the school’s “five P’s”: prepared, positive, productive, polite, and personally responsible. If their attitudes don’t improve, they can be suspended. “I hate the concept that a kid’s going to come to Ostiguy and we’re going to ‘save’ that kid,” says Oser. “It’s not a treatment program. It’s not a daycare program. We’re a school. They’re here to learn.”

Suspension is not punitive, Oser insists. At Ostiguy, “When a kid relapses, that’s a time to engage them more.” When a relapse at Ostiguy does occur, the student works with his or her parents, and with Oser and the school’s drug counselor, to revise the recovery plan — attending more meetings, for example, or getting a sponsor — and is allowed to come back to school only after completing the steps.

Last year, Oser recalls, one student started missing a lot of school, and when he did show up, he looked disheveled and refused to go to meetings or therapy. Teachers suspected he’d relapsed, but because he was passing his drug tests, they didn’t suspend him. By the time they realized he was using K2 — an herbal compound sold as incense that can cause seizures and paranoia — he had already turned several other students on to the drug. (Because K2 was legal until earlier this year, schools only recently started testing for it.) “The kid was not ready last year. He was a mess,” says Oser. “Keeping him in here as long as we did was a mistake.” Eventually they removed him from school and sent him to rehab. These days, Oser says, that student is an intern at Ostiguy and “a leader of the recovery community.” The school has since revised its relapse policy, which now states that mere behavior indicating a setback can be grounds for suspension. “I’ve never regretted suspending a student,” says Oser. “I have regretted allowing students to stay in the population, hoping things would get better. I can almost say it never works.”

PRELIMINARY DATA FROM THE TWO schools highlight the stark differences in their philosophies and goals. According to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, 97 percent of the 153 students referred to Northshore in its first five years actually enrolled and stayed — and nearly every one of them was actively using drugs at the time of enrollment. That’s no surprise given that the school will take all comers, regardless of whether they’re sober.

By contrast, the tougher standards at Ostiguy meant that while 84 percent of the 142 students referred to that school wound up enrolling and staying, just 22 percent of them were actively using at the time. What’s really striking, though, is that while fully 90 percent of Northshore students reported that they continued substance use, at least occasionally, after leaving the school, just 12 percent of Ostiguy students reported the same. Even so, according to the DPH, students at both schools who were still using when they left were doing so less often than when they initially enrolled.

It’s easy to think that Northshore is simply too chaotic and too permissive to be doing its students much good. Especially when you factor in the conclusions of Harvard’s John Kelly, who says that adolescent addiction programs “generally have the best results” when they “reward moves in the right direction” — that direction being reduced use and abstinence — and have clearly defined sanctions in place. The truth is, there are times when you wonder whether Northshore has the kind of sanctions Kelly is talking about. Do the students there have the sense that there’s something — anything —  at stake? The bar at Northshore can seem extraordinarily low. As long as you want to get better, and as long as you’re not in imminent danger of killing yourself or others, the message seems to be: At least you showed up. We’re glad you’re here. Let’s talk about it. Don’t kids need to be pushed harder than that to do the miserable, difficult work that recovery requires?

But there’s something else that’s true: Northshore offers at least some kind of structure and support to the teens who need it most. And if the choice is between a low bar and an unsupervised 14-year-old boy hiding in the woods outside an ATM so he can rob people — as Billy once did to pay for heroin — well, the low bar may win.

LATER IN THE DAY at Northshore, Alex and Billy go outside to smoke a cigarette and continue their conversation about marijuana. People can say what they want about weed, Billy announces, “But for me, that’s not a serious drug addiction.”

Alex nods. “I don’t think it’s that bad,” he says. “If you’re coming up positive for opiates, you’re going to have a problem.”

But Billy knows that eventually Lipinski will push him to cut down or stop with the pot completely. “When it does come time,” he tells Alex as their teachers start calling them in for fourth period, “I don’t know how I’m going to stop smoking weed. I have smoked weed every single day of my life since I was 11. And when I don’t smoke, I’m a dickhead. I’m such an asshole.”

Alex says that’s how he is about quitting cigarettes. “Butts?” Billy says, blowing out smoke. “I don’t plan on quitting them anytime soon. You don’t have to worry about that.”

If you’re a “woman of a certain age” in Israel, you don’t have a straightforward term like “menopause” to refer to that stage of life. In Hebrew you’re stuck with gil ha’blut, which translates roughly to “the age of worn out.” In Arabic it’s sinn al-ya’s — “the age of despair.” So when Dana Weinberg and Raghda Elnabilsy set out to adapt the seminal text “Our Bodies, Ourselves” for Hebrew- and Arabic-speaking populations in Israel, they had to reinvent some of the very words that defined the original version.

A groundbreaking paradigm shifter that taught women to value themselves and helped usher in women’s rights, the original pamphlet — written by 12 feminists in Boston — included sections on masturbation, virginity, orgasms and abortion. Detailed photos demonstrating such forbidden topics as proper use of contraceptives led groups across the country to attempt to have the book banned from local libraries. Yet its influence was enormous: Since “Our Bodies, Ourselves” was first published in 1970 as a 193-page newsprint booklet, it has sold more than 4 million copies, been through nine revisions and numerous translations, spearheaded by grassroots women’s groups in more than 25 countries. Each new American edition reflects changing attitudes toward women’s health and sexuality.

The Hebrew and Arabic versions, released in September, boast timely topics that are of interest to their respective demographics. For example, because treatments for infertility are so expensive in the United States, the chapter on assisted reproductive technologies in the American edition is relatively short; in Israel, in vitro fertilization and other infertility interventions are government subsidized and in widespread use, so the corresponding chapter in the Hebrew edition is 80 pages, more than five times as long.

“It’s not just the language, but women’s culture, resources — everything is different,” explained Weinberg, author of the Hebrew edition, at a recent health symposium hosted by Boston University, celebrating the 40th anniversary of “Our Bodies” and the release of the latest American version. This is true even among different groups of women within Israel. Elnabilsy, who is editor-in-chief of the Arabic edition and is also a social worker and sex educator, said that Palestinian women “are a national minority, and also a gender minority.” So the Arabic edition addresses the prejudices that Palestinian women face — both in the wider society and from men within their own community.

The idea for the Hebrew-Arabic versions was born a decade ago when Weinberg, now 40, received a copy of an American version of “Our Bodies” from a friend. Having recently given birth, she felt frustrated and depressed by how medicalized the experience had been. “I didn’t know that labor could be an empowering, amazing experience,” Weinberg said. Inspired, she chose home births for her next two children, and began researching ways to bring the book that changed her life to other women in Israel.

In 2005, Weinberg founded the Israeli nongovernmental organization Women and Their Bodies in order to create the Hebrew and Arabic editions. “We cannot talk about women’s health in Israel without addressing Palestinian women’s health issues,” Weinberg said. She recruited Elnabilsy, a former student whom Weinberg knew from her previous job as director of the Women’s International Zionist Organization’s School for Political Leadership for Women, to spearhead the Arabic adaptation.

