Fixing a Leaky Faucet in a Burning Building

By Evan Mintz, director of communications

The Council of State Governments Justice Center, in partnership with Arnold Ventures, this week launched the Breaking the Rules toolkit to help state and juvenile probation agencies better understand the conditions and penalties for youth on probation in all 50 states.

What’s Happening: After meeting with key juvenile justice stakeholders across the country — including law enforcement, practitioners, and impacted families — the CSG Justice Center has rolled out a toolkit to help jurisdictions develop more effective, equitable approaches to setting probation for young people. This includes promoting research-based and developmentally appropriate strategies.

Why it Matters: Research consistently shows that the most effective way to reduce youth recidivism is to identify and address the issues driving delinquent behavior. Unfortunately, juvenile probation is typically more about enforcing strict rules than solving the underlying issues. 
 

In fact, more than 60% of states require or authorize the imposition of standardized conditions and sanctions for youth placed on probation. These overly broad, arbitrary, and punitive rules may actually undermine outcomes rather than set up young people for success. 

What’s Next: The CSG Justice Center is seeking to partner with two jurisdictions and provide them with free, intensive technical assistance. This nine- to 12-month process will involve assessing their approach to juvenile probation condition setting and enforcement. The application is available here. 

By Juliana Keeping, communications manager
 

The Biden administration recently released the final regulations implementing the No Surprises Act, which continues to safeguard millions of patients against receiving surprise medical bills — through no fault of their own — and being exposed to unaffordable out-of-pocket costs.

What’s Happening: The NSA went into effect Jan. 1. Prior to the law’s implementation, millions of Americans received expensive surprise bills, many of which ran upwards of thousands of dollars. These unexpected bills — typically resulting from an out-of-network provider the patient was not able to choose — could not only financially devastate individual patients and families, but also resulted in higher premiums for everyone. The NSA is an important step in protecting against surprise bills and lowering health care costs for consumers, employers, and taxpayers.

Why it Matters: “The law is already providing essential protections to consumers, preventing over 2 million potential surprise medical bills in the first two months of 2022 alone,” says Erica Socker, AV’s vice president of health care. “And at a time when Americans are faced with inflation and rising costs, fully implementing the No Surprises Act in a way that lowers health care costs for families is more important than ever. We appreciate that the final rule continues to place guardrails around the independent dispute resolution process to help make sure the law realizes its promise of reducing health care costs and limits the ability of providers who remain out of network and private equity firms to abuse the process and extract higher prices.”

What’s Next: A number of lawsuits on the NSA have already been filed, challenging both regulations to implement the law and the law itself. While providers prevailed in a regulatory challenge earlier this spring, a New York judge recently upheld the law against a constitutional challenge to the law itself, writes AV grantee Katie Keith in Health Affairs. Moving forward, efforts by special interests to weaken the law will continue as billions of dollars are at play, reports Axios.

Criminal Justice
 

• Many Americans place a high importance on both preventing gun violence and protecting gun rights, according to new polling from UChicago Harris/AP-NORC.
   

• A preliminary report by the Council on Criminal Justice found that about one-third of veterans say they have been arrested at least once, compared to less than one-fifth of all nonveterans. A new commission will study why this is, reports NBC News.
   
• A bill on California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk would seal the criminal records of millions in the state. Having a criminal record can trigger nearly 5,000 legal restrictions that limit job, housing, and educational opportunities.
   
• Eight years after Michael Brown’s death, a new oversight plan for St. Louis police is putting the city’s elected officials and its police associations at odds, the Associated Press reports.
   
• The first police officer to be convicted in the March 2020 raid that led to Breonna Taylor’s death admitted to helping falsify a search warrant application, MSNBC reports.
   
• One year into its implementation, the Albuquerque Community Safety Department is gaining traction in addressing street-level mental health, addiction, and homeless-related crises, via The Crime Report.

Health Care

• The Bipartisan Policy Center explores why bipartisan efforts to address Medicare’s solvency are crucial for its fiscal sustainability.
   

Higher Education

• USA Today outlines the troubled history of the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools, which lost its authority this week; its accreditation of predatory schools such as ITT Tech allowed them to receive federal student loan aid.
   
