Author: MIL-OSI Publisher

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Alessandro Meregaglia, Associate Professor and Archivist, Boise State University

For the sharpest minds in show business, there’s always another hustle.

Take Joe Exotic, whose 2020 conviction for a murder-for-hire plot and violations of the Endangered Species Act hasn’t kept the eccentric tiger trainer out of the headlines.

Since beginning his 21-year sentence, the “Tiger King” star has started a cannabis brand, hawked digital art and begun work on an album tentatively titled “Jungle Rhapsody: A Tiger King Experience.” His most recent gambit involves selling personal phone calls from his cell – “What better Valentines gift could you ever get your loved one,” he posted on Instagram in January 2026.

But before Joe Exotic, there was Mabel Stark. Often described as America’s most famous female tiger trainer, the Tiger Queen was renowned for her pluck and charisma.

While researching Caxton Printers, the publisher of Stark’s autobiography, I came across unpublished archival material about Stark’s long career training animals. Like Joe Exotic, Stark had a knack for the spotlight. But even more impressively, she did it under the scrutiny of being a woman in a male-dominated world, while caring for her animals with love rather than fear.

From nurse to tiger trainer

Born Mary Ann Haynie in 1888 or 1889 – the exact year has always been a mystery – Stark grew up in Princeton, Kentucky. When she was 8 years old, she attended her first circus, where she was awed by the performances of trained animals.

Two decades would pass before she got a chance to try her hand at animal training.

Taking a vacation in California from her job as a nurse, Stark met Al Sands, manager of the Al G. Barnes Circus. After learning of her interest in training animals, he hired her on the spot.

Stark started by riding horses and training goats. It would take several years before she started working with tigers. But once she did, her career took off.

Crowds gathered to watch the “Tiger Girl” wrestle with big cats and wow audiences by commanding a dozen tigers at a time to follow her lead. Her wrestling act with her favorite tiger, Rajah – in which the duo would roll three or four times on the ground – became one of the best-known cat acts in the U.S.

She leveraged that success to join the Ringling Circus – the largest circus in the U.S. – for twice the pay.

As her popularity grew, Stark collaborated with screenwriter Gertrude Orr to write her life’s story.

“Hold That Tiger” hit bookstores in 1938. Caxton Printers, a small publishing company in rural Idaho, issued the book and marketed it primarily to young readers. It proved popular, selling well enough to warrant multiple reprintings.

Known for giving a voice to first-time writers and authors from underrepresented groups, Caxton Printers found a niche market for circus-related titles. It also published books about Stark’s first employer, Al Barnes, as well as the Ringling Brothers and renowned lion trainer Louis Roth, who also happened to be one of Stark’s ex-husbands.

Female power in the ring

Stark was acutely aware of the path she was paving.

“I deliberately chose a field in which no other woman had specialized,” she wrote in her autobiography.

The conventional wisdom at the time, she added, was that “tigers were considered too dangerous for a woman to handle.”

Stark’s willingness to defy convention mattered. As circus historian Janet M. Davis noted, “circus women’s performances celebrated female power” and represented “a startling alternative to contemporary social norms.”

In early-20th-century American life, women might not have been able to vote or to serve on juries in most states, but in the ring, they commanded the audience’s attention riding bareback on horses, displaying strength and stamina, and performing gravity-defying acrobatic feats.

Stark’s schedule was relentless. She performed almost daily with traveling circuses, and she continually refined her act. In 1938, she worked with both tigers and lions at the same time, a first for a female trainer. She made history again working with 12 tigers in one cage.

Whether it was due to the demands of her schedule or her preference for her cats, Stark’s relationships with men rarely worked out.

Over the course of her life, Stark married four times, three of which ended in divorce.

“I love these big cats as a mother loves her children,” she admitted to a friend. But “with husbands I was never happy.”

‘An animal trainer can’t have nerves’

Stark, aware of other trainers’ abusive behavior toward their tigers, took a different route.

