Published Work

Louisiana Illuminator

Act 788 took effect June 9. It creates the crime of unauthorized camping — a tent, a blanket, a night outdoors in a place the state did not designate — punishable by a $500 fine, six months in jail, or both. The homelessness courts written into the law require a defendant to waive the right to trial before entering, and when someone cannot pay for their own treatment, the court can order unpaid labor instead. A University of Kentucky study found older homeless men already describing themselves as imprisoned by the conditions around them — the isolation, the mistreatment, the constant exposure to danger — long before any of them saw the inside of a cell. A Yale study found more than 80% of homeless veterans became homeless only after service ended. A University of Hawai‘i review named domestic violence a leading cause of homelessness for women and children, not a contributing one. Researchers at UC San Francisco put it plainly: incarceration and homelessness are driven by the same structural forces and feed each other. Pennsylvania and Illinois moved to bar enforcement of camping bans where there is no shelter. California moved to protect the people who help. Finland cut long-term homelessness by 72% over a decade by housing people first and asking questions after. Louisiana reached for the jail.

Pattern Hunters ★ Featured Longform

There is a line at the top of the page nobody has written about yet. A boilerplate commercial template, seven years old at signing, handed to the chief executive of a state, and he signed it as written. Section 13 put the agreement under the law of New York. Louisiana is the only state in the country whose private law descends from Rome by way of France and Spain, and in the one document where it might have protected us, we cannot reach for it. Section 10 required a private company’s written approval before the governor could speak to his own constituents. Section 5 committed the state to help that company litigate against the citizen who files a records request. Nearly three hundred agreements in twenty-eight months, fifty-four elected officials, one hundred twenty-one employees down to the interns, and men bound to secrecy about a thing called Project Gondor. A six-hundred-percent crash spike in Holly Ridge and an elementary school in the corner where the highways meet. One document is an incident. Nearly three hundred is an institution.

Louisiana Illuminator

Between February and April, GPS reports showed Ashtin Ursin breaking the conditions of his release somewhere between 967 and 1,181 times — a trip to Houston with roughly 92 stops, TopGolf, a casino, a vehicle clocked at 119 mph. The company paid to watch him reported none of it, then filed a report saying he was in compliance because he had communicated with their office. In West Feliciana, a monitoring company sat on five exclusion-zone breaches in four days and Peggy Beasley Rayburn died. Act 746 barred judges, sheriffs and district attorneys from holding a financial stake in monitoring vendors. It fixed the corruption Louisiana could name and left the supervision problem exactly where it found it.

Louisiana Illuminator

Fifty-two lawsuits in two months. Children between 11 and 17. Conduct alleged across 33 years, and no criminal charges coming, because the window that revived these claims revives only the civil ones. The Justice Department told Governor Foster in 1996 that it had found systemic staff abuse at four Louisiana juvenile facilities. The Bureau of Justice Statistics documented it again in 2010. Galtung called it structural violence — harm that needs no villain because it lives in the policies, the staffing, and the oversight that never came. Now the state has moved $42.4 million to put youth back on that same campus, with $70 million more for a new 72-bed facility on the same ground. Louisiana has never needed a new building.

Pattern Hunters ★ Featured Longform

On July 20, 2026, ESPN cut Ryan Clark’s microphone during a commercial break and he did not come back for the final segment. He says he was fired, not laid off. This is the full reckoning: the angry Black man trope applied by colleagues who had known him twelve years, the Talented Tenth that Du Bois himself took apart in 1948, Memphis and Wilmington and Tulsa and Trémé, a mother’s arithmetic taught in Marrero and in Gonzales, and the table Kanter described set against the one prepared in the presence of enemies. Nineteen sections. Even in 2026.

The Lens

Part four of Before the Record: The Pipelines. Mea was 15. Four years of abuse at home, a mother who called her a liar, then a school that read her trauma as defiance — the double expulsion. Loyola’s Modern Slavery Research Project found that 100% of girls engaged in criminalized survival behaviors had prior histories of victimization. Every single one. Louisiana is projected to spend $93 million expanding youth detention. Build the door before the state is forced to fund the cell.

