It May Feel Like 2020, Too. But There Is Reason for Optimism.

By Evan Mintz, communications manager
 

While the national spike in homicides has some partisans and pundits demanding a return to the bad old days of overbroad and aggressive policing, a new generation of leaders is turning to a collaborative approach that relies on both community-based and law enforcement-based responses to violence. 

“We believe that you need both law enforcement and community approaches,” said Thomas Abt, a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice who chairs the organization’s Violent Crime Working Group. “It can't be just one or the other.”

What’s Happening: Cities like Chicago and Los Angeles have implemented community-based approaches such as well-managed street outreach programs that employ front-line workers to mediate conflicts, connect high-risk people to services, and promote nonviolent solutions.
 

And the City of Dallas is touting the success of “focused deterrence,” which includes a strong partnership between police and community members, clear communication with people who have the greatest need for support, targeted legal sanctions for further violence, and offers of personalized assistance for those who need it. Last year Dallas saw its homicide rate fall even as the number of arrests declined.
 

“That tells us we are targeting the right individuals — not all individuals,” Dallas Police Chief Eddie García told the Dallas Morning News. “Our goal to be laser-focused on violent crime looks to be working.”

What’s Next: While many of these programs show promise, more research is needed to fully understand whether and how they work, and to pinpoint best practices.
 

“Rigorous process and outcome evaluations — of which there have been few published to date — can help build the evidence base on these programs and help guide other jurisdictions as they look to implement similar efforts in their communities,” said Anita Ravishankar, AV’s director of criminal justice research. 
 

By Juliana Keeping, communications manager
 

Medications that prevent HIV infection — known as pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP — have been available for nearly a decade, but less than a quarter of people who could benefit from PrEP are taking it. 
 

What’s Happening: AV funded the creation of a novel policy proposal for a national program to finance and distribute these medications, moves that could put the U.S. on track to end the HIV epidemic. The proposal envisions a national PrEP program that addresses enormous disparities in access impacting rural communities and communities of color.
 

Dive Deeper: We talk about the effort with Joshua Sharfstein, a lead author and a professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. As Sharfstein explains, the proposal drew from past national public health success stories — such as Vaccines for Children and Louisiana’s subscription model for the treatment of hepatitis C — and its uptake could have positive implications for public health during the COVID-19 era.
 

When we dropped the news last week that Houston will be getting its own nonprofit newsroom, it was met with both excitement and questions. Three leaders of the organizations investing in the endeavor — Ann Stern of Houston Endowment, Rich Kinder of Kinder Foundation, and Laura Arnold of Arnold Ventures — penned an op-ed explaining why Houston, why now, and what it means for the community at large. Read it below.

Journalism is, at its core, a public service — and Houston could use more of it.
 

Our representative republic relies on an informed citizenry that has access to trustworthy, vital and actionable information that sheds light on problems and solutions, and provides a platform from which to spur reform. As Thomas Jefferson once said, it is preferable to have newspapers without government than government without newspapers.

But that twilight scenario Jefferson lamented is increasingly coming true. Misaligned market forces and outdated business models have caused a troubling erosion of journalistic resources nationwide. More than 2,000 newspapers have disappeared, leaving many cities with only a single newspaper of record, or worse, no newspaper at all. Information gaps are filled by partisan outlets that frame every issue to fit electoral ends, or by social media sites that care more about profit than the public good.

Even Houston, a city rich in local media in every language and on every platform, lacks news coverage at the size and depth appropriate for our chaotic, energetic, sprawling coastal metropolis. That is why we have decided to collectively invest $20 million for a new nonprofit newsroom in Houston. This newsroom will augment and strengthen the existing journalism ecosystem and add more resources to serve our community.

Darrell Jordan, who presides over Harris County’s Criminal Court No. 16. Before he became a judge, Jordan worked as a defense attorney in the nation’s third-largest county, where he witnessed the harms of judges using expensive money bail to jail people based on their inability to pay. After his election, he worked to craft new policies to address the unconstitutional practices that plagued the county’s 16 misdemeanor courtrooms, and those policies became the foundation for a landmark settlement that has reshaped Harris County’s bail system. The National Partnership for Pretrial Justice talks with Jordan about his efforts to change an outdated system and how those reforms are reshaping wealth-based detention in Harris County.

Read the Q&A >

Related: Harris County shouldn't toss misdemeanor bail reform, writes the Houston Chronicle editorial board.

Criminal Justice

• There’s a lot to digest in this thoughtful interview with John Jay College professor Peter Moskos, who provides commentary on policing, the rise in gun violence (“You have to crack down on gun offenders. That’s probably the single most effective thing that can happen”), and the political and intellectual climate around discussions of either. He talks with Greg Berman, distinguished fellow of practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.
   
• Why some mayors are optimistic about curbing violence in 2022, via The Washington Post. (free link for our readers)
   
• “It is my opinion that this new law will be bad, and people will be murdered,” wrote 12-year-old Artemis Rayford in a letter to Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee about the state’s new permitless carry law, WREG Memphis reports. On Christmas morning, Artemis, or “Shun” as his grandmother called him, was killed by a stray bullet.  
   
• The kids who lived through the start of the school shooting era have grown up. Vox profiles survivors now in their 30s and 40s.
   
• “If more incarceration makes us safer, why isn’t the U.S. the safest country in the world?” Colorado state Sen. Pete Lee argues in The Denver Post that political rhetoric tying rising crime to lower incarceration ignores myriad causes and targeted, evidence-based solutions.
   
• Despite popular belief, Constitutional guarantees of a “fair and speedy trial” are far from reality for a large population of defendants, according to an AV-funded study from the Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center at the Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law.
   