The first meeting was held at Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam, a village halfway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv that was jointly established by Jewish and Palestinian-Arab citizens of Israel. It was a symbolic choice in a country where geography is a matter of life and death, made by activists acutely aware of the imbalance in resources available to women from their respective communities.

For example: Elnabilsy points out that she interviewed women who had given birth in hospitals where they didn’t understand a word the doctors were saying. “They spoke with them in Hebrew, and gave them papers in Hebrew, and they asked them to sign papers in Hebrew,” she said. “And sometimes they signed and the doctor did whatever he wanted” because the women were too intimidated to ask for a translator. The Arabic version includes information on how to navigate the health care system in a country in which Palestinian women are a minority.

Although the women pool their resources as a single organization, Weinberg said they have agreed “to work together, and apart.” With 350 volunteers, the Hebrew team had so much material that the finished book, at 26 chapters, can’t contain it all. An additional 10 chapters will be published as booklets in the coming years.

Weinberg said, however, that “in Arabic, you cannot have so many volunteers, because women don’t have the resources to volunteer.” What’s more, because the process she and Elnabilsy employed has been to adapt the English version into Hebrew and then the Hebrew version into Arabic, help is needed from people facile in all three languages. With 30 volunteers working on the Arabic translation, that edition has only 10 chapters. Still, this marks the first time that a women’s health resource written by women for women has been published in either language.

The feat is substantial, according to Lucy Candib, a physician who wrote an introductory essay, “Women, Medicine and Capitalism,” in the original pamphlet. “The close and careful creation of text together will require a constant consciousness about power and vulnerability familiar to women everywhere, but even more ever-present in the world where this work will be created,” she said.

Women and Their Bodies received a grant from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation to distribute the first 1,000 copies of the Arabic-language books for free. (The Hebrew edition costs $50.) With the goal of making the books as accessible as possible, the organization is seeking grants and donations.

In addition to producing the books, Women and Their Bodies runs an online information center (which has been hacked multiple times since the book was published) and an ongoing series of health workshops designed for women of various ethnic groups throughout Israel. One, designed to address the frustrating lack of a nonderogatory or childish Hebrew word for “vagina,” was called, “What Is Between Your Legs?” Weinberg’s favorite word to come out of this workshop is n’ga, derived from oneg, the Hebrew word for “pleasure.”

The women also coined new words for “menopause” in both languages. In Arabic, they chose sinn al-amman, the “age of confidence.” This connotes “having a center, knowing who you are, and where you want to go,” Weinberg said. In Hebrew, the team chose emtza chayim, the “middle of life.” Or, Weinberg said, the age when “you have everything ahead of you.”

Long before hipster bars and boutique hotels lured tourists to New York City’s Lower East Side, the promise of a better life drew generations of Jewish immigrants to the neighborhood’s crowded cold-water walk-ups. As a vestige of that time, the Tenement Museum is an apt venue for singer-songwriter Clare Burson ’97 and writer Anna Solomon ’98, whose creative collaboration made its debut at the museum on September 7 before traveling to other cities. Solomon read from her novel The Little Bride, about a Jewish mail-order bride, and Burson performed what she calls her “little suite” of songs inspired by the novel.

In rich, deep prose, The Little Bride tells the story of sixteen-year-old Minna Losk, who flees poverty and pogroms in 1880s Odessa and travels to the United States, only to discover that her intended, Max, is a devout Orthodox man more than twice her age, whose first wife left him. He lives with his two teenage sons in a one-room sod hut in North Dakota. The Great Plains is a bleak place in which to eke out an existence, and Max’s stubborn adherence to the laws of Judaism makes it even harder. When Minna finds herself attracted to her stepson, Sam, she must navigate her new life and her new identity in an increasingly fraught situation. The most stunning aspect of The Little Bride is the way in which its characters are never so likeable as to be perfect and never so unlikeable as to be villains. Max and Minna develop a real affection for one another, even as Minna feels increasingly trapped and frustrated by their life together. The story is brutal but also infused with hope. Minna’s ingenuity saves her in the end, but her survival does not come without great personal cost.

Solomon, who grew up in one of a handful of Jewish families in the port town of Gloucester, Massachusetts, says she’s “always been drawn to stories about people living in places where they don’t seem to belong.” Her short stories, which have won a Pushcart Prize and a Missouri Review Editor’s Prize, are set in such far-flung and rural places as Alaska and North Dakota. So, when she stumbled across a website called “Stories Untold: Jewish Pioneer Women,” she discovered a forgotten time when Jewish women drove wagons and roped cattle.

Solomon met Clare Burson several years ago through their husbands, who are longtime friends. “We totally hit it off,” Burson recalls. “We talked about how cool it would be to collaborate, but we didn’t have something obvious to build that collaboration on.” When the completion of The Little Bride coincided with the release of Burson’s acclaimed 2010 album Silver and Ash—which in ten interrelated songs tells the story of her grandmother’s German childhood and 1938 immigration to the United States—the timing seemed right.

Burson studied modern European history at Brown, focusing on Judaic studies. She took two extended trips to Germany—one during a year off from her studies and the other on a Fulbright after graduation, during which she studied German identity politics in the wake of the Holocaust. She learned to play classical violin and then fiddle, beginning at an early age, but picked up a guitar only when one of her roommates in Germany gave her a hand-me-down and taught her a few chords. About halfway through her Fulbright, Burson decided to forego graduate school and joined a rock band.

She won a dedicated following of indie-folk fans after the 2003 release of In-Between, which was followed by Thieves in 2007. But it was Silver and Ash, she says, that “allowed me to bring in the things I studied and was really passionate about in college, and bring that together with my music in a really meaningful way.”

Upon hearing Silver and Ash, Solomon wondered, “Wouldn’t it be cool if Clare were interested in writing a song or two” about The Little Bride? Her publisher sent Burson a copy of the galleys, and “it just took off for her,” Solomon says, “because so much of it resonated. We write so much about immigrants, and about women, and about memory and loss—it just felt really natural.”

Listening to the songs Burson wrote, Solomon says, is “like hearing my book come to life. And actually I’ve been amazed at how certain parts of the book have become much more powerful to me when I hear a song about them.”

When

White was not the sort of young man to complain, though. “We, Brown’s African American students, didn’t feel affronted by this plain discrimination,” he says. “Quite the opposite. We felt happy to be at a place so liberal that it accepted Negroes at all.”

Almost sixty years later, the University has an Office for Institutional Diversity. The students and, to a lesser extent, the faculty members walking across the College Green on any given day hail from all over the world and have parents and ancestors from every imaginable race, background, and religion. Students arrived on College Hill this fall from more than 100 countries. Thirty percent of undergraduates are nonwhites.

And we have Gus White to thank for that.

