Injustice for George Floyd, in Life & in Death

The story behind the sweeping contraceptive access legislation recently enacted in Colorado provides a playbook on how to get it done. Advocates and practitioners joined forces to advance five complementary bills that the Colorado General Assembly passed — making Colorado a model for health care that is "fundamental to human dignity."
 

Why it Matters: Nineteen million women in the U.S. lack access to the full range of birth control methods. The problem is especially acute in communities of color. Insurance coverage for family planning services is overwhelmingly popular nationally, but policies supporting that have been under attack in recent years.
 

What to Copy: A unique and broad-based coalition of reproductive rights organizations, grassroots social justice nonprofits, and public health practitioners drove a unified state-level campaign that addressed the gaps in the federal Affordable Care Act. Advocates for family planning services often find themselves in competition with each other — and with other policy-focused social justice organizations — for both state dollars and policymaker attention. But in this case, they banded together, put all the proposed new measures on one sheet of paper, and pushed it as a single agenda.
 

School districts around the country are rushing to implement tutoring to help students facing learning loss from the pandemic. There are promising signs that this may indeed be an effective approach. But in our hurry, and without proof these programs work, we run the risk of launching ineffective programs.

Why it Matters: Data shows COVID's disruption of in-person learning — and of so much else about life — means students returning to classrooms have fallen further behind grade-level learning standards. Tutoring intuitively seems like a smart intervention. But without research to validate the effectiveness of different approaches, blanket implementations could leave students unprepared in the years to come.

What's Next: AV and the Overdeck Family Foundation are teaming up to support the expansion of a format called high-dosage tutoring, given the promising evidence established by decades of research. The need is urgent and immense, so we're also supporting the evaluation of other program designs and delivery in order to identify the best of the rest — and then get them to more districts.
 

By Juliana Keeping, Communications Manager

Allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices would make life-saving drugs affordable to millions of Americans who cannot afford them right now, without stifling innovation, write Mark Miller, AV’s executive vice president of health care, and David Blumenthal and Lovisa Gustafsson of the Commonwealth Fund.

How?

“We could start by reinvesting a substantial fraction of the hundreds of billions of dollars that could be saved from pending drug-payment-reform legislation into the most powerful engine of innovation in drug development: the National Institutes of Health and its academic research partners,” the trio write in an op-ed published in Harvard Business Review: “The U.S. Can Lower Drug Prices Without Sacrificing Innovation.”

Smart reform and the reinvestment of resulting savings would protect true innovation, the kind that is no longer dominated by large pharmaceutical companies, which are instead primarily funneling their dollars into lobbying, marketing, and buying up small, innovative companies rather than investing in research and development.

Read the full op-ed >

Related: A likely new treatment for COVID-19 was made possible by government-funded innovation, STAT News reports.

Criminal Justice

• A disturbing assessment of the state of emergency inside Rikers Island, the New York City jail complex, as told to The Marshall Project by those incarcerated there, corrections officers, and officials. “Right now, nobody needs to be in Rikers.”
  
  Related: An open letter from city and state legislators to the New York City district attorneys: “​​We write regarding the ongoing humanitarian crisis at the Rikers Island jail complex, which continues to be fueled by the callous decisions you and your staff make to send New Yorkers to their potential deaths by requesting cash bail.”
  
  Related: Opinion: Closing Rikers Island is a matter of life and death.
   
• And what about in Kansas? The Leavenworth Detention Center, a privately run pretrial detention facility, is described as an "absolute hell hole" of violence and death.
   
• Dozens of states have tried to end qualified immunity, but police officers and unions have helped to defeat nearly every bill, The Washington Post reports.
   
• ​​The Crime Report looks at a RAND Corporation study that found Black motorists in Virginia face more serious charges for “excessive speeding” than white motorists do — even when committing the same speeding infraction.
   
• We wrote last week about efforts by The Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center at Southern Methodist University to understand more about the lack of access to public defense counsel. This week, the center released “Ending Injustice: Solving the Initial Appearance Crisis,” a report that outlines the problems with post-arrest criminal procedure and strategies for reform.
   
