Can Journalism Save Itself from Profiteers?

Meet George Callas, who has joined AV as our new executive vice president for Public Finance. A nationally recognized expert in tax and budget policy who served as a senior tax counsel to former House Speaker Paul Ryan, Callas will work to deepen and expand upon AV's commitment to reforming
the public finance system.

He spoke with AV about his time on Capitol Hill, the imperfect nature of evidence and his role as a self-proclaimed contrarian on #TaxTwitter.

“My vision for the AV Public Finance team is to first identify agenda items related to good tax, fiscal, and budget policy, and develop evidence and analysis to inform the policy makers in Congress and the administration — in the hope of helping design policies that become law and actually work to address the problems they are trying to address.”

Read the Q&A >

By Evan Mintz, Communications Manager

In 2013, when Terrance Stanton was 26 years old, he was arrested and convicted of dealing crack and powder cocaine. Because crack carried a much harsher mandatory sentence than powder cocaine, Stanton was sentenced to life in prison, away from his wife and four children.

What's Happening: Stanton is on the verge of seeing his kids again. If the Senate passes the bipartisan Eliminating a Quantifiably Unjust Application of the Law Act, known as the EQUAL Act, the sentencing gap between powder and crack will be eliminated both going forward and retroactively. This will allow thousands of people to rejoin their families and communities instead of suffering unnecessarily cruel and punitive sentences for drug offenses. 

Why it Matters: Since it was first enacted more than 30 years ago, the sentencing disparity between crack and powder has been a key example of racial injustice in our criminal legal system. The average federal drug sentence for Black defendants was 49% higher than the average for white Americans. In 2019, 81% of defendants convicted of federal crack cocaine distribution were Black. 

“The history of this disparity between crack and powder cocaine is really disturbing,” said Holly Harris, executive director of the Justice Action Network. “There was no science behind it. There was no reason to treat crack and powder cocaine differently other than one was used in predominantly poor Black areas and the other was a drug that was used in a lot of rich, wealthy areas.”

What’s Next: The EQUAL Act passed the House with overwhelming bipartisan support, from Texas Republican Louie Gohmert on the right to Michigan Democrat Rashida Tlaib on the left. Now it falls on the Senate to send the bill to President Biden’s desk. Bipartisan co-sponsors are already lining up in the Senate, including Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina. 

“I think it’s a matter of when, not if this passes,” said Kevin Ring, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM). “We still have some challenges, but I think this is an idea whose time has come. I think people realize there’s no justification for the disparity.” 
 

By Evan Mintz, Communications Manager
 

Technical but important challenges are preventing researchers from collecting the data we need to fully understand what gun violence looks like in the United States. That was the takeaway from a panel hosted by NORC at the University of Chicago, the Data Foundation, Arnold Ventures, and the National Prevention Science Coalition titled, “Improving Data Infrastructure to Reduce Firearms Violence.”
 

Why it Matters: Gun violence remains a leading cause of death for America’s youth. Yet we often lack the basic information necessary to answer questions about issues like nonfatal injuries, let alone process more complex data in ways that can help policymakers craft laws that can reduce violence and save lives.  

“Any reasoned debate on firearms policy requires a widely shared set of facts. Unfortunately, a lack of objective and transparent data infrastructure has made it all too difficult to assemble those facts,” said John K. Roman, senior fellow in the Economics, Justice, and Society Department at NORC. 

What’s Next: In addition to holding two expert panels, NORC and Arnold Ventures also released three documents outlining the top challenges — and solutions — when it comes to collecting and understanding data about firearms. The papers provide guidelines for effective gun policy, ideas for measuring nonfatal gun injuries, and solutions to an outdated national crime statistics system.   
 

By Steven Scarborough, Communications Manager

This week, AV and the CUNY Institute for State & Local Governance (ISLG) announced the second phase of the Reducing Revocations Challenge, a national initiative to transform probation supervision and reduce its impact on mass incarceration. For the past two years, we’ve facilitated partnerships between research institutions and supervision agencies in 10 jurisdictions across the country to better understand what’s causing revocations of probation and parole as well as how to improve our supervision systems work.

Why it Matters: Nationwide, one in 55 people (roughly 2% of the adult population) are under supervision, which includes probation and parole. Instead of serving as an alternative to incarceration, supervision has become one of the biggest drivers of prison admissions in the United States. The latest numbers show that nearly 25% of prison admissions stem from a probation revocation. Before the Challenge, little was known about supervision revocations and violations other than that they are major drivers of mass incarceration.

What’s Next: Jurisdictions moving on to the second phase of the Challenge will take what they’ve learned about the local drivers of revocations and developing strategies to reduce them, ranging from revising standard conditions of probation to changing how officers respond to substance use. We hope that by using this tailored, research-driven approach to reform, we will see reductions in revocations in the participating sites — and more broadly we hope to see this action research team partnership model replicated across the criminal justice system.

