6.10.15: Using Illegal Drugs While Pregnant, Surviving A Kidnapping, & Jerks At Work

There’s plenty of evidence that drug use during pregnancy can harm the fetus, but should using illicit substances while pregnant be a criminal offense? On today’s show, an unfiltered look at what happens when expectant mothers are jailed for drug use.

Then, from Mexican cartels to Isis, the rise in kidnappings globally adds up to a 1.6 billion dollar “hostage industry”. Later in the show a journalist attends “Hostage Camp”, where wealthy travelers learn how to survive a kidnapping.  

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While Tennessee is the only state to criminalize drug use during pregnancy, a number of states are going to great legal lengths to prosecute pregnant drug users on charges of everything from child neglect to felony assault.  Olga Khazan examines a number of these cases in her article for The Atlantic “Into the Body of Another”.

The United States incarcerates six times as many women as it did thirty years ago. Many of these women are already mothers, and four percent of incarcerated women enter prison pregnant. What happens to the babies born in the correctional system and what happens to the children left behind, as their mothers serve out their sentences? Audrey Quinn of Life of the Law brings us this story.

You can listen to this story again at PRX.org.

Mitch Moxley is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn – he recently took Andy “Orlando” Wilson’s  three-day course on how to survive a kidnapping as part of a collaboration between Slate, and the travel journal Roads & Kingdoms.

Jerry Useem has covered business and economics for Fortune and The New York Times. We found his article “Why It Pays to Be a Jerk” at The Atlantic.

If someone is known as “the jerk” at work, it’ll show up on their performance review, right? Not likely, say two management researchers. Lilia Fuquen reports that their new study highlights the consequences of rudeness in the workplace.

You can listen to this story again at PRX.org.