Louisiana Illuminator

A governor dismissing his own state’s largest city is not a burn. It is a confession. King Lear, an attorney general indicted on 16 felony counts, $36 million in vetoed New Orleans projects — and underneath the feud, a child welfare system short 129 caseworkers, 4,600 children in foster care, and the worst maternal mortality rate in America. Where go Louisiana’s children, there goes Louisiana.

Pattern Hunters ★ Featured Longform

Nolan Wells went to Horn Island on July 4, 2026. His friends came back. He did not. Emmett Till. Money, Mississippi. 1955. Seventy-one years apart — same state, same water, same silence. The full longform reckoning: 350 years of receipts, the seed planted in Jamestown in 1676, the Voting Rights Act gutted in the same spring sociology was banned in Florida, the missing Black girls nobody is looking for, and the American Distraction theory — named, sourced, and proven across two and a half centuries of American history.

The Lens

The NAACP should help top Black student athletes forgo SEC money and honor the NAACP voting-rights boycott — without having to take a back seat.

Louisiana Illuminator

A 13-year-old crossed the street at midnight in a KKK robe to spray-paint a racial slur and Nazi code on Caroline Morrison-Howard's home in Central. Six months of escalating hate. Louisiana is still waiting for a response from the people with the power to act.

Pattern Hunters

A 13-year-old crossed the street at midnight in a KKK robe. The blueprint was never the child’s. This is the foundation analysis beneath the op-ed — the architecture of inherited hate, the rooms where it gets handed down, and the statutory gaps Louisiana has left open long enough to call them a choice.

Pattern Hunters

51 unexpected deaths. 13 employee arrests. Antonio Dukes died on Christmas Eve 2025 inside a facility where the guards ran the supply chain. From the bloodiest prison in the South to the pusher — this is the full structural indictment of what Elayn Hunt Correctional Center has become, and what Louisiana refuses to name.

Louisiana Illuminator

The fight for representation in Louisiana is not history. It is a current event — documented in court filings, legislative chambers, and the daily math of who gets counted and who gets erased.

Pattern Hunters

Cedar Grove asked a question Louisiana has not been willing to answer. This is the long-form reckoning the op-ed could only point toward — a century of disinvestment read as a verdict rather than a zip code, and the case that established the Three-Document Cadence.

Louisiana Illuminator

Colorblind ideology is not neutrality. In Louisiana, it is the architecture of a system that cannot see what it refuses to name.

Louisiana Illuminator

When the mall shooting happened, the governor showed up. The question Pattern Hunters keeps asking: who has to die, and where, for Louisiana to treat Black grief as a public emergency?

Louisiana Illuminator

Eight children. Two mothers. A city that keeps producing these cases and refuses to follow the structural thread back to the rooms where the abandonment began.

Louisiana Illuminator

The data is not a footnote. It is the indictment. Nine out of ten children who pass through Louisiana's foster care system encounter harm again — and the system keeps calling that a coincidence.

Louisiana Illuminator

Truth-in-sentencing dropped parole rates 78% and is projected to nearly double Louisiana's prison population by 2034. Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls it organized abandonment. My grandmother called it starting off wrong.

The Lens

The pipeline is infrastructure. It has addresses, decision-makers, and a documented paper trail. Pattern Hunters follows it room by room.

Louisiana Illuminator

Cedar Grove is not a zip code. It is a verdict — rendered by a century of disinvestment, redlining, and the deliberate withdrawal of every institution that should have stayed.

The Lens

The lawsuit names the mechanism. Pattern Hunters names the pattern behind it — and what it means for every person Louisiana has decided to warehouse rather than rehabilitate.

Pattern Hunters

The field. The line. The count. Angola's farm line is not a vestige of the past — it is a policy, actively maintained, on land that was a slave plantation before it was a prison.

Louisiana Illuminator

The whistleblower transferred for doing the right thing. 53 deaths in 2024. The normalization of deviance that turned Elayn Hunt's legacy into its own antithesis.

Louisiana Illuminator

Reframing the conversation: when we fund Black institutions, we do not just educate — we intervene in the very systems that criminalize Black life.

The Conversation

The peer-reviewed public scholarship behind the argument: HBCUs function as crime prevention infrastructure, and the data makes the case that policy has long refused to see.