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The Abstract
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> By Stephanie DiCapua Getman, Arnold Ventures
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My colleague Rhiannon Meyers Collette writes today about the principle of parsimony and how it can help us reimagine our criminal justice system:
When Daryl Atkinson was convicted of drug trafficking in 1996 — a crime, he notes, that was nonviolent and involved no weapon — he entered an insatiably punitive criminal justice system molded by America’s tough-on-crime politics.
His conviction resulted in a rigid 10-year sentence and a mandatory minimum of 40 months in prison, and though he served his time — including 45 days in solitary confinement and back-breaking labor on the prison's farm squad — his punishment endured outside the prison gates.
He couldn't drive because his license was suspended. He couldn't attend school because he couldn't access student aid. He owed and was forced to pay a fine of $50,000, in addition to the dues he'd paid with his body behind bars. He was denied the right to vote, a fundamental right codified in the American social contract.
Today, Atkinson is co-director of Forward Justice, a bar-accredited lawyer in two different states, and a former member of the Obama administration who earned recognition as a White House Champion of Change — yet he continues to be haunted by the collateral consequences of a conviction. His story, like millions of others, is a powerful allegory for America's addiction to punitive excess, meted out most often against communities of color.
Rather than a response to excessive crime rates, our nation's notoriously high rates of incarceration, criminalization, and collateral consequences are instead the result of a choice we have collectively made. This choice, if we are being honest with ourselves, is rooted in the black codes and racist policies implemented after the brutal end of Reconstruction. Among those policies is the political disenfranchisement of Black and Brown individuals, an issue that Atkinson highlights.
Undoing this damage can involve incremental change — the kind we advocate for every day at Arnold Ventures, like sentencing reform, accountable policing, eliminating wealth-based detention, and removing collateral consequences. Sometimes political reality mandates this step-by-step approach. But we also need fundamental change, a paradigm shift in the way we think about punishment and the deprivation of individual liberties, Arnold Ventures' EVP of Criminal Justice Jeremy Travis has argued.
As the cries for criminal justice reform grow louder and more urgent, Atkinson and Travis are making the case that applying the principles of parsimony — a legal concept that advocates for the lightest intrusion necessary to achieve a legitimate social purpose — can alter the framework of the U.S. criminal justice system. Travis recently wrote about this need for parsimony with Columbia University sociologist Bruce Western.
Parsimony helps us better analyze and understand how our criminal justice system has been weaponized against marginalized communities. More simply, parsimony is to criminal justice what the Hippocratic oath is to health care: Do no harm, Atkinson said.
But it holds a more ambitious promise, as well — laying the foundation for an entirely new vision for criminal justice. A reimagining of a system that values social justice, reckons with the sins of our past, and most importantly, places the value of human dignity above all else.
— Rhiannon Meyers Collette, Communications Manager
Read more in The Power of Parsimony.
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911 Reforms Chart a Path
to Safer Communities
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By Evan Mintz, Communications Manager
Arnold Ventures is working to change how 911 works. Our crisis response team is collaborating with programs in states and counties to study emergency response systems and then implement innovative practices that will change how they respond to crises.
What’s Happening: As soon as kids are old enough to use a phone, they learn to dial 911 during an emergency. But the reality of how 911 functions isn’t so simple. Each year, there are more than 240 million calls to more than 6,000 local 911 services. Little objective data is collected about call outcomes, and there is no standardized system that governs calls.
Why It Matters: Dispatches are often mismatched to the underlying issue. This disproportionately harms Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities — a reality thrust into the spotlight with the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin after a store clerk called 911 to report a suspected fake $20 bill.
What’s Next: The nonprofit research group RTI International is working on a multi-city research project analyzing 911 calls for service to ensure that first-responder resources are aligned with community needs. The findings have already been used to spur change. Some cities are working on mandating that alarm companies confirm calls before sending police resources. In others, officials are working on training civilians to handle traffic reports instead of relying on a uniformed officer. There are also efforts to strengthen programs in which mental health responders accompany the police.
Read the story >
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‘I Refuse to Pay for Something
I Didn’t Get’
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By Torie Ludwin, Communications Manager
When Marie Johnson Lattier dropped out of a training program at for-profit California Institute less than two weeks after she began, she asked the school to return her loans to the federal government, as required by law. Instead, they kept the money, making Marie responsible for the loan — and its repayment. Because of interest capitalization over time, her loans ballooned from $5,425 to $105,000 — for a program in which she was enrolled for two weeks.
Why It Matters: Students are in a difficult position when predatory schools falsely keep student loan money, and taxpayers pick up the bill. Because of rules set at the time by the U.S. Department of Education, California Institute’s unauthorized use of federal loan funds was illegal. The school was eventually shut down after the owner was convicted of fraud.
However, in 2018, those rules from the U.S. Department of Education that determine how federal student loan money is disbursed and collected were loosened under then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, offering much less protection for students and taxpayers.
What’s Next: These rules have the potential to change this fall and winter through a process called negotiated rulemaking (or NegReg), run by the U.S. Department of Education. The negotiated rulemaking committee has the power to strengthen rules so that students like Lattier are not defrauded by predatory colleges.
Read the story >
Related: How did the latest week of negotiated rulemaking go? Kyle Southern of The Institute for College Access and Success and Sarah Sattelmeyer of New America offer an analysis. (Spoiler alert: There is still a lack of consensus on a dozen issues, including borrower defense to repayment rule and discharge of federal loan balances for students whose colleges close.)
Related: Our series with Student Defense and filmmaker/photographer Alex Shebanow highlights student stories and how strengthened rulemaking on federal student loans can have significant impact.
