Incarcerated youths in Louisiana are being dosed with powerful antipsychotic drugs even though they haven’t been diagnosed with the major mental illnesses that these drugs are usually prescribed to treat, Matt Davis reports in The Lens.

Davis’s old school, data-driven investigative report raises troubling questions about the juvenile justice system in Louisiana. First, are young inmates being medicated for social control, as opposed to medical need? Second, are inmates with genuine mental health issues getting appropriate care?

Watch an interview with Davis about his story on WVUE FOX 8 News.

In the New York Review of Books, Elizabeth Drew thoughtfully pre-explains a question that will no doubt baffle future generations of historians:

Someday people will look back and wonder, What were they thinking? Why, in the midst of a stalled recovery, with the economy fragile and job creation slowing to a trickle, did the nation’s leaders decide that the thing to do—in order to raise the debt limit, normally a routine matter—was to spend less money, making job creation all the more difficult? Many experts on the economy believe that the President has it backward: that focusing on growth and jobs is more urgent in the near term than cutting the deficit, even if such expenditures require borrowing. But that would go against Obama’s new self-portrait as a fiscally responsible centrist.

Drew’s essay is essential reading for anyone who’s unclear on why the United States seems poised to commit what a blogger at the Economist.com has dubbed “the biggest unforced error in history.”

Jose Antonio Vargas’s Sidney Award-winning account of his life as a reporter and undocumented immigrant has sparked a range of responses from fellow journalists since it appeared in the New York Times Magazine last month.

Vargas came forward nearly twenty years after family sent him to the U.S. from the Philippines at the age of 12. He says he didn’t learn about his immigration status until he tried to apply for a drivers’ license at the age of 16. He decided to forge ahead with his life in America, including his dream of becoming a reporter. He describes how he used forged documents to obtain a drivers’ license and falsely claimed to be a citizen when he applied for various media jobs.

Jack Shafer of Slate argued that Vargas undercut his own credibility as a journalist by admitting to a pattern of deceit:

I get on my high horse about Vargas’ lies because reporter-editor relationships are based on trust. A news organization can’t function if editors must constantly cross-examine their reporters in search of deliberate lies. I’m more disturbed with Vargas for lying to the Washington Post Co. (which—disclosure alert!—employs me) than I am about him breaking immigration law. His lies to the Post violated the compact that makes journalism possible. It also may have put the company on the hook for violating immigration law [PDF], which slaps employers who knowingly employ illegal immigrants with legal sanctions and fines. This may be the case in the Vargas episode: In his story, he writes of telling one Post manager about his immigration status, and that manager, Peter Perl, took no action.

Economist.com blogger M.S. took issue with Shafer’s thesis, arguing that media organizations should take necessary steps to make sure that journalists tell the truth in print and ignore their personal lives:

There are many reasons why people lie. The way to tell whether you can trust your reporters is to subject them to withering scrutiny during their introductory phase on the job, and then, periodically and without warning, to subject them to withering scrutiny again. The responsibility for scrupulous accuracy is a procedural responsibility that needs to be instituted at an organisational level by management. Trustworthy organisations are run by people who build systems that produce reliable information; they’re not clubs composed of people who possess innate characterological trustworthiness. A newspaper editor should care whether his reporters are telling the truth in their professional journalistic work, and it’s that editor’s responsibility to institute reasonable procedures to ensure that they do so by making sure that systematic liars get caught quickly. Whether they’ve told their daughter that her father isn’t actually her biological father, or whatever, is none of the editor’s business. As I understand things, Jayson Blair doesn’t seem to have become a systematic liar until after he started working in the newspaper business.

M.S. argues that even journalists deserve a certain amount of leeway with regard to certain sensitive personal details because circumstances sometimes force otherwise trustworthy people to tell isolated lies in order to survive. I made a similar argument at Big Think in a post I wrote before I joined the Hillman Foundation. Some secrets have such devastating consequences that people are basically forced into lies. For example, we understand why an LGBT person might feel compelled to lie about their orientation in order to protect themselves from discrimination, social ostracism, or even violence. We don’t assume that every closeted person who comes out must therefore be less credible in other areas of their life. Holding them fully responsible for lying, without acknowledging that they never should have been put in that position in the first place, is a way of compounding the damage of an unfair system.

