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Megan Rice celebrated her 85th birthday last week — in a high-rise detention center in Brooklyn.

The Catholic nun is serving nearly three years in prison for evading security and painting peace slogans on the walls of a nuclear facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn.

Rice is far from the only religious figure to run into legal trouble. There's a long tradition of Catholic clergy protesting nuclear weapons, from the Berrigan brothers in the 1980s to the fictional nun Jane Ingalls, featured in the series Orange is the New Black.

Rice, a member of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, spent decades working and teaching in Africa. She too has a long history of protest, even before she allegedly joined two men to throw human blood and write slogans on a building that houses enriched uranium in 2012.

Now, from inside the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, Rice is continuing her own brand of activism. With the help of friends and advocates including the National Association of Women Judges, Rice is drawing attention to conditions inside U.S. corrections facilities.

She and a few hundred others had been set to live in a women's prison in Danbury, Conn., the same one that served as a model for Orange is the New Black.

After authorities decided to overhaul that facility, the Catholic nun was sent to what was supposed to be a temporary holding center.

Brenda Murray, a federal administrative law judge, has been closely following Sister Rice's case because one of her friends entered the convent at the same time.

"It seems ridiculous to put somebody like that long term on the ninth floor of a high-rise building," Murray says. "I mean, that was supposed to be a temporary situation 'til we resolved Danbury, and it isn't been temporary. And it just is unfair."

A high rise might sound luxurious. But in this case, friends say, more than 100 women share six bathrooms.

A study by the Liman Public Interest Program at Yale Law School says the detention center in Brooklyn has much less to offer than the one in Connecticut.

Pat McSweeney, a retired ninth-grade English teacher, knows that firsthand. McSweeney befriended Sister Rice years ago at a protest. She describes the Brooklyn holding center as "like a big cement box, huge."

McSweeney visits when she can, and keeps in touch by phone or e-mail.

"When I've asked her a couple of times if she can go outside, no she can't," McSweeney says.

Rice insists she's fine, but friends say conditions in the Brooklyn facility are taking a toll on her. For one thing, the cap came off her front tooth months ago.

"There was a long time when she was carrying the cap around in her pocket," McSweeney says, "and then I think she did see someone and it was on, when her niece from Boston visited her, but it must have come off again."

Things are even more complicated when it comes to women's health care behind bars. That's because advocates say every facet of the Bureau of Prisons system was designed for men, even though women are very different.

"The majority, the vast majority of women in federal prisons are not violent offenders," says retired federal appeals court judge Pat Wald.

Wald says research demonstrates that incarcerated women need time with family members and friends, and special programs to help them get ready to leave prison. She says those are programs that seem to be unavailable for Sister Rice and others locked up in the Brooklyn facility.

Yale Law School Professor Judith Resnik has been studying prisons for more than 30 years. She says the best solution is for authorities to look, case by case, at the inmates holed up in Brooklyn.

"A national review of those incarcerated with the end state of asking who need not be here or who could be in a less secure facility would be the desired end state," Resnik says.

For Megan Rice, that question could be moot by November. That's when the Bureau of Prisons web site says she's scheduled for release.

Moving from crisis to crisis — for too long that's been America's strategy for dealing with the challenges of an aging transit infrastructure, from roads, to bridges to ports. The result is a system that's crumbling and in desperate need of attention, according to a new report from the U.S. Department of Transportation. The massive study looks both at the current state of the country's transportation systems and forecasts what challenges lie ahead.

"Over the next 30 years, we're going to have 70 million more people in this country, and all those people are going be trying to get someplace on top of the number of people we have," Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx told NPR's Morning Edition. "So the congestion we have today is expected to get worse, unless we do something radical now." He says that, along with the president, he feels it's important to make a "substantial pivot" toward investing more in the country's transportation system.

Interview Highlights

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"The bottom line is, if you're stuck in traffic today and your travel time's longer than it was 10 years ago, it's likely to get worse unless we take some very important steps at the federal, state and local level," says Foxx. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

"The bottom line is, if you're stuck in traffic today and your travel time's longer than it was 10 years ago, it's likely to get worse unless we take some very important steps at the federal, state and local level," says Foxx.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

On the 5.5 billion hours we're spending in traffic

One of the statistics that comes out of this report is on the average year, people are spending about 5.5 billion hours in traffic, to the tune of $120 billion of lost time and cost — gasoline and other things. That's because the congestion is continuing to grow in some of our fastest-growing areas.

That doesn't have to be the reality going forward. Clearly, we need to make investments at the federal level, not only to maintain the system we have but to improve and build new capacity where we need it. We also need to make sure we're making smart choices about how that infrastructure gets built so we get the most throughput out of that infrastructure.

On how manufacturing will affect traffic

We have more manufacturing activity now than we've had over the last 15 years and we expect that to grow. We're expecting over the next 30 years, a 60 percent increase in truck traffic on our freeways. The bottom line is, if you're stuck in traffic today and your travel time's longer than it was 10 years ago, it's likely to get worse unless we take some very important steps at the federal, state and local level before it gets worse.