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 Alec Karakatsanis, founder of Civil Rights Corps, who is an outspoken advocate against inaccurate and hyperbolic media coverage of police and the criminal legal system. “Headlines and articles of the kind we are seeing across the U.S. are designed to create a Willie Horton-style panic,” Karakatsanis said recently in a Twitter thread about uncritical framing of crime in the news. “Amidst that fear, police states thrive. Stories like this make everyone afraid of poor people, people protesting injustice, immigrants, people of color.” The National Partnership for Pretrial Justice spoke to Karakatsanis about the problems he sees in the media’s status quo, and his ideas for how to get more holistic coverage that reflects the reality of community safety and criminal justice.
Read the Q&A > |
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Criminal Justice
- In collaboration with the Tampa Bay Times, The Marshall Project examines the trend of life-without-parole sentencing — which has soared in the past 20 years and is especially prevalent in Florida — and how many states are using it to punish “repeat offenders” even if their crimes caused no physical injury.
- Independent oversight of prisons is essential "to provide a window into these dark places," writes Michele Deitch in this essay, part of the Brennan Center’s series examining the punitive excess that has come to define America’s criminal legal system.
Dive Deeper: Read a three-part series, Transforming Prisons, on efforts to shine a light inside the “black box” of U.S. prisons.
- The New York Times examines the problems at New York City’s jail oversight board, which some say has been unresponsive amid rising jail deaths and horrible conditions on Rikers Island. (free link for newsletter readers) Meanwhile, Former New York State Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman has advice on how to reduce the population at Rikers.
- Rikers has dominated the news, but conditions are just as dire in many of New York’s upstate prisons, including Great Meadow Correctional Facility, reports New York Focus.
- America can’t fix policing without fixing the country’s gun problem, argues Vox’s German Lopez.
- San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin’s office has launched a new web portal allowing residents to access detailed criminal justice data, CBS Local reports.
- Why community-police collaborations are critical to addressing the rise in violence, via The Crime Report.
- A false account about fentanyl injections at the tragic Astroworld concert in Houston has us thinking about this story on police narratives around the drug and the media's role in reporting on them.
- Passing the EQUAL Act is one way to honor the veterans who have fought for our freedoms, writes Jason Pye of the Due Process Institute in The Hill.
Health
Higher Education
- “We’ve had rising high school graduation rates, rising rates of students entering college, and stagnating college graduation rates. Something is happening during the college experience that’s preventing these students from completing. That’s the problem these programs aim to solve,” Catherine Brown of The Institute for College Access and Success tells Politico in advocating for the College Completion Fund in the social spending bill, which would fund and replicate successful programs like ASAP.
- A new data tool from the Institute for Higher Education Policy helps stakeholders assess whether a school produces “equitable value.” (My alma mater, The University of Texas, contributed robust data across its system institutions.)
- ICYMI: Forbes reports on the Biden administration’s repayment plan for student loan borrowers; New America proposes changes to language from the U.S. Department of Education so that severely delinquent student borrowers may have the opportunity for auto-enrollment into income-driven repayment plans.
Also...
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- 60 Minutes reports on a new Missouri law that outlaws enforcement of federal gun laws. Police and prosecutors are worried: The law severely limits local law enforcements’ ability to assist in investigations involving illegal guns and has serious implications for efforts to reduce gun violence and protect victims of domestic abuse.
- Common Grounds, the bipartisan video series from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, brings together Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) to discuss policies that can further transparency in higher education.
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- A ballot measure that would have replaced the Minneapolis Police Department with a new Department of Public Safety failed last week. The What Next Podcast from Slate looks at why, in a city where the police killing of George Floyd sparked nationwide protests against law enforcement, the reform measure was so unpopular. Guest Jon Collins, senior reporter for MPR News, and host Mary Harris also discuss where police reform efforts might go from here.
Related: “Black lives need to be valued not just when unjustly taken by the police, but when we are alive and demanding our right to be heard, to breathe, to live in safe neighborhoods and to enjoy the full benefits of our status as American citizens,” writes Nekima Levy Armstrong of the Racial Justice Network in this New York Times op-ed: “Black Voters Want Better Policing, Not Posturing by Progressives” (free link for newsletter readers)
Related: This year’s election was neither a tidal wave for change nor an aggressive rollback in the face of an ongoing increase in violence. Instead, voters supported measured calls for police accountability, writes my colleague Evan Mintz.
Related: When it comes to police reform, “a majority of voters would rather use a scalpel than a sledgehammer,” writes Marc Levin of the Council on Criminal Justice in Newsweek.
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- In an extreme example of learning on the job, a group of University of Georgia journalism students are running a weekly newspaper that was gifted to the school in lieu of shutting down.
- Miss Colorado Maura Spence-Carroll, a soldier based in Fort Carson, is using her platform to raise awareness about the military and mental health, including firearm suicide among veterans.
- A prosecutor who locked up a teen for life more than 20 years ago finds new perspective — and friendship.
- For everyone complaining about how early it gets dark now (that includes me), presenting the Daylight Saving movie trailer.
- The longest partial lunar eclipse in nearly 600 years arrives next week.
- It's a good day for music: Beyoncé has released a new single from the upcoming biopic "King Richard," and Taylor Swift fans can rejoice in the epic rerecord of "Red (Taylor's Version)."
- Speaking of Houston talents, Kam Franklin of The Suffers this month released a new song that takes on the affordability crisis in health care. Listen to the haunting "Don't Get Caught Sick."
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I send my deepest sympathies to the families whose loved ones died or are fighting for their lives after the tragic mass casualty event at the Astroworld concert in my hometown of Houston.
– Stephanie
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Stephanie DiCapua Getman develops and executes Arnold Ventures' digital communications strategy with a focus on multimedia storytelling and audience engagement and oversees daily editorial operations and design.
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