The influence White’57 has had on Brown’s racial and ethnic diversity reflects the steady, deliberate effort of an unlikely pioneer. A groundbreaking orthopedic surgeon, he was the first African American medical student at Stanford, the first black surgical resident at Yale, the first black professor of medicine at Yale, and the first black department chief at a Harvard teaching hospital. One of the nation’s preeminent experts on the biomechanics of the spine, White has coauthored textbooks that remain seminal references for surgeons and clinicians. When his book for a popular audience, Your Aching Back: A Doctor’s Guide to Relief, appeared in 1990, the New England Journal of Medicine decreed that it “should be read by every person afflicted with low back pain, and perhaps everybody.”

Despite these accomplishments, it would be difficult to find a more modest man than Gus White. His perpetual optimism and quiet good cheer have been key to his acceptance in places normally inhospitable to African Americans. Yet he has never for a second forgotten how lucky he has been to be in such places, or how essential it is that he use his position to make more space at the table for all victims of prejudice.

For Gen Xers and Gen Yers who were raised on Martin Luther King Day assemblies and class projects about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad, diversity is sort of like puppies and rainbows. We take for granted that it’s desirable, good, even quaint—with all the jadedness that last word implies. But Gus White wants you to know that despite the huge strides we’ve made—including the first black president, both at Brown and in the White House—we still have a long way to go. In fact, White argues in his latest book that our ongoing lack of both diversity and good cross-cultural communication is making us sick. Literally.

Since his retirement from the operating room in 2001, White has taken on a medical issue that he says is far more difficult to solve than even the most complicated spinal problem. A combination memoir and manifesto, White’s new book, Seeing Patients: Unconscious Bias in Health Care, lays bare the troubling and insidious ways that prejudice gets in the way of good medicine.

If you want good medical care in the United States, White asserts in Seeing Patients, your best bet is to be a young, fit, straight, white, and middle-class male. He means this as a wry joke—and, when he repeated it at a lecture this summer at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the audience chuckled on cue—but it’s also true. The time it takes for EMTs to transport women to a hospital after a heart attack, he told the audience, is longer than it is for men. Hispanics receive fewer bypass surgeries for heart disease than other patients and fewer basic health-care measures such as flu vaccines. Similarly, African Americans receive fewer kidney and liver transplants than other patients, and more castrations when they have prostate cancer. African American diabetics undergo more amputations than other groups, White says, and Native American, immigrant, obese, and homosexual patients all receive inferior care simply because of who they are. And this remains true even after researchers control for such complicating factors as education, economic class, and insurance status.

What’s going on here? How is it possible that a country with one of the most advanced health-care systems in the world is failing such a large proportion of its patients?

The answer, Gus White says, lies in our nation’s history, and also within ourselves.

Gus White’s great-grandparents were born into slavery. In the segregated Memphis, Tennessee, where he grew up, the legacy of that recent past was everywhere. The city had its black middle class, White recalls in Seeing Patients, but “the white world did not mix with the black and the black did not mix with the white.” Although White grew up as an only child in that middle class—his physician father graduated from the all-black Meharry Medical College and was a house physician at the local black hospital—his family had to use colored bathrooms and colored water fountains. White and his friends watched their favorite Westerns at all-black movie theaters so they could avoid having to sit in the balcony at the segregated ones. At the hospital where White’s father worked, even the blood at the blood bank was segregated. As a young boy delivering the black newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier, White occasionally saw front-page photos of the lynchings that were still commonplace. On those days, he writes in Seeing Patients, “I didn’t want to take the newspaper around. I didn’t even want to handle it.”

Still, the middle-class black community in Memphis was committed to “advancing the race.” Teachers at the black schools stressed that “education was going to drive forward our right to equality that we had been struggling for so long to achieve.” White’s mother, Vivian, and his Aunt Addie were proud women who refused to be belittled or underestimated.

As a teenager working at a drive-in movie theater, White and his friends clashed with white workers who took to calling them “darkies.” When they retaliated by calling the white workers “Nabisco Boys,” the workers followed White and his friends home one night in their car, shooting BBs and shouting curses.

After White’s group was attacked, “Mom and Aunt Addie practically had a fit,” White recalls. “Vivian White and Addie Jones were not going to take this kind of thing, and after some discussion they made it clear that I was not going to take it either.” The next day they drove White to work and gave a stern talk to the manager of the drive-in, who ensured White’s safety for the rest of that season and the one after it. “I didn’t know at the time that this incident would stay with me for the rest of my life, but what a lesson it was,” White notes.

When White was eight years old, his father died suddenly, and he and his mother were forced to move from their two-bedroom house into the home of Aunt Addie and her husband, Uncle Doc, a pharmacist. The family doubled up on couches and cots, and White’s college-educated mother got a job as a secretary at a high school, where she eventually became a teacher. Still, as White writes in the book, “My father’s death when I was so young meant that most of my relationship with him ended up being my relationship with his reputation,” and the question he heard more often than any other was, “You going to be a doctor like your dad? Your dad was a fine man, a great doctor.”

A bright and a diligent student, White at thirteen left Memphis for the Mount Hermon School for Boys, an exclusive New England prep school (now Northfield Mount Hermon). Students earned tuition money by waiting tables and sweeping floors. Although he suffered from culture shock at this tiny northwestern Massachusetts enclave, he thrived at Mt. Hermon, singing in the choir, excelling academically, and earning varsity letters in football, wrestling, and lacrosse.

In 1953 White opted for college at Brown. “Brown had good athletics, highly regarded premed studies, and, my grapevine informed me, they not only took Negroes, they treated them well,” he writes in Seeing Patients. “Four or five each year. Never more, but never fewer, either.”

At the University, White worked grueling hours in order to play football—he was a varsity offensive and defensive end—while simultaneously earning high grades in his premed studies. When psychology professor Anthony Davis helped White research and write an honors thesis, it “increased my level of confidence by several magnitudes,” White writes.

He also became the first African American fraternity brother at Brown when he rushed Delta Upsilon. And it was because of White’s designation as the Brown DU chapter’s delegate to the 1956 national convention, to be held in Vermont, that he and his fraternity brothers received the following telegram: “the middlebury chapter regrets that due to circumstances beyond its control… it is necessary to postpone the delta upsilon convention… until 1957.” (Thirty years later, the fraternity formally apologized to White. “I can tell you that the delivery and celebration of justice does feel good to all concerned,” White writes. “No matter how long you might have to stick around to see it.”)

After graduation and medical school at Stanford, White did an internship at the University of Michigan Medical Center and an orthopedic residency at Yale. But soon he was forced to confront yet another foreign world.

In August 1966, White arrived in Vietnam as a combat surgeon. Subject to a special doctors’ draft, he could have found alternative service but opted not to. He wanted to “jump over there and do what I could,” he writes in Seeing Patients. While he was in Vietnam, he couldn’t help but notice that he was “seeing more wounded black soldiers than I might have expected. . . . What I heard from the black troopers was that they were more likely than not to be chosen as point men when they went out on patrol.”