“Kindness and patience are the biggest factors in training. … Trainers who try to beat animals into submission always get into trouble,” she said.

Yet her trade was not without danger.

“An animal trainer can’t have nerves. I haven’t had any since I gave up nursing,” she said in a 1922 New York Times interview. “They may be planting violets on me tomorrow, but while I have my health and strength, I’d rather take care of 10 tigers than a sick person.”

Stark had several serious accidents. Perhaps the worst was in 1928: After a circus train arrived late, Stark started her act without realizing her tigers hadn’t been fed for 24 hours. Two famished tigers attacked Stark after she fell in mud.

“As I lay there, helpless,” she wrote, “I wondered into how many pieces I would be torn, and how long it would take for the other tigers, growling and snarling restlessly on their seats, to finish me.” She suffered multiple broken bones, nearly lost her leg and required 300 stitches.

Another incident took place in 1950, when a tiger mauled her as she reached for its cub. Doctors initially thought they would have to amputate her arm but managed to save it.

Despite these close calls with her tigers, Stark maintained that “I am not afraid. I like the challenge of their roaring defiance.”

The stark reality

Stark toured with circuses until the late 1940s, when she was hired by Jungleland, a zoo located outside of Los Angeles.

Save for the three-and-a-half years she lived in Japan touring with her wild cat act, she spent the last 20 years of her career at Jungleland.

Stark never stopped drawing crowds to her show, nor did she shy away from the spotlight. She even appeared on the game show “What’s My Line?” in 1961 as a contestant whose profession the panel had to guess.

“Each year has left scars on my body, but it has also brought a full measure of happiness,” she recalled.
Stark worked at Jungleland until she was fired in 1967 after the park’s insurance company stopped covering her. Being away from her tigers devastated her, and she died by suicide just months later on April 20, 1968, at her home in Thousand Oaks.

The concluding paragraph of Stark’s autobiography anticipates the end of her life:

“The chute door opens as I crack my whip and shout, ‘Let them come!’ Out slink the striped cats, snarling and roaring, leaping at each other or at me. It’s a matchless thrill, and life without it is not worth while to me.”

Alessandro Meregaglia has received funding from the Idaho Humanities Council, the Bibliographical Society of America, and Boise State’s Institute for Advancing American Values for his research on Caxton Printers.

– ref. The inspiring and tragic story of Mabel Stark, America’s most famous female tiger trainer – https://theconversation.com/the-inspiring-and-tragic-story-of-mabel-stark-americas-most-famous-female-tiger-trainer-276570

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Helena Addison, Postdoctoral Fellow, Yale University

“People can assess me, interview me, incarcerate me, observe me, and they can think they know what I need,” said Shawn, a man in his early 50s who spent 15 years in and out of prison. “And that can be an educated assessment, but at the end of the day, I live inside of this body, inside of this head. I know what I need.”

Shawn is one of 29 formerly incarcerated Black men living in Philadelphia I interviewed as part of my research on coping with the mental health effects of imprisonment. His name and the names of other people quoted in this article are pseudonyms chosen to protect their privacy.

I study incarceration, mental health and access to health care. I’ve previously written about how confinement in jails and prisons leaves a lasting impact on mental health. But I also wanted to understand how the men I interviewed recognized and addressed their own mental health needs — through coping strategies, conversations with friends and family, and seeking mental health treatment.

Depressed but ‘doing OK’

Both research and clinical practice often fail to accurately capture how formerly incarcerated Black men identify their own mental health needs. That’s in part because implicit bias and anti-Black racism shape how mental health is assessed and treated in both correctional and community facilities.

Most of the men I spoke with said the mental health evaluations they received while incarcerated were designed only to “check the boxes” and conveyed a sense that no one really cared.

“They’d listen. They’d ask the pertinent questions,” Malcolm, 62, explained. “Then they’d talk down to you. And then they forget all about you.”

