A New Era of Partisanship

By Evan Mintz, communications manager
 

A new report by the Data Collaborative for Justice studied the impact of New York's bail reform since it took effect in January 2020. Their report found a statewide decline in arraignments and in cases where bail was set. However, racial disparities still persist even under the reformed pretrial system.

What's Happening: In 2019, New York State passed a pretrial reform law that reduced reliance on cash bail. While much of the narrative around the law has centered on New York City, this report looks at the impact across the state.

“An interesting finding is that the increase in pretrial release was actually largest in non-New York City courts,” said Olive Lu, a senior research associate with the Data Collaborative for Justice. “I think there’s maybe a sense or presumption that New York City would be the more extreme for anything, but we actually didn’t find that to be entirely true.”

Why it Matters: Almost immediately after passage, the law was inaccurately blamed for an increase in violent crimes. This research and data stands in contrast to a misleading media narrative.

“What we have with the data right now — and I would venture that the 2021 data would show similar findings — is that we can’t point to any clear link between higher crime rates and increase in pretrial release,” said Lu.

What's Next: This research is just one of many steps necessary to fully understand how New York's pretrial system works and its larger effects on impacted individuals and society overall.

“We need more data, and right now we don’t have enough to really make any conclusive statements,” said Lu. “And that may sound like a cop-out, but I think it’s really important to acknowledge that and to be patient and allow researchers time to get the data and evaluate whether the policies are working as intended.”

“There are so many unjust outcomes for people who have these criminal records. It’s not good for anybody — it’s not good for the individual, it’s not good for community safety, it’s not good for the economy, and most importantly, it’s not good for children,” says AV Co-Founder John Arnold in a new video interview with VP of Criminal Justice Julie James. 

​What's Happening: We’ve just wrapped up Second Chance Month, a nationwide campaign highlighting the thousands of legal barriers — to housing, employment, education — faced by nearly 70 million people in the United States with a criminal record.
 

Dive Deeper: Arnold and James discuss how providing second chances means extending opportunities to people who often pose little risk to public safety, the role businesses can play in fostering reintegration, and the broad public support behind second chance policies. “We’re working to ensure that a record doesn’t become a lifetime of exclusion,” says Arnold.

Watch the video >

We also spoke with two leaders working to provide opportunities for those with a criminal record:

Syrita Steib faced a web of
legal and social barriers after her release from prison. That experience inspired her to found Operation Restoration and ensure other formerly incarcerated women and girls don’t face the same challenges alone. Today,
the organization is staffed entirely by women — with 80% being formerly incarcerated — and offers an array of programming and wraparound services.

Read the story >
 

Sam Lewis joined the Anti-Recidivism Coalition as its
first life coach after his incarceration and now serves
as the executive director. The coalition has helped pass 33 criminal justice reforms in California — and its success is
in large part due to mobilizing formerly incarcerated people to advocate for criminal justice reform. “It’s important for people in our justice system to know that there's another pathway, that redemption is possible, and that there’s reason for them to have hope,” Lewis says.

Read the story >

Check out the entire Second Chance Series here.

By Rhiannon Meyers Collette, communications manager
 

World Press Freedom Day was commemorated this week at a perilous time for journalism. A world away in war-torn Ukraine, journalists are paying with their lives while covering the conflict, while reporters in Hong Kong are being systematically silenced. Closer to home in Mexico, eight journalists have been murdered in 2022 alone. These attacks should not be ignored here in the United States, where our longstanding tradition of a free and fair press finds itself under assault. Journalists today fight seemingly unending battles to gather and report the news, accused of being the "enemy of the people," forced to do more with a shrinking set of resources, restricted from accessing even the most basic public information and facing criminal charges for doing their jobs or even being killed or attacked in the line of duty.
 

Why it Matters: This erosion of an American institution is alarming. Our democracy depends on a free and fair press. Journalists serve as a vital check on power. They uncover corruption, shine a light on systemic failures, help keep the citizenry informed, and inspire necessary change and reform. But this prolonged assault on the free press — coupled with the collapse of commercial journalism and the rise of anti-democratic rhetoric — are already undermining efforts to ensure transparency and accountability of government and powerful institutions.
 

What's Next: Against this backdrop, there are signs of hope. We are seeing encouraging growth in the numbers of journalists providing necessary watchdog reporting at state capitols. We have entered an exciting new era where nonprofit newsrooms, untethered from the pressures of a failing commercial business model, are doubling down on vitally important topics and serving communities that have long been ignored by legacy papers. Across the nation, news organizations big and small are making a difference and changing laws. This work is not just important, it is imperative. Without it, American democracy — itself — is in peril.
 

Read more about our work to support journalism.

Criminal Justice

• Over half of all women in U.S. prisons are mothers, as are 80% of women in jails, including many who are incarcerated awaiting trial simply because they can’t afford bail, the Prison Policy Initiative reminds us this Mother's Day weekend.
   