• The Marshall Project launches an ambitious series exploring the outcomes in Cuyahoga County’s court system — including why 75% of incarcerated people convicted are Black.
   
• The average length of stay in jails across the country increased by an average of 20% from 2014 to 2019, according to a report from the New York’s Data Collaborative for Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, with Black people overrepresented in admissions and time behind bars, via The Crime Report.
   
• Solitary confinement is bad for those subjected to it and for public safety, the Tampa Bay Times editorial board writes. “What goal is served by crippling the emotional health of those assimilating back into society?”

Health 

• Yes, you can be charged for a hospital ER visit even if you don’t receive care — all you have to do is check in at the front desk. Kaiser Health News’s Noam Levey reveals a dirty secret of hospital billing practices. “Hospital emergency rooms almost invariably charge patients as soon as they check in. And once they register, patients will be billed — often a lot — whether treatment was rendered or not.” 
   
• North Carolina hospitals often bill poor patients instead of writing off those bills under their tax-exempt status, according to a damning report developed by the National Academy of State Health Policy.
   
• In Michigan, the attorney general has launched an investigation into Eli Lilly — one of three major U.S. insulin manufacturers — for high insulin prices. “U.S. prices are more than eight times higher than in 32 high-income comparison nations combined, according to researchers at the think tank Rand Corp,” AP stated.
   
• The Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission (MACPAC) proposed in their January public meeting that Congress require and fund states to develop a strategy to integrate Medicare and Medicaid for dual-eligible beneficiaries. This historic stance both parallels calls by AV’s Complex Care team to make integrated models available nationwide and complements our work to fund states in their pursuit of more meaningful integration through Advancing Medicare and Medicaid Integration (AMMI). 

Higher Education

• Diverse Education makes a case for why gainful employment and accountability in higher education are equity issues.
   
• Senate Democrats are raising questions about the link between online program managers and student debt, specifically looking at predatory recruitment tactics and the use of federal aid, NBC News reports.
   
• The Postsecondary Equity & Economics Research (PEER) Project has released five inaugural research papers and briefs designed to help policymakers protect student loan borrowers. The papers examine data use, earnings, student success, and accountability, all relevant to the Education Department’s negotiated rulemaking currently underway.
   
• The Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP) releases the third in a series of briefs on the formation of a student-level data network, discussing data elements, institutional burden, timing of reporting, and use of data to address changes proposed if federal legislation like the College Transparency Act or College Affordability Act were to become law.

Democracy

• CNN’s Dana Bash breaks down the problems with partisan gerrymandering, using Texas as an example.

Also

• On NPR, Steve Inskeep talks with Sen. Kevin Cramer (SD) about carbon capture utilization and storage as a steady source of energy when compared to renewable sources.

• Our Co-Founder and Co-Chair John Arnold joins the Meb Faber podcast to talk about when he decided to focus on philanthropy, the problems Arnold Ventures is tackling around election reform, health care, and charitable giving tax laws, and what has surprised and frustrated him along the way.
   
• AV’s VP of Criminal Justice Walter Katz joins Reducing Crime podcast host Jerry Ratcliffe for a wide-ranging discussion on how to improve police accountability, including civilian oversight models, crisis response, and the role of civilian policy makers. Katz, who previously worked as a defense attorney, also touches on the emotional trauma experienced by so many who work in the criminal justice system. 
   
• AV’s Evan Mintz and Dr. Howard Henderson, founding director of Texas Southern University’s Center for Justice Research, join Lisa Gray’s CityCast to discuss homicide rates in Houston and the steps that can be taken to reduce violence, including focused policing on crime hotspots, the role of mental health, and what strategies beyond law enforcement can be employed. Henderson nails why it’s important to be proactive rather than reactionary: “We can save a lot of police lives, we can save a lot of lives in the community, save a lot of heartache when we educate ourselves and understand just what is behind all of this violent crime.”
   
• Wendy Sawyer of the Prison Policy Initiative talks to NPR’s Michel Martin to put in context new data showing the number of people in prisons and jails is back up after dropping early in the pandemic — and that from 2019 to 2020, deaths increased 46% in prisons, 32% among people on parole and 6% among people on probation (data on jail deaths is not yet available). She also pinpoints why this should be on everyone’s radar, even those not connected to incarceration. “The data doesn't have to make you care,” Sawyer says. “It should make you think about what actually has been going on in prisons and jails. You know, the truth is worse than what many people would assume is going on.”

• Ibis Health and Advocates for Youth are hosting a webinar Jan. 31 at 3 p.m. ET entitled “Expanding youth access to birth control pills with an over-the-counter option” with speakers from the New York Birth Control Access Project, Advocates for Youth, and Board-Certified Adolescent Medicine Specialist and Pediatrician Krishna Upadhya. During this webinar, a panel of advocates will highlight the unique barriers young people face in accessing birth control pills and share the youth-driven efforts underway to make birth control pills over the counter in the U.S. for people of all ages.

• Jason Rivera, one of two New York City officers tragically killed in what began with a domestic disturbance call, joined the police force to help NYPD better its relationship with the communities it serves. But his passion for helping others started long before he put on the uniform.
   
• Holocaust survivor Ella Blumenthal, 100, will share her incredible story in a heartfelt documentary, "I Am Here."
   
• The James Webb telescope reached its final destination a million miles from Earth.
   
• Learn about the life of artist Edmonia Lewis, who is getting her own U.S. postage stamp.
   
• The Wordle memes are here. Here’s a very 2022 take on the game. Now try your hand at spin-off game Absurdle. 
   
• A 2-year-old saved his family from a house fire. (His parents had lost their sense of smell due to COVID-19.)