As a respite from the brutality, White volunteered at a nearby leprosarium, performing surgeries to help patients regain some mobility in their crippled hands and feet. “For me, the St. Francis Leprosarium was an oasis,” he wrote. “After all the blood and gore, it seemed almost a place of meditation. . . . In many cultures leprosy is regarded with such horror that if anybody just makes eye contact and looks at lepers and acknowledges them as human beings, they are profoundly grateful. And if you help them? You fix them up? . . . The feedback is incomparable. . . . I didn’t know who was helped most at that leper colony—the helpers or the helpees.”

On the bumpy jeep ride out to the leprosarium, White writes, he would reflect that “at the hospital I was seeing the worst that man can do to man, then I go down the road to see the worst that nature can do. Man’s inhumanity to man and nature’s cruelty to man—both of them an absolute bitch.”

The “equal opportunity employers”—pain and death—that White saw in Vietnam helped crystallize one of his most resonant realizations about race and humanity. He writes, “Our humanness supersedes our cultural issues, our difference in status or rank, our racial selves. A superior officer, a trooper, black, white—under the knife they’re all the same. . . . In the final analysis, that’s all we are—human.”

After his surgical residency, White spent eighteen months earning a PhD in orthopedic biomechanics at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. It was there he met his wife, Anita, a Swede, and it was also there, he realizes in retrospect, that he made a formal commitment to promoting diversity in medicine. In Sweden, he says, race was simply not an issue.

“Nobody cared,” White recalls. “When people said hello, it was just hello. Not hello—I see by the color of your skin that you are a white person; what kind of white baggage might you be carrying toward me? Or, hello—I see by the color of yours that you’re black; wonder what kind of baggage you might be carrying toward me?”

White knew that one of the reasons race isn’t an issue in Sweden is that there is essentially only one race there—something neither possible nor desirable in the United States. But Sweden gave him a glimpse of true equal opportunity for African Americans, and he resolved to make medicine a more welcoming profession for blacks. He joined the admissions committee at Yale Medical School, where he was about to become a faculty member, and began advocating on behalf of qualified black applicants who might otherwise have been overlooked.

To this day, White notices that too many black students play down their accomplishments, underestimate their own worth, and try to blend in and be as inoffensive as possible, with the result that they are hesitant to speak up and share their ideas. When he meets such students, White invariably asks them a favorite question: “Do you know that you’re a national treasure?”

Some years later he and a handful of his peers founded the J. Robert Gladden Orthopedic Society, a group of African American orthopedists who saw the need for “an effective platform for sharing concerns and research both among ourselves and with the larger orthopedic community.”

“I’m aware of only one or two organizations that are similar,” says former Secretary of Health and Human Services Dr. Louis Sullivan, “and none that I believe is as viable or active as the Gladden society.”

After White became a Brown trustee in 1971—he later served on the Board of Fellows from 1981 to 1992—he began to realize that “diversity was a black question, yes, but not only a black question.” Increasing the number of underrepresented minorities in a given community, he argued, not only benefitted those minorities; it also enriched the community as a whole. All people, he writes in Seeing Patients, “should be willing to share knowledge with each other and learn from one another and teach one another, to achieve better understanding of cultural differences and the implications of them, and to appreciate the importance of working together and getting beyond the isolation of cultures from each other.”

Seeing Patients is full of stories—some funny, some not so funny—of things people have said and done before realizing Gus White is black. (A woman he once dated assumed he was Puerto Rican. When he told her he was black, she slumped down in her chair in tears and asked, “Are you absolutely sure?”)

In addition to being fair-skinned, White is tall and lanky, usually at least a head taller than anyone else in a room. There’s an inherent gentleness and elegance about him, and his calm, unflappable demeanor puts people at ease. “He was an athlete in his younger days,” says David Chanoff, the coauthor of Seeing Patients, “and he still has that kind of presence. He’s a combination of congeniality, collegiality, and drive.”

Thinking positively is something of a reflex for White. In a notebook he kept during the 1960s, he jotted down the phrase “Black brother, don’t hate. Calculate.” Where others might get angry, White is unflappable. “Hate doesn’t help,” he says. “It only pushes you down. It depresses you.” His daughter Atina White ’98 says, “He has this ability to be strategic about letting yourself cool off and finding other ways to accomplish what it is you’re trying to do. He is very logical—almost to a fault sometimes.” His favorite bit of fatherly encouragement to his three daughters, Atina says, is to be “strong in the head, strong in the heart, strong in the whole body.”

At his talk at Brigham and Women’s, White ran through slide after slide of dispiriting, frustrating evidence of unequal treatment in medicine. As an orthopedist, he said, he was particularly upset by the fact that blacks and Hispanics are less likely than whites to get adequate pain medication after a long-bone break or fracture. Pain is pain, he said; it has nothing to do with culture or race. This fact, White says, “is not presented to abuse anybody or accuse anybody or make anybody feel guilty. It’s not your fault. It’s not my fault. But it is your responsibility and my responsibility to do something about it.”

In surveys, White writes in Seeing Patients, physicians say they do not discriminate on the basis of sex. And yet in 2008, when researchers sent a male and a female patient with identical osteoarthritis in their knees to seventy-one family practitioners and orthopedic surgeons, 67 percent recommended knee replacement for the man, while only 33 percent did so for the woman.

“I think this is not conscious bias,” White argues, quoting Mayo Clinic orthopedist Mary O’Connor, the past chair of the Ruth Jackson Society, which tries to correct health disparities affecting women. “I don’t believe these physicians had the female patient in their office and thought, ‘I’m going to withhold a recommendation for surgery.’”

O’Connor continues: “But there’s still something going on. . . . There’s the stereotypic—Oh, she’s going to be a whiner. . . . The most difficult thing to realize is that, yes, you may be the one doing it. You may be guilty of giving different care to people who don’t resemble you.”

White admits his own bias against obese patients. But, he says, “If you can be aware, let that be a yellow light.” That yellow light forces you to pause and remind yourself about what the evidence says you should do with this particular patient, and make sure you do it.

Three decades after graduating from Brown, White was serving on Brown’s Board of Fellows, watching with dismay as the hundreds of black students now at Brown voiced their discontent.

“They felt they weren’t being treated properly, that their needs weren’t being addressed,” White writes in Seeing Patients. “From what I could see, the school cared about its minority students—it just did not know what to do about them.” So White approached then-President Howard Swearer with an idea. Rather than “responding to brushfires,” why didn’t the University convene a committee to study what might help improve relationships among students of all races at Brown?

Swearer asked White to lead the effort. White and his colleagues spoke to hundreds of students, faculty, and staff about diversity at Brown, and compiled, synthesized, and analyzed what they heard. The resulting report, The American University and the Pluralist Ideal, was released in 1986. It made seventeen recommendations, including broadened course offerings on race- and ethnicity-related subjects (the ethnic studies concentration was born as a result) and increased support for minority clubs and organizations. At its heart, the report asked the University to move past diversity and aim for the broader goal of pluralism.