On his proposal to improve highways and rails

The president and I have a proposal for surface transportation – highways, and transit, and rail – that would use pro-growth, business tax reform. Taxing untaxed corporate earnings that are overseas, and having those earnings come back home and being put to work for infrastructure.

It's a one-time fix, but it's also a fix that doesn't increase deficits and doesn't require tax increases, and allows us to basically double what the gas tax is putting into the system today. So we think it's important to make a very substantial pivot toward much greater investment.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush isn't officially a presidential candidate, but by delivering a speech to the Detroit Economic Club Wednesday he sure acted like one.

The elite, nonpartisan organization is a must-stop for serious candidates — it's hosted every eventual president since Richard Nixon. The list of presidential contenders who've taken to the podium there in recent decades is long. Last year, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul was among the speakers.

The club was founded in 1934 during the Great Depression, by prominent Detroit businessman Alan Crow to hold Michigan gubernatorial and senatorial debates and talks by congressional and business leaders.

Its nearly 3,300 members include movers and shakers from Michigan's political and corporate worlds.

Historically, candidates like Jeb Bush have used the forum to outline their economic policies. It was during his 2012 DEC speech that Michigan native Mitt Romney famously listed all the cars he owned, including "a couple of Cadillacs." Romney's father, automaker and former Michigan Gov. George Romney, spoke at the DEC with Nixon in the 1960s.

In 1992, Bill Clinton used the DEC platform for "a major economic address," that criticized President George H.W. Bush. A month later, Bush delivered his own address at the DEC to announce his economic agenda for his second term.

More recently, then-Illinois Sen. Barack Obama in 2007 reprimanded Detroit auto giants from the DEC podium.

"We know that our oil addiction is jeopardizing our national security," he said. "Here in Detroit, three giants of American industry are hemorrhaging jobs and profits as foreign competitors answer the rising global demand for fuel-efficient cars."

"We politicians are afraid to ask the oil and auto industries to do their part and those industries hire armies of lobbyists to make sure that the status quo remains," he said.

2016 Republican presidential nomination

Detroit

Fresh Off The Boat, a comedy premiering Wednesday night on ABC, is the rare series that features Asian-American actors in a show about an Asian-American family. It closely resembles ABC's Black-ish not primarily because both shows feature casts of color, but because both shows share a sort of emerging ABC house style, in which slightly hapless but deeply lovable narrators have family adventures while constantly teetering at the edge of a very much heightened reality.

The show is based on — but liberally adapted from — the story of Eddie Huang, whose parents were from Taiwan, and who are played in the show by Randall Park and Constance Wu. Their American dream involves running a steakhouse, perhaps the most cowboy-tinged, Americana-themed kind of restaurant they could have chosen. For young Eddie, played by Hudson Yang, being an American kid means hip-hop.

It's well worth reading this New York Times piece by Wesley Yang, which interrogates the "tortured ambivalence" the real Eddie Huang has about the show, as well as the long piece he wrote for New York Magazine about finding most of the pilot silly and frustrating but a sliver of it energizing. (Make sure you get to the end, though; there's a turn.)

But it's also worth at least considering the show simply as a self-contained half-hour of broadcast comedy, separate from any obligation to break ground, and asking: is it any good?

In the first three episodes that the network made available, you get a pretty basic set of family stories: kids trying to make friends, kids getting goofy and ill-advised ideas, mom trying to navigate the crazy neighborhood ladies, dad dealing with the problems at his restaurant, mom trying to lower the boom about school. As already mentioned, it feels, in structure and style and mood, a lot like Black-ish, with young Eddie Huang taking the sardonic narration over in the place of Anthony Anderson as Andre Johnson. That's not necessarily surprising — CBS procedurals have a style, as do ABC dramas and as did many of the successful NBC comedies of the '80s and '90s. It's a slightly detached retelling by the central character, almost adopting a little bit of the ability mockumentary shows like Modern Family have to let characters reflect on their own folly.

For the early stages of the show, it's really all about the execution of the material. They're still settling into the rhythms of this family, but Constance Wu as mom Jessica and Randall Park as dad Louis are both very good at making rather sitcommy lines sound better than they would in less careful hands. Wu has a tough task here, because her hard-driving mom could easily drift into stereotype, but they're smart to give her a personal story early on in which she's called upon to decide whether to stand up to bullies, much like Eddie has to do at school.

It's certainly not a great show; Eddie Huang is right that they're taking a pretty safe, not very provocative approach to putting this family in front of the viewers of ABC. He's right that a lot of the feel-good lessons aren't exactly daring in the face of what television has been saying for decades about everything being ultimately universal.

But he's also right that there are bracing moments in which this show is pushing on dynamics that don't come up all that often, as when Eddie finds himself tussling with the black kid at his school over who's "on the bottom" of the pecking order. Every episode has a couple of moments like that, where a new facet is added to a pretty ordinary sitcom plot and even a jaded eyebrow may go up in interest.

There's a warmth to the show, though, that feels earned. It has promise. It's a family with a lot of rootable, likable people in it. And it has a really funny line about Burt Reynolds and Cop And A Half in the second episode, though you won't necessarily want to explain it to your littlest ones. Fortunately, they won't get it.