• A new report from the Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center finds that Texas courts use varying measures of poverty to determine who should be provided a court-appointed lawyer, leaving many defendants without the legal defense established as a constitutional right in Gideon v. Wainwright, reports Houston Public Media.
   
• Louisiana lawmakers could limit solitary confinement for teens after an investigation by ProPublica, NBC News and The Marshall Project found that children at the Acadiana Center for Youth were held in solitary around the clock for weeks.
   
• This paper from Susan T. Parker compares crime data sources to assess underestimation of gun violence.
   
• “Despite our differences, we both wholeheartedly believe America's sentencing policies are far too extreme, leave little hope for redemption and exacerbate problems with crime in our neighborhoods. They must be changed.” Mark Holden of Americans for Prosperity and Bill Underwood of The Sentencing Project for the Campaign to End Life Imprisonment press the need for sentencing reform in USA Today.
   
• Forcing people to pay for being incarcerated is a legacy of tough-on-crime policies that hurts prisoners and families, argues this perspective piece in The Washington Post.

Health 

• We were glad to see important dialogue in the Senate this week around drug pricing transparency and middlemen, or pharmacy benefit managers. Read the AV drug pricing team’s policy positions on transparency and PBMs here.
   
• Patients For Affordable Drugs is making a fresh push for drug pricing reform, Politico reports.
   

• Rising health care prices don’t indicate higher quality — instead they are a consequence of growing hospital consolidation crushing competition, Hunter Kellett, AV’s director of health care, said at a hospital price transparency conference this week.
   

• Time Magazine delves into the difficulties of getting birth control access as well as coverage by health insurance, looking at the roles of the pharmaceutical and insurance industries in curtailing access to this form of health care.
   
• Pharmacists play an expanding role in contraceptive access, notes Pharmacy Times. 
  
  Dive Deeper: AV profiles several pharmacists who already prescribe birth control.

Higher Education

• The Hechinger Report outlines the need for stronger quality controls in the certificate programs many colleges offer. Research shows that “nearly two-thirds of undergraduate certificate programs left their students worse off than the typical high school graduate, making an average of less than $25,000 per year.”
   
• MDRC published the first three briefs of the College Completion Strategy Guide directed toward institutions, in collaboration with the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, Ed Trust, and TICAS. The briefs discuss research on wrap-around programs, holistic advising, and completion strategies targeted at Tribal Colleges and Universities. 
   
• In an effort to target loan forgiveness, the Biden administration is moving to cancel the federal student loans owed by some 28,000 borrowers who attended a now-defunct chain of for-profit beauty schools that the Education Department shut down in 2016, as reported by Politico. 
   
• Via The Washington Post, Student Defense, the Project on Predatory Student Lending, and the National Consumer Law Center have sued the Biden administration, saying the Education Department failed to process a six-year-old application for loan forgiveness submitted on behalf of dozens of borrowers who attended Kaplan Career Institute. It’s the first major legal action by consumer and student advocacy groups against the Biden Education Department and can potentially chart a path toward resolving other pending borrower defense group applications that remain unsettled.
   
• IHEP released the results of its Degrees When Due (DWD) initiative in Lighting the Path to Remove Systemic Barriers in Higher Education and Award Earned Postsecondary Credentials. In partnership with the research team at the University of Utah, IHEP built institutional capacity at nearly 200 institutions from 23 states to award degrees to students who have earned them, re-engage former students who have dropped out, and equip students with credentials that help them realize their postsecondary goals.  

Democracy

• Still curious about ranked-choice voting? In Alaska, voters are trying it out with M&Ms.

I just wrapped up the very stressful process of applying to new middle schools for my daughter, and it was laden with implications for the future. Do we choose STEM or IB? All girls or a traditional campus? Why does picking a middle school feel like choosing a college these days? Am I putting too much pressure on this poor kid? So I was intrigued by the premise of “Try Harder!” by filmmaker Debbie Lum, who follows five bright minds at Lowell High, the top-ranked high school in San Francisco, where the majority of the student body is Asian American. The film interrogates the role race and class play in the competitive college admissions landscape as the students pursue their dreams of futures at Stanford, Harvard, UCLA, and other elite universities. These kids are endearing nerds who put enormous pressure on themselves to excel, but, as one Lowell parent says, “There is no formula for success anymore.” You can watch it on Independent Lens and other streaming platforms.

• Congratulations to all of our grantees across the policy landscape named in Washingtonian’s list of D.C.’s 500 Most Influential People. 
   
• “Mom loved running. On Mother’s Day, I run to feel close to her.” Read this heart-tugging story in honor of Mother’s Day. 
   
• The Astros' Dusty Baker makes history as the first Black MLB manager to win 2,000 games.
   
• Birdsong sequences do not sound to birds like they do to us. 
   
• We can all relate to this squirrel tasting almonds for the first time. (But has he tried them covered in chocolate?)
   
• I’m kind of excited about this “Weird Al” Yankovic mockumentary.