“Diversity meant that the University community would include people of different races, religions, and so on,” White writes. “To a certain extent Brown had achieved diversity. Pluralism moved beyond diversity in that it conceived of a community where minorities were not simply present, but where they were welcomed, where their cultures were acknowledged and valued. . . . We were asking Brown to make diversity into one of the pillars of its fundamental identity.” (Brown awarded White an honorary degree in 1997. He also worked on a follow-up report, which was released in 2001.)

Now that White is looking to make culturally competent care one of the pillars of medicine’s fundamental identity, he thinks he knows intuitively what will help. Doctors must be honest with themselves about their biases, for example, and medical schools must increase the number of medical students from underrepresented minorities. But will it make a difference, really?

“I’m sorry to say,” White says, “that we did a review of the literature and we said, ‘Culturally competent care education pedagogy: what works? What are the teaching methods that work?’ So far, there’s not anything that has been demonstrated experimentally, on an evidence basis, that says, if you teach these things, you can get these better outcomes in patients that are getting disparate care.”

After White retired at age sixty-five from performing surgery—”I wanted to exit at the peak of my skills, while I was still providing the highest level of care I could,” he writes—he founded Harvard’s Culturally Competent Care Education Program to try to address the problem. The program consists of White, his assistant, and piles of papers, books, and sticky notes. It is fueled by White’s unfailing optimism. Each day he puts on a jacket and tie—even on days when he has no appointments or meetings—and goes into his office to do research, write papers, give lectures, collaborate with others in the field, and mentor students.

In medicine, evidence is king. Without a clinical trial demonstrating the effectiveness of one type of intervention versus the other—without data to prove that, say, teaching medical students one way versus another results in better outcomes for minority patients—White is, he admits, “just flailing away at things that ought to make sense, that ought to work.” He adds, “Hopefully at some point we’ll show that they can work.”

White has always drawn great pleasure and comfort from music, and several of the chapters in Seeing Patients begin with quotes from the blues great Memphis Slim. One of the chapters, “A Man Ain’t Nothing But a Man,” draws its title from “John Henry,” that quintessential American folk song about the man who beats the steam engine and dies trying.

When great bluesmen like Lead Belly and Mississippi John Hurt sing about what John Henry told his captain, the words are layered with meaning. John Henry, a former slave in some accounts, says that he is only a man—there is only so much he can do to beat the steam engine—but he promises to die trying. At the same time, he is making a simple yet deeply profound statement that he, like his captain, is a human being. And yet, because of who he is, he, like his ancestors, is going to die with his master’s tools in his hands.

As important as our cultural identities are, White notes in Seeing Patients, “In the final analysis, we are all so much more similar than different. Once you make the incision, once you look inside, everybody is the same. Open up that skin and underneath it’s all one. The reality of the body tells this to you. . . . A man, in John Henry’s enduring words, ain’t nothin’ but a man.”

When White was invited to lecture at Brigham and Women’s in June, he was the keynote speaker at a function celebrating the achievements of underrepresented minority faculty and fellows at Harvard Medical School. From behind the lectern, White took a quick tally in his head: about twenty of the fifty doctors, medical students, and other health-care professionals gathered before him that day were from racial or ethnic minorities. There were medical students from programs aimed at recruiting underrepresented minorities into medicine. There were doctors, now mentors, who had previously been mentees in these programs. White felt deeply gratified, even as he prepared to talk about how racism and other “isms” were getting in the way of good medical care.

He smiled. “Good afternoon, my fellow humans,” he began.

Roy Shurger Jr. didn’t know what to think. When he picked up the phone one day last year, a young man named Adam Bright was on the line, asking if Shurger had been on a debate team in his youth.

Shurger paused, welling with emotion, not knowing how to answer.

Shurger had indeed joined a debate team in Norfolk more than fifty years ago, and he credits the experience with the eloquence and self-confidence that helped him to succeed in his distinguished career as an X-ray technician, educator, and administrator. At the same time, until Bright called, Shurger had told almost no one about it. He had hidden the experience from employers. Even his children didn’t know that he and his teammate had beaten the impressive West Point debate team. That’s because Shurger’s days as a debater came when he was in Norfolk Prison as a member of a nearly undefeated team made up entirely of inmates.

Adam Bright and his partner Natasha Haverty are assembling an oral history of the Norfolk Prison Debate Team, which from 1933 until sometime in the 1970s regularly took on—and defeated—teams from universities like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Oxford. According to the project directors, in 1966, the team boasted of a record, under one coach, against some of the most formidable teams in the world of 144 wins, 8 losses. And yet, the very existence of the team, let alone details from its decades-long tenure, had been ­all but forgotten until now.

The project is supported in part by a grant from Mass Humanities, and will collect stories which might otherwise have disappeared as people like Shurger, who is seventy-nine, get older. The significance of the oral history, which so far includes fifty-five hours of audio and transcriptions, reaches beyond the debate team itself to raise questions about incarceration, punishment, and rehabilitation.

Norfolk Prison Colony, the brainchild of Harvard professor Howard Belding Gill, opened in 1932, as a “model prison community.” Gill’s idea was to rehabilitate motivated prisoners by giving them self-sufficiency and education, and by making life in prison as similar as possible to life on the outside. Civic-minded locals were encouraged to volunteer at the prison, lead groups, and teach classes. Even the architecture was designed with Gill’s ideals in mind. “Once you got inside the walls, you didn’t even know you were in a prison,” says Carlo Jeremini, the prison’s school principal, in one of the oral history’s interviews. With a heavy Boston accent, Jeremini makes the early years of Norfolk come alive. “There are no bars,” he says. “There was a quad, like a college town, with dormitories around the quad, a school building at one end, a community center at the other end. The guard did not wear a uniform; he wore civilian clothes.”

The debate team “was the exemplification of the Norfolk philosophy,” says Bright: “Get outsiders to interact with the men to make the men feel like men.” Professors from local colleges served as coaches, lawyers and politicians judged the events, and college students came from all over the world to compete. Townspeople were invited into the prison to watch the debates, which were also broadcast on local radio.

Bright was a freelance journalist and a volunteer with the New York City-based storytelling organization The Moth when he first stumbled on a mention of the Norfolk debate team in a biography of the songwriter Leonard Cohen. (Cohen had debated at Norfolk while a student on McGill University’s debate team.) Haverty, a radio producer and documentarian, was working as The Moth’s outreach coordinator, and the two first imagined they would make a radio documentary about the debate team.