A few of the men received diagnoses they didn’t understand or believe. John, 29, described how a judge ordered him to have a mental health evaluation and that he was diagnosed as having post-traumatic stress disorder.

“I didn’t take it serious,” he said. “I didn’t start understanding mental health and believing it until I was locked up for a long period of time. I started reading up on it and studying it. …That’s how I started understanding therapy was important.”

Comparing the way participants described their mental health in their own words during the interviews with standardized screening tools revealed an important pattern. Most described themselves as “good,” “blessed,” “at peace” or “doing OK.” Yet nearly all reported symptoms of depression, anxiety or PTSD.

More than half reported three or more PTSD symptoms, such as trauma-related nightmares or feeling constantly on guard and easily startled.

These findings underscore that what appears to be resilience or well-being on the surface may mask underlying mental health needs, and the way those needs are expressed is shaped by culture and life experiences.

Coping mechanisms

Participants described self-reliance as essential to coping with incarceration and life after release. Physical separation from family and community, along with strained relationships and limited resources after release, left many feeling like they had to manage mental distress on their own.

“When you’re in prison, you learn to depend on yourself,” Ken, 56, said.

Some said incarceration reinforced existing coping strategies they’d had, such as exercising, praying, journaling, reading and meditation.

“I was always into being active,” said Tay, 31, who took part in a military-style bootcamp while incarcerated. “I learned how to use [exercise] to cope with my emotions.”

Others were introduced to new coping skills through educational, vocational and recreational programs inside their correctional facilities. Men spoke about how earning GEDs, taking college courses, learning trades and participating in other structured programs helped them manage stress and connect with others.

Unfortunately, the availability of such programs is limited.

Bottled-up feelings

Many of my study’s participants described wanting to “do things differently” after incarceration by expressing their emotions rather than suppressing them.

Some directly connected bottling up feelings to behaviors that had led to their incarceration.

“[You’ve] let a lot of stuff build up and then [you’ll] go outside and lash out on the first person you see,” David, 30, explained. “I’m getting more comfortable with expressing myself, whether it’s to my mom or if it’s to a friend.”

But finding the right people to confide in could be difficult.

“I try to express myself every day. People laugh and make a joke out of it,” Shakur, 21, said. “If I had somebody sitting one-on-one, talking to me about my problems, I’d feel better.”

Navigating romantic relationships was also difficult.

“We come back to them broken. And they trying to fix us, but they don’t know how to fix us. They’re broken too,” said Thomas, 44.

Mass incarceration doesn’t just fracture individuals – it erodes romantic relationships, as those left behind often navigate their own economic strain, limited resources and emotional distress.

Participants emphasized that speaking with people who shared similar experiences made it easier to express themselves and helped them navigate moments of distress.

Deep distrust of institutions

Many participants expressed deep distrust of mental health treatment within correctional facilities.

“Being a Black man living to 62 years old, I don’t trust the government from the Tuskegee experiment to the thing they had going on in Holmesburg prison,” said Carl. “How can you put your trust in that?”

The Tuskegee study was a research study conducted by the U.S. federal government from 1932 to 1972. It followed Black men with syphilis but withheld effective treatment, even after the cure was made widely available in the 1940s. This caused preventable suffering and deaths.

During the Holmesburg Prison experiments, conducted at a Philadelphia prison from the 1950s through the 1970s, University of Pennsylvania researchers tested pharmaceuticals and chemicals on incarcerated men, many of them Black, without adequate informed consent.

Some of the men I interviewed also reported experiencing or witnessing mistreatment after reporting mental health concerns, and they expressed fears that seeking help while incarcerated would lead to punishment rather than support.

Stigma and seeking help

After release, participants shared concerns that they would be seen as “weak” by their peers for talking about their problems. This mental health stigma served as a barrier to seeking treatment.