Learn more: Pathways to Success on Probation: Lessons Learned from the First Phase of the Reducing Revocations Challenge

RJ Infusino thought he was on the path to a new career as an audio engineer when he enrolled at the Illinois Institute of Art. Instead, after his school lost its accreditation and closed, he was bumped from one for-profit school to another, accumulating debt and moving further from his career path. “It’s hard to put into words how betrayed I felt and still feel to this day.” He became the lead plaintiff in a 2018 class action suit against the school and others owned by the Dream Center, just before the changes to the U.S. Department of Education rules would have made a class action suit impossible. The DOE is reviewing class action waiver rules right now during negotiated rulemaking, or NegReg. Infusino’s portrait is one in a series produced by Student Defense and filmmaker/photographer Alexander Shebanow and is featured in the documentary "Fail State."
 

Criminal Justice

• The trial of three white men accused of murdering Ahmaud Arbery began this week, and it may be a test case for racial justice in America, NPR reports.
   
• A Navy veteran jailed for self-medicating for PTSD is calling for an end to a wealth-based pretrial detention system that treats addiction like a crime. 
   
• Science Magazine has dedicated its latest issue to “Criminal Injustice” and mass incarceration in the United States.
   
• A new paper from the Square One Project identifies proven interventions in access to housing, education, employment, health care, and social support programs that could help reduce incarceration. 
   
• NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea backtracks on claims that bail reform is to blame for gun violence, CBS reports.
   
• In two rulings, the Supreme Court signals its support for qualified immunity, which has been criticized for shielding police officers from accountability for wrongdoing, The New York Times reports. (free link for Abstract readers)
  
  Dive Deeper: Polling done in 2020 found extraordinary bipartisan support for policing reforms, including qualified immunity.

Health

• FactCheck examines how big pharma is misleading the public on Medicare drug negotiation legislation. “They’re making up a whole bunch of stuff that is unlikely to happen based on everything we know about the way the law is structured,” says Fiona Scott Morton, professor of economics at the Yale University School of Management.
   
• MedTechDive examines how the system to recall medical devices is outdated, allowing defective products to slip through. "It truly is like we are operating in about the 1950s."
   
• An arthritis drug that cost $198 in 2008 now goes for more than $10,000, Axios reports, an example of how drug companies continue to put profits over patients.
   
• President Biden’s new Title X rules have been heralded by reproductive health advocates for both rolling back Trump-era restrictions and taking steps to modernize the program. Clare Coleman of the National Family Planning & Reproductive Health Association and Nomsa Khalfani of Essential Access Health broaden the story from the rules to overall contraceptive access and funding for essential reproductive health care. 

Also …

• As college application season heats up, Third Way evaluates the return on investment for the same college majors at neighboring institutions of higher education in Dallas, Atlanta and Philadelphia.
  
  Related: Our current student loan system puts the burden on borrowers to navigate a complex system. Third Way offers a simple fix.
   
• Read a powerful call from Mandy Teefey, the mother of kidney transplant patient Selena Gomez, and Congresswomen Cori Bush, Ayanna Pressley, and Katie Porter to hold organ procurement organizations accountable as an equity issue. Reforms are projected to save more than 7,000 lives per year, but do not take effect until 2026.
  
  Related: AV has been advocating for the Biden administration to accelerate reforms to the organ donation system as a matter of racial equity and COVID response. Axios explains why this is so important. 
  
  Dive Deeper: Delayed reform of organ procurement organizations, many of which are marked by "greed and incompetence," could lead to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.

“The Price of Freedom,” airing on HBOMax, takes an unflinching look at the gun violence epidemic in America and the outsized role of political and cultural influence in our nation's failure to address the issue. The film not only includes input from the likes of former President Bill Clinton but also David Keene, former president of the National Rifle Association.  More than a hundred people in the U.S. are killed in gun-related deaths each day, a number that dwarfs the totals coming from any other country in the world.  And yet, our elected officials still refuse to invest in the type of research that would lead to greater understanding of the causes behind this violence. “The Price of Freedom” seeks to answer the question of why this distorted reality is allowed to exist in America.

Also: “Among the Stars” is a six-part docuseries with fly-on-the-wall access into the vast world of NASA. Airing on Disney+, the docuseries offers breathtaking views from the International Space Station and personal views of the men and women who make this access possible.

Reveal, an AV grantee, recently released a seven-episode series examining the death of Billey Joe Johnson, a Black high school football star who died during a routine traffic stop conducted by a white officer. "Mississippi Goddam: The Ballad of Billey Joe" is a harrowing account of the unanswered questions into Johnson’s death, a primal scream for racial justice and reckoning, and as Al Letson, Reveal’s host and reporter who has wrestled with this case for more than 13 years, put it, “a long look into America’s cracked foundation, where justice isn’t equal for everyone.” Episode 1 is now live – new episodes drop every Saturday.

• Vox has created a stunning visual podcast accessible to deaf audiences. Here's how they did it.
   
• Sikh hikers had the ingenious idea of using their turbans and clothing to save two men from a waterfall pool. “In Sikhi, we are taught to help someone in any way we can with anything we have, even our turban.”
   
• Paul McCartney writes in The New Yorker on how the Beatles classic "Eleanor Rigby" came to be, just one of the many "happy accidents" in his life.
   
• Will it be a “bones” day or “no bones” day? Millions of people are using TikTok posts about a pug as a daily horoscope — including Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, Taco Bell, the University of Missouri, and the Seattle Seahawks.
   
• Come for the commercials, stay for the music: Travel back in time with My 90s TV. (You can escape to the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 00s, too.)