But there was frustratingly little information available. Norfolk’s most famous debater, Malcolm X, makes brief mention of the team in his autobiography. (“You would be astonished to know how worked up convict debaters and audiences would get over subjects like, ‘Should Babies Be Fed Milk?’” X wrote.) Time magazine occasionally reported on the Norfolk Debate Society’s victories. “In Norfolk, Mass.,” ran one 1951 item, “two inmates of the state prison, taking the affirmative in a debate on whether the American people should support the welfare state, defeated two members of the Harvard debating society.” Other than that, there was almost nothing. The names of the debaters, the subjects of the debates, and—most crucially for radio—audio footage of the debates themselves, were all elusive.

The Mass Humanities grant was awarded on one condition: Bright and Haverty had to track down at least five former debaters. They had “some confidence” that they could do it, recalls Haverty, “but some of it was pure hope.” They moved to Boston, logged onto Lexis-Nexis, and spent the summer hunting through archives and making cold calls.

“We had role-played what it would be like if the wife answered, or how we would play it if he was in a room with people,” says Bright. But when they reached their first debater, they realized they “never really fully role-played what the effect would be of saying it to him,” Bright says. “I had not prepared for how emotional it was going to be for him to have someone call fifty years later and say, ‘Were you on this team at Norfolk?’ How complicated it was.”

Since that time, they have spoken to fourteen debaters from the Norfolk team and twenty-one others, including coaches, prison administrators, and college competitors. Some, like Shurger, have gone on to have productive lives and successful careers. Others, like debate team star George Nassar—infamous because of his connection with “Boston Strangler” Albert DeSalvo—must do their interviews via collect call, having landed back in prison after being released on parole. Together, the voices of the debaters, the coaches, the townspeople, and prison administrators weave a rich human tapestry of a time that is quickly fading from view.

As the war on drugs and a “tough on crime” political atmosphere have swelled the ranks of the incarcerated, prisons have become little more than warehouses. Education programs, enrichment programs, and job training have all fallen by the wayside as cash-strapped states struggle to house ballooning numbers of inmates. MCI-Norfolk, as it is now known, maintains little more than Gill’s original architecture.

Shurger, who was sent to prison at fifteen and spent eight years behind bars for first-degree murder before being released on parole, says that the public thinks “everybody who’s been in prison is bad. And that’s not true as far as I’m concerned.” The oral history, he says, is an opportunity “to see something that would be more favorable to those inmates who came out and did well.”

The audio and corresponding transcripts from the oral history will be archived at the Harvard Law Library, the Boston Public Library, and the Emerson College Library. Bright and Haverty also hope to write a book that compiles the most compelling moments from the archives.

Such as this one, from a former Norfolk prisoner named Richie (he didn’t want his last name used), who says that joining the debate team “was intimidating at first. You don’t think, intellectually, you’re at the level of these students coming in that you’re going up against. And then you find out that you are. And you might be a little bit better.”

Two hundred and sixty-six people have been exonerated by DNA in the United States after spending years—sometimes decades—in prison for crimes they did not commit. More than half of these people were convicted on the basis of bad forensic evidence.

In some cases, the forensic methods themselves had few or no professional guidelines or objective criteria. In other cases, analysts used scientifically valid tests but fudged or misstated the science in their testimony. Here’s a list of some common areas for mistakes or malice – and men who have suffered as a result.

On a cold night last fall on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the marbled lobby of the American Museum of Natural History had been transformed into the setting for a swanky cocktail party. More than 500 people had paid between $1,000 and $100,000 to attend. The museum’s giant barosaurus skeleton was aglow in purple light, and an hors d’oeuvres buffet featured dishes from around the world served up in copper and ceramic tureens. One cocktail waitress carried a bar chime around the room, sweeping it with a stick at regular intervals to wash the crowd with a sound like falling water.

The occasion was the first of fifteen Human Rights Watch “Voices for Justice” dinners, whose purpose is to honor “those who speak out where there is silence.” This year the nonprofit organization was honoring Egypt’s Hossam Bahgat and China’s Liu Xiaobo. It’s been something of a dizzying few months for Human Rights Watch, which is in the process of doubling in size after the billionaire philanthropist George Soros in September had given the group his largest single gift yet: $100 million.

For the past thirty years, the purpose of Human Rights Watch has been, according to its website, “to hold oppressors accountable to their population, to the international community, and to their obligations under international law.” Although it is based in New York City, Human Rights Watch has offices all over the world and is likely to have more soon, thanks to Soros’s gift.

Unlike its more visible cousin, Amnesty International, which operates by rallying its mass membership around such actions as letter-writing campaigns, Human Rights Watch is particularly adept at using the press to expose systematic human rights abuses and at exerting direct pressure on policymakers and government officials. Its success is based on combining emotional outrage with a meticulous devotion to factual accuracy.

The group issues an annual “World Report” on human rights, which often generates a great deal of media attention, and follows it up with a steady stream of reports documenting specific rights abuses. In the first half of December alone, for example, Human Rights Watch issued reports on attacks on teachers and schools in Pakistan, on the year’s abuses against migrant workers throughout the world, on the overuse of violence by Indian troops on the border with Bangladesh, and on the excessive time spent in New York City jails by nonfelony defendants awaiting trial. It has been called the greatest nongovernmental organization since the Red Cross. In a largely critical article last year about the group’s repeated emphasis on what it sees as human-rights abuses by Israel, the New Republic conceded that Human Rights Watch “is widely considered the gold standard in human rights reporting—an organization whose conclusions nobody can afford to ignore.”

For twenty-five of its thirty years, one of the people most responsible for shaping Human Rights Watch has been Kenneth Roth ’77. As the group’s executive director for almost eighteen years, he has both presided over and been a catalyst for the transformation of human rights work from an idealistic pastime into a legitimate profession. “Human rights has moved from being a slightly marginal idealistic way of viewing the world—well-meaning activists who didn’t always achieve a huge amount—to being a much more professional enterprise,” says Iain Levine, Human Rights Watch’s program director. “Has Ken played a part in that? Unquestionably.”

When Roth was hired in 1987 as deputy to then-director Aryeh Neier, he had no professional human rights experience. At the time, Roth says, the idea of getting a job in human rights was almost unheard of, and foreign policy professionals tended to view human rights activists as well-intentioned amateurs. “When I hired Ken,” Neier recalls, “the Reagan administration was still in office. Reagan had started out in 1981 disdaining the focus on human rights of his predecessor Jimmy Carter. He shifted ground fairly early, and adopted a concern with human rights, but very often his appointees questioned the reporting by NGOs on factual grounds.”

In response, the groups that would later combine to form Human Rights Watch developed an almost religious devotion to factual accuracy. Helsinki Watch began in 1978 to monitor the Soviet Union’s compliance with the civil rights portions of the Helsinki Accords. The 1980s saw the founding of a number of “watch groups” around the world—America Watch, for example, monitored the various regimes in Central America—which eventually became known as “The Watch Committees.” All these groups merged in 1988 to form Human Rights Watch.