• The 19th* dives deeper into the report we highlighted last week on the increasing number of women serving life sentences in prison. “The systems that we have in this country that are supposed to provide safety nets, and are supposed to keep people safe and protect communities, I think are failing women,” says report author Ashley Nellis with the Sentencing Project.
   
• The criminal justice system has long been the first response to substance use disorder — with minimal success. A video series and new guide by the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution at John Jay College offers prosecutors strategies for advancing drug policy grounded in principles of public health and racial justice. 
   
• A powerful photo essay from The New York Times illustrates the staggering financial burden on people in Florida who are barred from voting because of fines and fees from a prior felony conviction. “It’s like I’m not a citizen. That’s what they’re saying.” (free link for Abstract readers)

Health

• Similar hospital services for treating COVID-19 have generated widely disparate bills for patients, with charges varying by tens of thousands of dollars, a Wall Street Journal analysis shows. (free link for Abstract readers)
   
• Where criminal justice and health care connect: Solitary confinement in prison condemns many people to long-term health issues, Kaiser Health News reports. And COVID-19 only exacerbated its use: Solitary increased by 500% during the pandemic.
  
  Dive Deeper: Some states are realizing the've gone too far in the use of solitary.
   
• The American Enterprise Institute offers new policy options to put downward pressure on health care prices. 
   
• Brookings examines policies that can mitigate the harmful effects of private equity acquisitions in health care.

Also...

• The Columbia Journalism Review profiles Real Change, a weekly Seattle newspaper and nonprofit that centers the experience of unhoused people in its coverage — and provides them an opportunity to earn income. “There’s the old axiom that journalism is meant to speak truth to power. That’s true, but it’s also meant to remind people who’ve been told they’re powerless that they’re not.”   
   
• As college graduation rates stagnate nationwide, The Institute for College and Access (TICAS) explains the who, what, why, and how of the Retention and College Completion Fund.
   
• Data from organ procurement organizations will be analyzed for the first time to better understand the inequities and issues within the nation’s flawed organ donation system, Axios reports.
   
• The Voter Choice Act is reintroduced in Congress. It would provide funds and technical support to local and state governments that adopt ranked-choice voting.

Al Jazeera English’s Fault Lines and the nonprofit newsroom The Lens partner for the short documentary “The Jim Crow Convictions,” free to stream on YouTube. It’s the story of the problematic trial and conviction of Brandon Jackson, who in 1997 was sentenced to life in prison in the armed robbery of a Louisiana Applebee’s — despite two jurors voting not guilty (both of whom were Black). Jackson denies involvement in the robbery, there was no physical evidence tying him to it, and much doubt has been cast on the “star witness” testimony. At the time, Louisiana was one of two states that allowed non-unanimous jury convictions; elsewhere, he would have had the right to a retrial. Non-unanimous jury convictions were an outgrowth of the Jim Crow era and used to diminish the influence of Black jurors. The Supreme Court in 2020 ruled them unconstitutional, but this year said the decision would not retroactively apply to the more than 1,500 people still convicted and imprisoned under the law — most of whom are serving life sentences without the possibility of parole — and the state Legislature blocked a bill that would have offered a path forward for people like Jackson. It did, however, create a task force to study the issue of providing relief for those in prison on non-unanimous verdicts. Jackson is still behind bars, and his lawyers are still pursuing post-conviction relief.

• Journalists Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov win the Nobel Peace Prize for their fight for freedom of expression and holding powerful leaders to account. 
   
• How did it take me so long to discover this Instagram account? Photographer Christian Vieler captures with hilarity dogs catching treats.
   
• Calling all Dolly fans: W Magazine profiles the living legend, who talks fashion, songwriting, and why she never slows down. 

Join a discussion on “Improving Data Infrastructure to Reduce Firearms Violence” at 2 p.m. EDT on Tuesday Oct. 19. The event is co-hosted by NORC at the University of Chicago, Arnold Ventures, the Data Foundation, and the National Prevention Science Coalition. Learn more and register.

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.