Are We All Just Scared Sixth-Graders?

By Steven Scarborough, Communications Manager

Every day, courts charge youth in the justice system with thousands of dollars in fees and fines that they often can’t afford to pay. Julissa Soto was a single mom earning $19,000 a year at McDonald’s when her 14-year-old son stole a tube of toothpaste. Her family ended up homeless when she opted to pay the resulting $8,000 in court fees before their rent.
 

Why it Matters: When young people are assessed thousands of dollars in court fees, they are being set up to fail. This debt can keep them from moving on with their lives and often follows them into adulthood in the form of civil judgements, tax and wage garnishment, or bankruptcy. As Soto’s story demonstrates, these fines and fees can also pose an insurmountable financial burden for families that are often already struggling, forcing them to choose between paying off court debt or purchasing essentials like rent or groceries.
 

What’s Next: On Thursday, a coalition of youth advocacy groups, with support from Arnold Ventures, publicly launched Debt Free Justice, a national campaign to abolish charging court fees and fines to youth and their families. The campaign will work to support community-driven efforts at the state and local level through policy advocacy, litigation, and research. This year alone, the campaign has successfully supported legislative efforts in 15 states to address juvenile court debt with an aim of abolishing this practice nationwide.
 

By Steven Scarborough, Communications Manager

There are over 2.2 million people currently warehoused in prisons across the U.S., where they are confined in cramped, unhealthy, and often dangerous conditions. Restoring Promise is creating housing units for young adults in prison grounded in dignity to show that a different path is possible. The initiative enlists both people who are incarcerated and corrections staff to design and operate their housing units, empowering them to create a mutually supportive community.
 

Why it Matters: The 200,000 young adults currently in prison are the people most likely to experience violence in prison, most likely to be killed in prison, and most likely to be sent to solitary confinement. Restoring Promise focuses on transforming prisons into a place where these young people can thrive free from violence and fear. Research shows that the more you make prison resemble life on the outside, the easier it will be for people to successfully transition home, and prisons that have introduced Restoring Promise are reporting higher rates of reintegration success and lower incidences of violence.
 

What's Next: Restoring Promise is currently in use at prisons in six states and looking to expand. By enlisting people who are incarcerated — as well as correctional staff — to become agents of change within the prison system, this initiative is demonstrating how a more humane approach to incarceration benefits all the stakeholders in our prison systems. “We're not in the business of changing people,” says Ryan Shanahan, Restoring Promise's Research Director. “We're in the business of changing systems and prisons. It’s about creating opportunities for people to be their best selves.”
 

By Torie Ludwin, Communications Manager 
 

MDRC has released a targeted report for state agencies and academic institutions on how and why to implement evidence-based programs that support college completion, and the timing couldn’t be better: Such programs could get federal support as part of the $3.5 trillion Build Back Better Act.

What’s Happening: More than 20 years of rigorous research by MDRC and others show that the most effective student interventions by far are multifaceted programs, which support students from many directions throughout their time in school. One of them, the Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) has shown to nearly double the graduation rates for students across diverse student populations. MDRC’s report takes into consideration evidence-based program components, equity, targeting of funds, data tracking, and staffing. It also offers insights on sustaining and scaling multifaceted support programs as well as a practical set of online tools for agencies and institutions related to process, intake, benchmarks, student involvement, cost calculators, and others.

Bottom Line: While these programs are initially expensive, they can reduce the cost per degree for institutions. Once implemented, the program has less cost over time, and in states with performance-based formulas for funding, can also serve as a potential revenue resource.

Read the report >

Jeremy Travis, AV’s executive vice president of criminal justice, who sat down with Greg Berman of The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation to talk about our “once-in-a-half-century” opportunity to reform the criminal justice system. As Berman writes, Travis has been involved in “almost every significant criminal justice reform effort of the past 50 years.” In a wide-ranging interview, Travis discusses his work at Vera Institute of Justice, his time with the New York City Police Department in the 1990s, the theory of “broken-windows” policing, the controversy around “focused deterrence,” and the recent spike in violent crime. “The goal is always progress, improvement, having government that works, and making things better for people and for communities...That's hard. That's why I teach, that's why I write, that's why I care about research.”

