‘The Inability to Forget’

By Evan Mintz, Communications Manager

 

Last month, President Joe Biden called upon Congress to pass a policing reform bill in Floyd’s name by the anniversary of his murder by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. It hasn’t happened yet. But beyond the partisan stalemates of Congress and talking heads of cable TV, local lawmakers and state legislators are working to pass significant, structural reforms that maybe — just maybe — could be the real change our country needs.

 

What’s Happening: Congress may not have its own policing bill yet, but states like Illinois, Maryland and Washington have passed reforms that will help remove barriers to police accountability, bolster civilian oversight, and create statewide use-of-force standards. Meanwhile, cities are questioning whether police officers are the best response to calls for low-level violations or people in crisis. Philadelphia, Dallas, Denver and Atlanta are all experimenting with co-responder models or mobile crisis teams in response to calls for help from the public.

 

What’s Next: While we wait for a federal policing bill, more than 1,400 policing reform bills are pending in legislatures. California’s Senate Bill 2 will give the state the authority to decertify law enforcement officers for misconduct — a regulatory oversight that exists in all but four states. And Texas’ House Bill 830 will limit the ability of law enforcement to arrest people for fine-only offenses, a reform that activists have been pushing since Sandra Bland died in jail after being pulled over for changing lanes without a turn signal.

 

Read the story >

 

Related: Maryland’s leadership on police reform is an important first step, writes AV’s Walter Katz in Maryland Matters.

By Ashley Winstead, Director of Strategic Communications

 

As abolitionists, activists, legislators, and system stakeholders are bringing new energy and urgency to the challenge of transforming the country’s response to crime, a new report from the AV-funded Square One Project argues that the principle of parsimony should become a defining value of future justice policy.

 

What It Means: “The Power of Parsimony,” authored by Daryl V. Atkinson of Forward Justice and AV's Jeremy Travis, applies the principle of parsimony — a historical legal concept that holds the state should exercise only the most limited intrusion into a person’s liberty to achieve a broader goal — to the realities of today’s criminal justice system. This approach would result in punishments that are no greater than necessary and define punishments that cross that line as unjust, illegitimate, and potentially even exercises of state violence.

 

Why It Matters: The principle of parsimony can be used to analyze nearly every aspect of the criminal justice system to determine whether current policy is appropriately limited or excessively punitive. In their paper, Atkinson and Travis analyze prison sentences, collateral consequences of criminal convictions, and solitary confinement through the lens of parsimony to demonstrate how each is excessively punitive. "If we took the principle of parsimony seriously, we would place liberty at the center of every debate about justice policy,” says Travis. “We would insist that every limitation on liberty meet a strict test: Is this exercise of state power reasonably necessary to achieve a legitimate purpose? The result would be a profound reduction in the reach of the criminal justice system."

 

Read the paper >

Watch: Atkinson and Travis explain parsimony in this short video.

By Rhiannon Meyers Collette, Communications Manager
 

In the latest of a series of investigations into anticompetitive tactics by the pharmaceutical industry, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform revealed that leading drug maker AbbVie used a series of strategies — including exploiting the U.S. patent system — to hike prices and profit gouge patients while enriching its executives.
 

What’s Happening: The committee reviewed more than 170,000 pages of internal AbbVie documents (obtained only after its chairwoman threatened to subpoena the company) that showed AbbVie blocked lower-cost biosimilars from competing with its blockbuster drug Humira by securing patent settlements and building patent thickets. AbbVie has filed applications for 247 patents on Humira since its launch in 2003. Per its settlement agreements, biosimilar competition can't come to market until 2023. Thanks to the company's stranglehold over the market, today's list price for Humira is $77,000 per year — 470% higher than when the drug launched. 
 

Why It Matters: AbbVie’s tactics mirror the playbooks used by other major pharmaceutical manufacturers, underscoring that these behaviors aren't company-specific but rather reflective of broader systemic failures in the market. According to internal documents and the CEOs' testimonies under oath, pharma dedicates a sizeable chunk of its budget to suppressing competition and tightening its grip on the market rather than "investing in new therapies that provide meaningful clinical value beyond what’s already on the market," writes AV’s Erin Jones. That's an important distinction to keep in mind as Congress continues to debate ways to lower drug prices.
 

Read the story >

By Rhiannon Meyers Collette, Communications Manager

Less than a year and a half after COVID-19 arrived in the United States, the country has fully vaccinated half of adults — a breathtakingly fast pace that has put the end of the pandemic in sights. Much has been written about the first-of-its-kind mRNA technology and the herculean effort to get as many shots in arms as quickly as possible. But there's an equally important story to be examined in how the U.S. pulled off such a feat. The answer in short: Government intervention.