By the time Roth took over from Neier as executive director in 1993, Human Rights Watch had sixty employees and a budget of $7 million. The organization has since grown to employ 300, with offices in fourteen cities around the world, staff in ninety countries, and a budget of almost $50 million. “I probably would never have been hired if I had showed up at the door today,” Roth admits.

Roth has overseen the organization’s “professionalization,” demanding expertise and accuracy in all things. He pronounces words precisely. He can call a dizzying array of facts to mind and synthesize complex information on the spot. With long, spindly fingers, dark hair parted on the side, and plain, silver wire-rim glasses, Roth is “slightly geeky,” as one of his colleagues affectionately describes him, with a “slightly geeky sense of humor. He’s not warm and fuzzy. He’s kind of more sharp-edged.” His longtime friend Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, says, “He’s one of the great humanists. He believes in the dignity of the human experience.”

Roth recently spent the afternoon in a plush wood-paneled room at Yale Law School, which he attended after earning his AB in history at Brown. Over the course of two hour-long talks and two wide-ranging question-and-answer periods, he looked relaxed. He easily discussed topics like the military and political circumstances of the war in Eastern Congo, the election in Burma, the relative effectiveness of different types of sanctions, the European Union’s internal politics, the moral implications of anti-imperialism, the Lisbon Process, the “scorched earth” approach of the Sri Lankan government in its war with the Tamil Tigers, the African National Congress’s sentiment toward the International Criminal Court, India’s foreign policy toward Burma and Sri Lanka, China’s self-image with regards to mass atrocities, the difference between the apartheid divestment strategies of the 1980s and similarly inspired corporate divestment movements today, the UN Global Compact, and the reason the Obama administration has not yet closed the prison at the Guant√°namo Bay detention camp.

Roth also is the guiding sensibility for the “World Report,” which summarizes human rights in the ninety countries and territories where the organization works. Roth’s introduction synthesizes the group’s work for that year around a theme. At the press conference where he releases the report, Roth usually draws from his essay to describe some of the organization’s major initiatives and then takes questions.

“He could be asked about any one of ninety countries,” Iain Levine says. “I’ve never heard of him screwing up—getting the wrong country, the wrong issue, the wrong leader. I always think, How on earth? It makes him a very authoritative figure. When you can demonstrate that level of mastery of the subject matter, people do sit up and take notice.”

Each week, Human Rights Watch publishes two reports, which can sometimes run to hundreds of pages, and about a dozen shorter bulletins. This “naming and shaming” is at the heart of the organization’s strategy: identifying and describing, in excruciating detail, human rights abuses around the world.

In Human Rights Watch’s October 2010 report “Beaten, Blacklisted, and Behind Bars: The Vanishing Space for Freedom of Expression in Azerbaijan,” for example, Afgan Mukhtarli, a photographer for an Azerbaijani newspaper, describes his beating while covering a political demonstration in that country: “That’s when about twenty policemen attacked me,” he is quoted as saying. “Four of them twisted my arms and made me kneel, as others kicked and beat me. They broke my right wrist and left knee. They were cursing me and my newspaper and kicking with their boots, which had iron heels.”

To compile such reports, Human Rights Watch recruits researchers who speak the languages of the countries where they work. These staffers may spend years gaining the trust of local activists and human rights groups to collect sensitive information. Nothing is published without independent verification.

“Ken has a tremendous commitment to making sure that we get the facts right,” says Levine. “And that we document the facts in an objective, dispassionate way. It doesn’t mean you can’t be passionate about human rights activism, but in the documentation of it, it had better be rigorous, methodical, objective.” The reports, Roth says, are “material of the caliber that you would find in the top newspapers around the world, material that the major foreign ministries would be reading. We need to be operating at that level.”

Still, Human Rights Watch is not just a publishing company, Roth is fond of saying. The group uses its research as the basis for a wide range of diplomacy and activism, in some places applying quiet pressure behind the scenes, and in others shaming by creating an “intense press spotlight,” as Roth describes it: “Governments will go to great lengths to avoid a PR problem that won’t go away.” Staff members work with the press to frame and publicize human rights issues and to provide information to the UN and the International Criminal Court. In addition, they may help set up tribunals and negotiate the deployment of peacekeeping forces or bring pressure on governments with particular influence over the targeted country.

“It’s not enough to be right,” Levine explains. “You have to find a way of convincing either the perpetrators or those whose actions or inactions facilitate the human rights violations to do something different. Ken thinks very strategically about how you go from identification of the violations and the violator to bringing the pressure that will change the situation.”

In many countries, human rights are narrowly defined, and so the group also tries to broaden what’s considered abuse. In May 2001, Roth and his colleagues got word of the case of fifty-two Egyptian men who were arrested aboard a floating gay nightclub called the Queen Boat. The men were charged with “habitual debauchery,” “obscene behaviour,” and “contempt of religion,” and were beaten and tortured by the Cairo police. But when Human Rights Watch called for a protest, the local human rights organizations objected.

“They said this wasn’t a human rights violation, this was immoral conduct,” Roth recalls. “When we probed a little further, we realized what they were most worried about is that the Egyptian government would discredit them for taking on an issue that was broadly seen as immoral, and that their bread-and-butter work would be compromised if they took on gay rights. We had to develop a strategy to try to get Egyptians to think of gays as having rights the same way everybody else does.”

So Human Rights Watch published two reports in rapid succession focusing on torture in Egypt. “Egypt’s Torture Epidemic,” released in 2004, focused on the beating and torturing of ordinary Egyptians accused of crimes. This report, Roth says, “was deliberately issued to set the stage” for the next one, which came out less than a week later. “In a Time of Torture” documented “the government’s increasing repression of men who have sex with men.” Roth explains: “We presented the reports one after the other, and tried to highlight the fact that everybody is vulnerable to this. You can’t allow one category of victim without risking other categories of victims. By portraying it as an issue of torture, rather than explicitly gay rights, we made progress.”

Human Rights Watch is not without its critics. In particular, the group’s work targeting human rights abuses by Israel has drawn criticism from those who detect an anti-Israel bias. In 2009, the group’s very founder, Robert Bernstein, wrote in a New York Times editorial that the organization “has been issuing reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict that are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.” Bernstein drew a distinction between “closed” and “open” societies and argued that “at Human Rights Watch, we always recognized that open, democratic societies have faults and commit abuses. But we saw that they have the ability to correct them—through vigorous public debate, an adversarial press and many other mechanisms that encourage reform.”

Last spring, the New Republic picked up the argument in an article by Ben Birnbaum that included interviews with Bernstein and other dissenting Human Rights Watch directors. In response, Kathleen Peratis, a self-described Zionist and longtime Human Rights Watch board member, wrote to the magazine: “There is no bias against Israel at Human Rights Watch, except in the minds of those who erroneously believe Israel is harmed by honest criticism. Far from harming it, I believe this work strengthens Israel.”