Read the interview >

Dive Deeper on some of the issues discussed in Travis’ interview:

• “Pessimism, Optimism, and Hope: Square One Discusses The Social Contract”
• “Murder Spike Should Spur Bold Response From Politicians”
• “Congress Needs to Have a Criminal Justice Data Infrastructure Week”
• “What is 'Parsimony' and How Can It Transform Our Justice System?”
• “The Era of Punitive Excess”
• “How New York City Can Close Rikers and Continue to Reduce Jail Population”
• “Podcast: Confronting Racism in Policing”

43%

Increase in the number of women serving life without parole between 2008 and 2020

1 in 15

Number of women in prison who are serving a life sentence

52 

Number of women sitting on death row, 42% of whom are women of color

The impact of our nation’s extreme sentencing practices on women is explored in a new report from ​​The Sentencing Project, National Black Women’s Justice Institute, and the Cornell University Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide.

Read the report >

• Murders rose by nearly 30% last year, but the increase this summer does not appear to be as large as the record spike of 2020, reports The Upshot. (It's also worth noting that neither year rises to the level of the early '90s, and that overall major crimes fell in 2000). (free link for Abstract readers)
  
  Related: More than 5,100 children were victims of gun violence in 2020, USA Today reports.
   
• Police reform talks have fallen apart in Congress. Meanwhile, Colorado is an example of a state leading the way on police accountability, The Atlantic reports.
   
• Chicago’s Choose to Change program is breaking the cycle of violence among traumatized teens, according to research from the University of Chicago Crime Lab and Education Lab.
   
• New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed the Less Is More Act to reduce the number of people incarcerated for technical parole violations, and she immediately ordered the release of nearly 200 people who had been at Rikers for 30 days. Isaabdul Karim missed that cutoff by a day. He then became the 11th person to die at the jail complex this year, The New York Times reports. (free link for Abstract readers)
  
  Related: Here's how New York City can close Rikers and reduce the jail population.
   
• Here’s a case study for what’s wrong with the criminal justice system: A homeless Pennsylvania man was charged with a felony and jailed on a $50,000 bond for the inadvertent “theft” of 43 cents from a convenience store, Penn Live reports.
   
• ​​“United We Thrive, Divided We Die” is a portrait of gun violence in Brooklyn. The Trace offers an early look at photographer Amnon Gutman’s yearslong project documenting violence prevention efforts by groups such as Save Our Streets and ManUp.
• Read the obituary of Kenneth F. Schoen, a former probation officer who became known as the “father of community-based corrections” for his work to reform incarceration practices.

• As regulators work to implement the No Surprises Act — a ban on surprise medical billing that goes into effect Jan. 1, 2022 — decisions made during the rulemaking process will determine the strength of the law’s patient protections, its impact on consumer premiums, and overall savings to the health care system. Arnold Ventures submitted public comments to the Biden Administration on the first of these rules to ensure robust patient protections and lower costs for consumers, employers, and taxpayers. 
  
  Related: Read a two-part series on AV’s principles for implementing the No Surprises Act.
   
• As some Democrats put Biden’s drug-pricing reforms in jeopardy, Aaron S. Kesselheim and Jerry Avorn of Harvard Medical School explain why Congress shouldn’t believe the myths big pharma is peddling about innovation.
   
• Federal investigators say a small group of insurers used controversial methods to document patient diagnoses and draw billions in questionable Medicare payments, The Wall Street Journal reports. (free link for Abstract readers)
   
• In a letter to the Congressional Social Determinants of Health Caucus, Arnold Ventures emphasizes the importance of improving care for those who are dually eligible for Medicare and Medicaid.
  
  Related: AV has created a toolkit for researchers interested in investigating the care needs and patterns of low-income older adults and people with disabilities.
   