 

What's Happening: In an op-ed published in The Hill, two veteran health policy experts — AV's Mark Miller and Richard Frank of Harvard Medical School — argue that the fast-track development and distribution of the vaccines demonstrates that the U.S. government "can be a constructive and responsible partner with the industry."

 

Why It Matters: Congress is locked in debate about ways to reform the drug pricing system and lower costs for patients and taxpayers. The pharmaceutical industry has falsely claimed that government involvement would stifle innovation and limit access. However, the COVID-19 vaccine success story suggests that a "restructuring of the relationship between the government and the industry can be accomplished in a manner that benefits American patients and taxpayers while keeping the industry financially healthy," Miller and Frank write.

 

Read the op-ed >

Related: Frank sets the record straight on research and development and government intervention in his Health Affairs piece, "It Was The Government That Produced COVID-19 Vaccine Success."

By Rhiannon Meyers Collette, Communications Manager

With Chiquita Brooks-LaSure now officially confirmed as the new administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, it's time for the agency to take steps to improve care for people with complex needs who were among the hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic: individuals who are dually eligible for Medicare and Medicaid. Dual-eligible individuals must navigate two distinct and fragmented systems to get care, which often results in beneficiaries driving disproportionately high shares of government health care spending but experiencing worse health outcomes than those who are covered by Medicare alone. In an open letter, AV's Arielle Mir outlines a strategic vision for CMS to improve care and coverage for this vulnerable population. Brooks-LaSure has an opportunity to guide CMS toward new policies and procedures that better address the needs of dual-eligible individuals by strengthening care delivery models and rebalancing long-term care services toward more home- and community-based models. And CMS has the ability to better streamline integration and incentivize enrollment in existing integrated coverage options now.

Read the letter >

“Sound of Judgment,” a 20-minute documentary from ProPublica and The News & Observer that takes you all the way from Graham, North Carolina, to the Capitol insurrection in Washington, D.C. A confederate monument looms large in Graham’s town square, the relic of a shameful history that includes the 1870 Ku Klux Klan lynching of Wyatt Outlaw, the city’s first Black elected official. No one was convicted of the murder, and some of the men involved went on to hold positions of power in government and the criminal justice system. George Floyd’s death in 2020 awakened a movement for change among the people of Alamance County. It was met with an aggressive and tactical rebuttal from local Sheriff Terry Johnson and the confederate believers who stood behind him.
The best quotes in this film come from Ebony Pinnix:

• Of her activism: “I have two kids that are out of my home now. I can no longer physically protect them. The only way I feel like I can protect them is by going out there and trying to get change. This is the same as the past, but in a new light.”
• Of law enforcement: “They’ve definitely lost our trust. There’s no more respect there. The respect is gone.”
• Of the future: “We have a lot of support now — from all over the country — unfortunately thanks to pepper spray.”

What We Will Be Watching: The new PBS documentary premiering Monday, “Tulsa: The Fire and the Forgotten,” which explores the 1921 massacre and anti-Black violence. Activist Gregory Robinson, featured in a preview, sees a connection between Tulsa and George Floyd: “If you think George Floyd is the only person who has received injustice in this country, you’re way out of touch. Right here in the city of Tulsa we have not been doing justice by citizens.”

The National Press Foundation, with support from AV, will host the webinar “Pandemic Crime Wave: Causes and Responses” at 12 p.m. ET on Thursday, June 3. Speakers including Thomas Abt of the Council on Criminal Justice, Fatimah Loren Dreier of the Health Alliance for Violence Intervention, and Alexis Piquero of the University of Miami will put recent crime stats in perspective and talk about disturbing spikes in domestic violence and strategies for reducing violence. Learn more and register here.

• Simone Biles again unveiled a move no other woman has done before, a Yurchenko double pike on the vault. “Asked why Biles does the moves despite not getting as much credit in the scorebook as she should, she responded, ‘Because I can.’”
   
• Edward Martell had been involved with the justice system since his early teens, but a judge gave him a second chance. Sixteen years later, the judge swore Martell in as a lawyer.
   
• A teenager who experienced homelessness and had to manage her diabetes on her own has been accepted to more than 50 colleges.

The Prosecution team at Arnold Ventures and the National Partnership for Pretrial Justice are accepting proposals for research on the role of prosecution and prosecutorial decisions at various points along the criminal justice process. Learn more here.

Our Complex Care team is funding research into how to improve the systems that deliver care to a population of more than 12 million people who are dually eligible for Medicare and Medicaid. Learn more here.

The Criminal Justice and Evidence-Based Policy teams at Arnold Ventures are teaming up to learn more about what works in criminal justice reform in an ongoing request for proposals for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that will test programs and practices. There is no deadline for submissions.

The Evidence-Based Policy team invites grant applications to conduct randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of social programs in any area of U.S. policy. Details are here.

View all of our RFPs here.