For his part, Roth says Bernstein “was arguing that we should not report on Israel because Israel is an open society. And my two-word answer to that is: George Bush.” Under the Bush administration, Roth argues, the United States “was an open society that committed serious abuses, and therefore we reported extensively on it.”

When asked what first piqued his interest in human rights, Roth points to his father. To keep his four children still while cutting their hair, Walter Roth used to tell funny stories about his German childhood. At first, the stories focused on the delivery horse at the butcher shop run by Walter’s father in Frankfurt. The kids called them Bobbi stories, after the name of the horse.

As the children got older, the stories got more serious. The suburban Chicago town where they lived was a world away from the life in Nazi Germany that Walter had fled a few decades before. He served on the local school board and worked as chief technical officer at an electronics corporation; his wife taught high school math. But while he cut the hair of his oldest son, Kenneth, he spoke about, “the evil that governments are capable of.”

Similarly, Roth got early lessons in how to negotiate for change. Once a week the Roth parents and their children met for Family Council, where complaints were aired. “There were four children,” Walter Roth recalls, “and they had an equal vote, so they could outvote us on anything.” The Roths took Family Council very seriously. Any arguments during the week, no matter how small—tiffs over television shows, bedtimes, allowance—were referred to Family Council for resolution. There was a rotating chairmanship, and motions were all logged into a book and numbered.

“But then there was a discussion before [the children] voted,” Walter says. “In the discussion, they learned that you have to listen to both sides.” The kids all became “little politicians,” too, negotiating in advance of Family Council to win votes.

Not surprisingly, when Kenneth Roth arrived at Brown he quickly became an activist. He participated in the 1975 takeover of the University Hall organized by minority groups in protest of proposed financial aid cuts. (“Blacks Beat Brown” read a headline in Time.) He volunteered with a prisoner advocacy organization and visited each week with inmates at Rhode Island’s Adult Correctional Institute.

A history concentrator, Roth was fascinated by political philosophy and theory—the “morality of public policy,” as he describes it. From his political science and philosophy classes he learned that “it’s not enough to cite the law.”

“Laws have to be principled to be effective,” he says. “What really matters are public norms of behavior—the public’s sense of right and wrong.” Even today, says program manager Iain Levine, Roth has “a very very strong commitment to moving beyond policy prescriptions to how you tell the story,” how you generate enough outrage to “mobilize political and public pressure” to get policy prescriptions implemented.

“Whether there’s a law prohibiting that practice or not is less important than whether the outrage exists,” Roth says. “Because we can build on the outrage to create a law.”

After Brown, Roth went on to Yale Law School. He had a sense that he wanted to pursue some combination of teaching, criminal law, and international law. “There was one human rights course at Yale at the time,” he recalls. “I dutifully signed up for that course each year for three years, and each year they cancelled it. So I had no training whatsoever. To make matters worse, when I graduated there were no jobs in human rights. Human Rights Watch had just started. It had two employees. Amnesty International was also tiny.” So he clerked for a year, then joined a private law firm while volunteering nights and weekends for the Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights. “I was a kid” he says, “who walked in and said, ‘I’d like to do something.’”

Roth had been volunteering for only a few months—he had represented one Haitian asylum seeker—when martial law was declared in Poland. “And even though I didn’t speak Polish, and had never been to Poland, they said, ‘You take care of it,’” Roth recalls. “So I started reporting on events in Poland and ultimately traveled there. It’s almost embarrassing when I think back to how na√Øve the whole movement was.”

After a stint as a prosecutor at the U.S. Attorney’s office for the southern district of New York and a staffer for the Iran-Contra investigation in Washington, Roth was hired in 1987 to work at The Watch Committees. “I was actually hired because Haiti was blowing up,” Roth says, “and the people who did the Latin American work didn’t speak French. I did, so they hired me, even though I had no experience with Haiti other than having represented that asylum seeker. That first election I went to cover, the army decided to blow it up by shooting everybody they could find until they cancelled the election. That was my first investigation.”

At the time, human rights work was stymied by the limits of communication. “The pace used to be glacial,” Roth recalls. “Amnesty, in the early days, literally wrote letters to verify: ‘Dear so and so, we understand your brother is in prison. Could you please verify the following?’ And mail it to Guatemala. And wait two months for it to come back. Maybe.”

The explosion of new technologies has transformed human rights work under Roth’s watch. “Today, our aspiration is real-time response,” he says. “If something happens, we want to respond that same day within the press cycle. You can only do that with modern technology.” Phone calls are cheap, and satellite phones are available for researchers in remote areas without cell phone towers. Colleagues in places as far-flung as Congo and Brussels and Moscow can use video-conferencing technology. Satellite photographs help researchers verify and quantify events.

Researchers in dangerous areas have begun using smart pens; a tiny camera near the point of the pen records their handwritten notes onto a flash drive inside the pen. “So you can throw away your notes, and you can just download from the pen what you wrote and reconstruct it later,” Roth says. “If you’re stopped at a checkpoint, you don’t have anything on you. That’s a big concern in certain war zones.”

Along with the rise in modern technology has come the accompanying decline in traditional media outlets, “our biggest magnifier,” Roth says. Human Rights Watch has adapted by keeping up an active, easy-to-navigate website from which reports can be instantly downloaded. “At one time,” Levine says, “you went, you did your report, you came back and you issued a press release and you did a bunch of meetings. Now we have so many more ways of getting the story out.”

For television stations, Human Rights Watch makes video clips and interviews available. “If we don’t give them the video,” says Roth, “they are not going to run the story.” For radio stations, the organization offers broadcast-quality podcasts. “They don’t even have to do their own reporting,” Roth says. “They just plug our three-minute segment onto their radio stations.”

George Soros’s $100 million gift is crucial to the group’s newest strategy of having staff and bases in more and more places around the world. “When we started out, our first focus was on influencing United States government policy,” says Roth’s former boss, Aryeh Neier, who now heads the Open Society Foundations. “We wanted to leverage the power of the purse and the influence of the United States for the human rights cause. But the world has changed. The United States does not play the same dominant role internationally that it played previously.”

The Soros gift will allow Human Rights Watch to almost double its annual budget, to $80 million, and to open offices in major non-Western capitals with emerging international importance. In the last year, new offices have opened in Tokyo, Johannesburg, and Beirut, and others are planned for Delhi, Nairobi, Bangkok, and Brazil. “I’m afraid the United States has lost the moral high ground under the Bush administration, but the principles that Human Rights Watch promotes have not lost their universal applicability,” Soros told the New York Times. “So to be more effective, I think the organization has to be seen as more international, less an American organization.”

Roth, Soros, and the thousands of donors whom the organization wined and dined this winter are betting that the new office in South Africa will be a better vantage point than Washington, D.C., or Paris from which to negotiate with Zimbabwe. They’re sure that the relationships their staff creates with the Indian government from an office in Delhi will give them improved leverage in such countries as Burma and Sri Lanka.

After all, Roth says, “governments behave better when they’re watched.”