• The Mendocino Voice reports on how a jail’s medication-assisted treatment program for people with opioid use disorder is finding its footing — after overcoming stigma and funding obstacles: “I think it’s a mindset change. Not just in the jail, [but] for the whole community. We still haven’t as a society grasped that [addiction] is a disease, and that it has to be treated at a different level.”
   
• Will opioid settlement funds be used to help those struggling with opioid use disorder? Reason sounds the alarm on where the money may actually be spent. (And here is how it should be spent, via recommendations from an interdisciplinary team led by health economist Dr. Richard Frank.)
   
• Expanding access to long-acting reversible contraception like IUDs and implants is possible if states and providers rethink Medicaid reimbursement policies, argues a new policy brief from Waxman Strategies, Medicines 360 and Health Management Associates and supported by AV.
  
  Related: Sunday is World Contraception Day. Learn how AV is working to expand access to contraception, close gaps in reproductive health care coverage, and inform women about their contraception options. 
   
• Another grim milestone: Covid-19 overtakes 1918 Spanish flu as the deadliest disease in American history, STAT News reports.
   
• Hospitals billed private insurers an average of $320,000 for the complex COVID-19 hospitalizations, MedPage Today reports. 
   
• This stunning photo essay by photographer Bethany Mollenkof for STAT captures the impact of Covid-19 on residents of rural Black communities in the South.

Also...

• Rob Richie and David Daley of FairVote say partisan gerrymandering is wrong and getting worse — but ranked-choice voting offers a fair solution. After all, “John Adams said that legislatures ought to be ‘in miniature, an exact portrait of the people at large. It should think, feel, reason and act like them.’” 
   
• Vox writer Dylan Matthews has some sage advice for young idealists: Find a lonely cause, a neglected problem few to none are working on. Of example he highlights is close to our hearts, too: organ donation and the reform of organ procurement organizations to increase the number of organs distributed and save lives.

ABC honors Hispanic Heritage Month with “Soul of a Nation Presents: Corazon De America: Celebrating Hispanic Culture.” John Leguizamo kicks things off with a cheeky monologue that appreciates many of the Latinx contributions we can’t live without: taxes, job creation, chocolate, hot sauce, piñatas, cowboys. (Did you know more tortillas are sold in this country than hot dog buns?) The special is hosted by actor Benjamin Bratt (who was lovely when I served him at an Austin coffee shop he visited while filming “Miss Congeniality” — he even commented to some fawning patrons about my not fangirling out) and includes an interview with civil rights icon Dolores Huerta, 91, who talks about how the fight she began has changed. “What’s different is we have a spotlight on what’s happening,” Huerta says, crediting the activism of young people after the death of George Floyd with accelerating the movement. Travel to El Paso to understand the symbiotic U.S.-Mexico relationship and the community’s fragile recovery after an outsider killed 23 people in the 2019 Wal-Mart mass shooting. There’s a beautiful story about Anahuacalmecac Prep in Los Angeles, where the curriculum includes a lingual connection to the past (and a great lesson on the labels we use as a country); a primer on Afro-Cuban dance in New York; a coffee date in the Bronx for a frank discussion on colorism; and an exploration of Latinos’ impact on sports. It ends with a musical performance of singer-songwriter Ozuna's hit single "La Funka." The special is streaming on Hulu.

• Betty Reid Soskin just turned 100, making her the oldest active ranger in the National Park Service. She spends her days sharing with visitors "her rich and complicated history" of segregation.
   
• The most advanced space telescope ever built is about to head to work, and its daunting commute involves a sea voyage, a rocket launch, and some flawless mechanical executions. “It’s going to help us unlock some of the mysteries of our universe,” Greg Robinson, the James Webb Space Telescope program director at NASA, tells Scientific American. “I want to say it’s going to rewrite the physics books.”
   
• Finally, fall is here! Vox offers eight interesting things to know about the autumnal equinox, from the science to the pumpkin spice. 

The Higher Education team seeks grant applications to build the evidence base on effective student support strategies for students enrolled in online postsecondary programs, either fully-online or in hybrid modalities. Respondents can read the RFP; school or program letters of interest are welcomed until Oct. 11.