“It’s not normal for guys like us, as far as being Black, African American, to reach out to a therapist,” said David.

Some men, like Antonio, who described feeling “like walls was closing in on me,” were motivated to seek treatment due to significant mental distress. Others were driven by a desire to improve their relationships with their wives or children.

Nearly 70% of participants had used formal mental health services at some point. Some were mandated to receive treatment, while others sought help voluntarily – sometimes at local walk-in clinics and behavioral health centers such as Wedge Recovery Centers, a Philadelphia staple that was mentioned by several participants but closed in May 2025 due to financial losses.

Communities can work together to reduce stigma around seeking mental health support and formal treatment, take expressions of mental distress from formerly incarcerated men seriously, and create spaces where they feel safe being vulnerable.

Participants named visible, neighborhood clinics with walk-in behavioral health services as places they felt able to go in moments of need. Increasing the visibility of these services, conducting outreach and integrating formerly incarcerated men as peer navigators can help build trust.

Read more of our stories about Philadelphia, or sign up for our Philadelphia newsletter on Substack.

Helena Addison received funding from National Institute of Nursing Research of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number F31NR020434, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration and American Nurses Association Minority Fellowship Program, the University of Pennsylvania’s Presidential PhD Fellowship, and Jonas Philanthropies to support this study and/or her PhD training.

– ref. Formerly incarcerated Black men say they’re ‘doing OK’ while trying to cope with depression and PTSD – https://theconversation.com/formerly-incarcerated-black-men-say-theyre-doing-ok-while-trying-to-cope-with-depression-and-ptsd-275071

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Georges Naufal, Associate Research Scientist, Public Policy Research Institute, Texas A&M University

The Oregon Supreme Court on Feb. 5, 2026, issued a ruling that will have a wide impact. More than 1,400 criminal cases had to be dismissed, the justices ruled, due to lack of adequate counsel available for defendants.

Like other states, Oregon must provide defendants with legal representation if they cannot afford attorneys on their own. But Oregon has less than one-third of the attorneys it needs to provide adequate defense for indigents, or people who can’t afford counsel on their own.

Shortages of this scope are common around the country. Pennsylvania faces a similar shortage of about 30% of the public defenders it needs, with insufficient numbers of attorneys in nearly every county. New Mexico needs 67% more attorneys to provide effective counsel. Kansas needs 277 more public defenders, or roughly triple its current number.

As public policy researchers who study legal defense issues, we believe it’s clear that such shortages have repercussions throughout the criminal justice system.

Without enough lawyers providing indigent defense, defendants sit in jail longer, plead without guidance and risk wrongful convictions. Prosecutors face delays in clearing their cases. Court dockets slow, costs rise and public trust declines.

In other words, indigent defense shortages harm not only defendants but the justice system as a whole.

Rights to an attorney

The Sixth Amendment guarantees individuals facing criminal charges the right to defense counsel, at government expense if required. This right was clarified by a landmark Supreme Court case in 1963, Gideon v. Wainwright. The court ruled that states are required to provide attorneys to defendants who cannot afford an attorney.

About 80% to 90% of state defendants and more than 90% of federal defendants cannot afford a lawyer. The exact rate varies by state, year and type of charge, but it generally falls well above 50% of all criminal cases.

Fulfilling the promise made in Gideon often falls to public defenders and private lawyers appointed by courts. Sixty-three years after the decision, the pool of lawyers willing to fulfill this promise is rapidly shrinking, aging and is overburdened, with lawyers sometimes working without pay.

Texas reflects this national problem. There are too few lawyers handling too many cases, putting the whole criminal justice system at risk. In a research report for the Texas Indigent Defense Commission, our team at Texas A&M University found that the state lost 1,345 attorneys who had been handling indigent defense cases between 2014 and 2023, or about one-fourth of all such attorneys. That decline happened even as the total number of lawyers in Texas grew by more than 25,000.