Vargas’ story illustrates how broken our immigration system is. He was brought to this country as a child and he learned his true status while he was still a minor. Did anyone seriously expect a 16-year-old to pack up and go back to the Philippines after his family had spent a relative fortune to bring him to the U.S.? He was trapped in someone else’s lie. His other option would have been to skirt the issue by going underground and taking menial jobs where no one would inquire too closely about his immigraiton status.

Yes, Vargas exposed his employers to some risk by lying about his immigration status. What’s worse? Consigning a promising young man to literal or figurative exile? Or subjecting an institution to the hypothetical risk of a fine between $275 and $2200 for hiring an undocumented person?

Other critics, including Vargas’s former boss at the San Francisco Chronicle, have suggested that Vargas undercut his credibility because he wrote about immigration issues without disclosing that he himself was an undocumented immigrant.

Dick Rogers wrote at SFGate.com:

In an e-mail, Vargas, who went on to write for the Washington Post and Huffington Post, said he omitted his status “because I was afraid and fearful of the consequences.”

That’s exactly the point. Over his career, what else did he fail to report or write? It’s difficult to divine. The majority of his stories were routine: fires, crime, features. He also wrote often about diversity and immigration. Just as it’s hard to prove a negative, it’s hard to know whether Vargas listened sympathetically to some and less so to others, whether he was more inclined to hear one side of a story than others, whether he omitted information that hit too close to home.

This argument tacitly assumes that citizenship or legal residency is the default neutral position from which immigration should be covered. You could just as easily ask whether reporters who take their U.S. citizenship for granted might listen more sympathetically to some stories than others. Do anti-immigration activists get more sympathetic coverage because reporters are more likely to be documented than undocumented? Everyone has a stake in immigration policy. It’s not as if citizens and legal residents are inherently neutral and undocumented people are biased.

It’s a little more complicated if a reporter is lying about their immigration status, as opposed to simply not disclosing. But, as discussed above, sometimes people have good reasons to tell isolated lies about their personal lives. Refusing to cover immigration would only have attracted suspicion to a young reporter of color who was living in constant fear of exposure. Under the circumstances, demanding total transparency would be tantamount to demanding self-incrimination.

Vargas has become an advocate for the DREAM Act, proposed legislation that would help resolve the untenable position that Vargas and countless other undocumented young people face after being brought to the U.S. as children. We can all agree that it’s better for society and for journalism when people can be open about who they are. Instead of pointing fingers at individuals who lie after the fact, we should reform our institutions to make it easier for everyone to live and work with integrity.

The Sidney Hillman Foundation is very proud to announce that Jose Antonio Vargas is the winner of this month’s Sidney Award for excellence in journalism for his powerful and thought-provoking autobiographical story, “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant.”

When Vargas’ mother put him on a U.S.-bound flight from Manila one late summer morning in 1993, the twelve-year-old had no idea he was about to become one of our nation’s estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants. He thought he was imigrating legally, as his grandparents, a security guard and a food service worker, had done years earlier. Vargas learned his true immigration status four years later when a clerk at the DMV informed his that his Green Card was forged. Like many immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children, Vargas was trapped. He reasoned that if citizenship hadn’t been given to him by birth or bureaucracy, he’d have to earn it.

With the help of an “underground railroad” of sympathetic friends and mentors, Vargas rose from his hometown paper to the heights of American journalism. Along the way, he shared a 2008 Pulitzer Prize for the Washington Post’s coverage of the Viriginia Tech massacre, saw his reporting turned into a documentary, and profiled facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for the New Yorker.

All this time, Vargas was haunted by his immigration status. The strain of keeping such a terrible secret ate away at his sense of security and his ability to feel close to others.

Vargas had hoped that the DREAM Act would pass before his last piece of official ID expired on his 30th birthday. The DREAM Act is 10-year-old piece of bipartisan legislation, currently stalled in Congress, that would give undocumented young people who were brought to this country as children the opportunity to earn legal permanent residency by going to college or serving the the military.

When the DREAM Act failed in the Senate, Vargas realized that the involuntary charade had gone on long enough. He decided to come forward in the hopes that his story would catalyze a more realistic debate about immigration in this country.

Learn more about Vargas and his piece in the Backstory, an email Q&A with Lindsay Beyerstein.