Some 24 million voter registrations in the United States contain significant errors, including about 1.8 million dead people still on the rolls and many more approved to vote in multiple states, according to a report released Tuesday.

The number of Americans living under the correctional system fell to 1.6 million in 2010, according to recent government data. Host Michel Martin discusses the decline and efforts to reform the system with former U.S. Attorney General Richard Thornburgh and Adam Gelb, director of the Public Safety Performance Project for the Pew Center on the States.

When compared with the billions of dollars big banks have rung up in overdraft fees over the last decade, recent settlements with customers over unfair overdraft charges have amounted to little more than a slap on the wrist. No different is JPMorgan Chase's tentative agreement, first reported Monday, to settle for $110 million a consumer case charging that it routinely reordered checking account transactions. more

MY MOTHER grew up on the black side of segregated Mississippi in a family of teachers, preachers, and sharecroppers. She won money to go to college from an oratorical prize. My father - the son of an Italian immigrant - spent his childhood in a small town in Pennsylvania. He saw himself as middle class because he had two pairs of pants. (Poor people only had one.)Like millions of Americans, they climbed the socioeconomic ladder painstakingly, through scholarships and federal loans and research grants. They became university professors. Yet I have never heard either of them ever claim to be “self-made.’’

The widening income gap has become a controversial issue in the United States, as liberals decry the decline of the middle class and conservatives argue that a healthy market economy must reward effort, enterprise and risk taking. But on the related issue of economic mobility, or individuals’ ability to move up the income ladder, most people appear to agree: Upward mobility is good. more

Conventional wisdom used to say women were the big financial losers after a divorce. But a new Pew survey finds women these days are actually bouncing back better than men financially.

On tonight’s Special Report with Bret Baier, James Rosen investigates the rising rate of downward mobility among the middle class. In a recent study, the Pew Charitable Trust found that 1 out of every 3 American middle class kids has fallen out of that class by the time they are an adult.