The problem is worse in rural areas, where judges cannot find enough attorneys to appoint, slowing court operations. In Texas, 27% of attorneys in rural counties are already overburdened and exceeding recommended caseload guidelines.

“I understand the irony of a prosecutor advocating for money for a public defender office, but at the end of the day it would help the county carry out its constitutional obligation,” Val Verde County prosecutor David Martinez told the Texas Tribune. “It would save the county hundreds of thousands of dollars in the long run.”

Fewer attorneys available

This problem is not new. A 2004 report from the American Bar Association outlined funding shortages that hampered hiring of defense counsel, leading to inexperienced and sometimes incompetent lawyers handling excessive caseloads.

But the problem has accelerated since the COVID-19 pandemic and its disruption of the labor market.

Our research shows that attorneys who take indigent defense cases often do so out of a strong sense of civic duty and commitment to public service. Attorneys are asked to do far more than just apply the law. They regularly help clients navigate housing, transportation, substance use and mental health needs. Without a strong sense of calling, many attorneys choose other areas of practice instead of public defense.

Some attorneys with a sense of motivation are still unable to join public service. Citing the cost of repaying law school loans, they enter private practice instead.

No simple solutions

The shortage of attorneys willing to take indigent defense cases is a serious policy problem. Solving it requires expanding the pool of attorneys who are available to take these cases – both the attorneys who are practicing today and the attorneys who will enter the profession in the future.

Policymakers have mainly focused on expanding the pool of existing attorneys. The most common tools include increasing appointment fees, offering additional financial incentives and creating or expanding public defender offices.

These approaches can help in the short term, but their effects are limited. Raising fees rarely brings new attorneys into indigent defense; instead, it often lures attorneys from neighboring jurisdictions that already face shortages.

Raising fees for private lawyers also fails to address public defender offices, where attorneys are salaried and often paid less than prosecutors. Loan forgiveness programs can help recruitment and retention; research shows they matter for public service careers, but these programs are uneven across states and uncertain over time.

Financial incentives alone will not solve a workforce problem rooted in supply. A sustainable solution requires expanding the pool of prospective attorneys. We believe it would help for recruitment to begin much earlier, at the high school level, especially in rural areas, and continue through college and law school.

Current efforts tend to focus only on law students who are already committed to legal careers. Partnerships between counties, state agencies, bar associations, universities and community organizations could help build pipelines leading to public defense careers. They might offer, for example, internships and mentoring, or reduce barriers for students who want to serve their communities.

Expanding the pool of attorneys will require years of coordinated investment across states, counties, courts, law schools and the legal profession. Short-term incentives can prop up overburdened systems, but long-term recruitment will be needed to keep courts functioning and fully protect the constitutional right to counsel.

Georges Naufal has received funding from the Texas Indigent Defense Commission.

Emily Naiser has received funding from the Texas Indigent Defense Commission.

– ref. Public defender shortage is leading to hundreds of criminal cases being dismissed – https://theconversation.com/public-defender-shortage-is-leading-to-hundreds-of-criminal-cases-being-dismissed-275534

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Stephen Neely, Associate Professor of Public Affairs, University of South Florida

Does politics stress you out? Did the last election cause you to lose sleep, lose your temper or lose a friend? If so, you weren’t alone.

For the better part of two decades, the American Psychological Association has documented a steady increase in the phenomenon of “political stress” among American voters. However, research and reporting during that same period have focused primarily on the political consequences of increasing polarization and division rather than the psychological consequences of the modern political climate.

As a political scientist studying how the public engages with politics and media, I wondered: What does it mean to live in a political environment that is highly confrontational, emotionally charged and difficult to escape? And how does that environment affect people over time?

During the 2024 presidential election, I teamed up with three colleagues to answer those questions. Our book, The Anxious State: Stress Polarization, and Elections in America, published in January 2026, summarizes what we learned.