• The New York Times asks whether some colleges are worth the tuition they charge, pointing to Third Way’s analysis and pulling data from the College Scorecard. (free link)
   
• The Washington Post profiles several Black women who discuss the positive impact of the student loan payment pause. (free link)
   

Contraceptive Choice and Access

• Cafés and restaurants are providing free contraception in Texas, in some cases including IUDs, report Newsweek and KHOU.
   

Democracy 

• Newsweek reports that “threats to democracy” is the most top-of-mind issue for voters, topping “cost of living” and “jobs and the economy,” in a poll by NBC.
   
• CNN interviews Nick Troiano of the Unite America Institute on how nonpartisan primaries reduce polarization.
   

Journalism

• "Like a living hell." More than two-thirds of Texas prisons don't have air-conditioning in most living areas, placing incarcerated individuals in dangerous and deadly conditions, the Texas Tribune reports. Extreme heat has killed prisoners and cost taxpayers millions in wrongful death and civil rights lawsuits.

• The White House has directed health and science agencies to make federally funded studies immediately available to the public after publication in a move praised by open-access advocates, reports STAT.

"Katrina Babies," a new documentary on HBO Max, examines the lasting impact of Hurricane Katrina on the children in its path. Filmmaker and New Orleans native Edward Buckles Jr., who was just 13 when life as he knew it changed forever, turns the camera on himself, his family, and his peers, exploring with intimacy what they went through, what they remember, and how it felt. "After losing so much, why wouldn’t anyone ask if we were okay? Nobody ever asked the children how they were doing. So I am,” says Buckles.

The film employs artful animation, archival news footage, and interviews with dozens of survivors who experienced the event as young children and teenagers. Buckles himself recalls seeing news footage from the evacuation center where he and his family sought shelter, a flea market in a small Louisiana town. The screen showed his aunt’s neighborhood under water. As a child, he thought that could mean only one thing: his four cousins were under water, too.

Then there is what happened after the storm: a painfully slow and unorganized federal response, poor and unsanitary conditions in shelters, racist media coverage, and the sense of loss and displacement accompanying such a massive relocation of Black families. The experiences of the children at their new schools, in their new communities, were not always that of support and care, but rather suspicion and resentment. When some children did return to New Orleans, they were confronted with the totality of the loss: toys, homes, neighbors, whole communities that had spanned generations. “The New Orleans we knew was gone.” 
 
Read an interview with the filmmaker.



Also: C-Span’s Washington Journal talks to FairVote’s Rob Richie about the mission of the organization, which began 30 years ago to give voters better choices, more chances to participate in elections, and better representation. He discusses what the organization has achieved in that time and offers a good primer on the benefits of ranked-choice voting and how that process played out in the recent Alaska primaries. The caller questions might be the most compelling part of this watch.

The Center for Health Care Strategies is seeking states to participate in the "Medicare Academy: Capacity-Building for Advancing Medicare-Medicaid Integration" — a 10-month training program designed to help Medicaid staff build the Medicare knowledge needed to successfully advance integration efforts. Up to eight state teams will be selected for the academy, which is made possible by Arnold Ventures, The Commonwealth Fund, and The SCAN Foundation. Medicaid agencies in all states, commonwealths, and territories are eligible to apply. The academy will be provided at no cost to participating teams. Applications are due Sept. 9, 2022. Learn more and apply

• Today is Women's Equality Day, marking the 102nd anniversary of women’s suffrage in the United States. The Hill offers a history lesson and a look at where women stand in 2022.
   
• Houston friends, here’s your chance to name the city’s new mini street sweeper. Some options: Bitsy. George Brush, Jr. Sweep Caroline. Slim Scrub. OK, I'll stop.
   
• “I’m not into video games and goofing around on my phone like some of my friends. I’d rather be busy on the farm.” And he’s only 12.   
   
• We just can't quit Clippy. Read his fascinating origin story.
   
• The launch window for the maiden flight of Artemis 1, a spacecraft intended to one day take humans back to the Moon, opens next week.
   
• Our dogs may actually cry tears of joy when they see us.