How often have we heard of employees being injured on the job and their bosses trying to squirm out of paying for benefits? We’ve seen it with coal miners and NFL Players, but what if the job was defending our country, and the boss was the US military?

Most Americans take for granted the idea that they will succeed more than their parents did. But recently many studies have shown that Americans are not as socially mobile as their European counterparts. Nowhere are the consequences of that immobility so stark than in the criminal justice system.

Fifty years after Martin Luther King gave the “I Have a Dream” speech, mass incarceration has become a modern-day analogue to Jim Crow. Some 65 million Americans -- disproportionately people of color -- have criminal records.

To say that internet comments are often misinformed is kind of like saying Nelson Mandela was a pretty cool guy. It's about as understated as understatements get.

The American ideal is equal justice under law -- a nation where everyone plays by the same rules and pays the same penalties when they break those rules. This ideal is not reality, as our recent video with Glenn Greenwald reveals.

Brave New Foundation (BNF) is looking for a political rock star to run our Beyond Bars campaign, which produces videos and engages social media to fight mass incarceration. Our goal is to heighten the sense of public urgency around reforming this country’s dysfunctional criminal justice system. We think it’s shameful the United States has the highest rate of imprisonment on earth, with even modest offenses (often drug crimes) resulting in harsh punishments. Beyond Bars promotes a greater emphasis on solutions like prevention and rehabilitation, which are more cost-effective and more humane.

Beyond Bars recently teamed up with the ACLU and The Nation magazine on a video series showing who's profiting off of mass incarceration in the United States. It's called Prison Profiteers. American taxpayers don't get much out of having the biggest prison population on earth, but a handful of corporations and other institutions do.

This week, Target became one of the few corporations to implement a ban on asking applicants about their criminal history or performing background checks prior to an initial interview with a candidate. The ban, which rolls out early next year in stores nationwide, is intended to level the playing field for formerly incarcerated people trying to reenter society and comes after protesters from Take Action Minnesota targeted the corporation at its Minneapolis headquarters earlier this year.

Incarceration rates in New York have declined steadily in recent years due partly to reforms in drug laws. According to the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, incarceration for drug offenses has dropped 71 percent since 1996. Last month, the state of New York closed its 13^th prison in the last four years.

Now that the federal government is up and running again, President Obama has announced that immigration reform is his highest priority. The country's biggest for-profit prison companies already pull in hundreds of millions of dollars a year locking up immigrants in federal custody. They stand to pull in even more money if the new laws generate lots of new prisoners.