While several features of the modern political landscape contribute to political stress, one culprit in particular is alarmingly efficient at converting politics into chronic stress – social media.

Political stress builds fast

We conducted four large, nationally representative surveys tracking Americans’ political attitudes and well-being, one every three months over the course of 2024. Across our election year surveys, roughly 4 in 10 American adults consistently reported that politics had caused them to experience at least one significant stress reaction in the past month. These included nontrivial conflicts with friends and family, sleep disruptions, lost tempers and being unable to mentally or emotionally disengage from politics.

In a country of roughly 260 million adults, that amounts to well over 100 million people experiencing measurable political stress in any given month.

In just one example, at each point in 2024, around 17% of American adults reported losing sleep over politics. This translates to roughly 44 million people nationwide. Sleep loss is not a trivial inconvenience. Extensive research shows that insufficient sleep is associated with impaired cognitive function, chronic health problems, diminished productivity and an increase in traffic accidents, just to name a few.

Our findings point to similar trends from the effects of lost tempers, fractured social networks and excessive political rumination. And while some degree of political stress might be expected in the lead-up to a highly consequential election, what surprised us most was how little these numbers changed over time. Despite a year filled with dramatic political events, reported levels of political stress rarely budged.

This stability suggests that political stress is no longer driven primarily by isolated moments of breaking news or electoral upheaval. Instead, it appears to be sustained by the environment in which people now encounter politics – and that environment is increasingly shaped by social media.

Why social media is different

Social media differs from earlier forms of political communication in a crucial way: Content is not presented chronologically or editorially; it is presented algorithmically. Platforms such as Facebook, X and TikTok are designed to maximize attention and engagement, which means they privilege content that provokes strong emotional reactions.

In other words, content that causes outrage, fear, moral condemnation and conflict is simply more likely to keep users scrolling, clicking, commenting and sharing.

As a result, political information on social media is more likely to reach people through a sensationalized and emotionally charged lens than information encountered through traditional news sources. And given the architecture of social networks, this content tends to reach users whether they seek it out or not.

Time spent online is stressful, but engagement makes it worse

Our findings show that even passive exposure to political content on social media is linked to elevated political stress. But active engagement – such as likes, reposts and comments – makes the problem substantially worse.

People who reported frequently encountering, commenting on or sharing political content online consistently exhibited the highest overall levels of political stress in our survey. Compared with those who primarily consumed political information passively and without engaging, active participants were far more likely to report losing sleep, losing their temper and feeling unable to disengage from politics.

In other words, the more that social media turns users from observers into participants in political conflict, the greater the psychological toll appears to be.

A generational divide

These effects, while substantial, were not distributed evenly across the population.

Younger Americans, particularly members of Gen Z, reported higher levels of political stress associated with social media use than older cohorts. This is not especially surprising. Younger adults are more likely to rely on social media as a primary source of political information.

For a generation that has never known a political environment without algorithmically curated feeds, the boundary between politics and everyday life is especially thin. Politics does not arrive at scheduled times, through discrete channels. Rather, it is interspersed with expressions of social identity, entertainment and peer interaction. And this constant exposure comes with a psychological cost.

Social media alone certainly isn’t to blame for the anxious and divisive state of America’s political climate. In our research, we identified a number of factors that contribute to Americans’ current levels of exhaustion with politics, including sharp increases in partisan hostility and negative – often uncivil – campaign tactics.

But social media nonetheless stands out for how efficiently it amplifies this stress – and that is unlikely to change unless and until voters become more aware that their emotions and well-being are being negatively influenced by the very platforms they turn to for information and connection.

I don’t own or “work for” the publisher selling our recent book, but the exposure for these data would presumably benefit both they and me.

– ref. Stressed out by politics? You’re not imagining it, and research shows that social media is largely to blame – https://theconversation.com/stressed-out-by-politics-youre-not-imagining-it-and-research-shows-that-social-media-is-largely-to-blame-274849