We Can’t Wait Another Five Years

By Evan Mintz, communications manager

Experts are calling on the media to do a better job covering the criminal justice system in an objective manner. Headlines are still dominated by an “if it bleeds, it leads” mentality while reporters struggle to center objective data and provide balanced perspectives.

What's Happening: Homicides rose by 30% nationwide in 2020, a troubling and unprecedented rise, and one that can’t easily be explained by any one factor.

Rather than lead with the complexity, however, many media outlets spent 2021 focusing only on the spike, making space for misleading narratives that accelerated through social media. Partisan opinion pieces pounced on the opportunity to draw connections between criminal justice reforms and rising crime, without evidence.

Why It Matters: Salacious stories and inaccurate — or even brazenly false — media coverage about criminal justice policies have been followed by declines in popular support for reform. Meanwhile, media has failed to report on how changes to pretrial systems or policing practices benefit communities and families.

“The stories of tens of thousands of people who went home safely to their families, who went back to their jobs and their communities as a result of bail reform, aren’t covered,” said Insha Rahman, vice president of advocacy and partnerships at Vera Institute of Justice. “If those got as much press as the one terrible case, we would have a different public perception of what reform does in our community — to public safety and people’s lives.”

What's Next: Media outlets across the nation are committing to improving the way they cover criminal justice issues. Gannett's chain of papers has established new, across-the-board policies to be less reactive and more reflective of community interests. The Associated Press and Boston Globe have taken steps to protect the privacy of people involved in low-level offenses. And the Los Angeles Times has publicly grappled with how a history of discriminatory coverage has hurt Black and Brown communities. 
 

One in four people living in America has had a sibling incarcerated. Among them is Carlton Miller, AV’s director of criminal justice. 

At just 8 years old, Miller saw his brother, Kendrick, sentenced to what was effectively life in prison at the notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary, a former slave plantation known as Angola. This excessive punishment was meted out by the state’s “Jim Crow jury” system, a legacy of white supremacy that allowed convictions by non-unanimous juries.

It was also what motivated Miller to pursue his life’s work: championing the criminal justice reforms that would ultimately help set his brother free.

Miller tells the story of his brother’s incarceration and the lessons he took away from it in this powerful essay for the Brennan Center for Justice. It is a testament to the devastation excessive punishment has inflicted upon families across the country, Miller’s personal determination to right a wrong steeped in racist ideology, and the need for redemption and restoration. “This issue is more than a criminal justice issue: it is a human rights issue,” he writes. “We are in a crisis — a crisis that has defined the trajectory of my life.”

Read his story > 

By Juliana Keeping, communications manager

One of the most powerful testimonies on Capitol Hill this week came from Jane Doyle, above, a Pennsylvania grandmother who has multiple sclerosis and helps care for her elderly mother. Both women are dually eligible for Medicare and Medicaid — placing them in the group of 12 million Americans who are forced to navigate two large bureaucratic systems and, as a result, often struggle to coordinate their care.

What's Happening: In riveting testimony to the Senate Special Committee on Aging, Doyle described the uphill battle she faced getting the care she and her mother needed, an odyssey that included hundreds of pages of documents and numerous bureaucratic hurdles.

“I ask you to do whatever you can to ease the burdens people like me and my mother have faced,” Doyle told Congress. “While these programs are important, they are not easy to use. To make these programs actually work, it needs to be much easier for people like my mother to enroll and for people like me to find care.”

Why It Matters: Dual-eligible individuals are among the most medically vulnerable Americans, experience worse outcomes than their Medicare-only peers, and have been among the hardest hit by COVID-19. The Senate hearing on Thursday reinforced that dual-eligible individuals deserve immediate and urgent attention, highlighting the need for effective policy solutions that improve lives and lower costs.

“It’s time we expand access to integrated Medicare-Medicaid models and address the barriers that people who are dual eligible face to living healthy lives in their communities,” said Arielle Mir, VP of health care at Arnold Ventures.

Read the story >

By Evan Mintz, communications manager

95%

The proportion of people arrested in New York City in November 2021 who were released pretrial and had a successful outcome, meaning they attended their court dates, abided by any court-imposed restrictions, didn’t commit new crimes, and successfully saw their case to disposition.

It’s a figure that remains true dating back to 2019, before the state’s new bail laws — largely eliminating wealth-based detention for most misdemeanors and non-violent felonies — went into effect.

And it’s among the data you can see for yourself through the New York City Criminal Justice Agency’s new pretrial dashboard. This interactive database provides users with a detailed and nuanced look into the city’s complex pretrial system.

Why It Matters: Before this dashboard, the public and experts alike lacked basic information about New York City's pretrial system, such as how many people are jailed pretrial or how many people are released pretrial. Now that information is not only easily available, but sortable by charge, arrest type, and release type.

Bottom Line: This data transparency comes at a time when New York’s bail reform law has come under attack, and it has proven critical to debunking false claims about the effect of pretrial reforms on public safety. 

“My hope is it supports a healthier dialogue about social justice reform — one that is not about absolutes, but more about nuance and hard data,” says Aubrey Fox, executive director of the New York City Criminal Justice Agency.

Criminal Justice

• News that Chicago violence-prevention leader Eddie Bocanegra will advise the Justice Department on community violence intervention. “To me it signals that the (Biden) administration is still following what the research says … you can’t solve gun violence just with cops and handcuffs,” AV’s VP of Criminal Justice Walter Katz tells the Chicago Tribune.
   
• A first-of-its-kind survey of research from 2021 to help identify policy solutions for reducing gun violence and evidence gaps that need to be filled, via the Giffords Law Center.

• This study, based on a randomized-controlled trial by the California Policy Lab, which found promising, sizable reductions in rearrests from a youth restorative justice program.
   
• An op-ed by Emily Bazelon on the ways prosecutors can reduce recidivism and improve public safety by following the research.
   
• This Associated Press investigation into the culture of abuse at a federal women's prison in California.
   
• The Department of Justice ruling that incarcerated people placed on home confinement via the CARES Act could stay at home was welcome news. But as this Inquest piece makes clear, they are still serving a sentence, and their futures hinge on how the DOJ implements its decision.
   
• Bolts magazine lays out eight big election questions that will shape the future of criminal punishment and mass incarceration.
   
• What to know about no-knock warrants after the fatal shooting of Amir Locke by Minneapolis police, via ABC News.

Health 

• This Wall Street Journal commentary on the role that the high-priced nonprofit hospitals in Indiana play in increasing the cost of insurance for employers — thus suppressing wages and hiring. The state’s legislators have taken notice. (free link)

• New legislation by Sens. Mike Braun and Tammy Baldwin would bar health plans from entering into contracts that allow anti-competitive business practices and bring much-needed relief from high health care costs for businesses and consumers.
   

• How a majority of hospitals recently surveyed are ignoring a federal order to publicly post their prices, Bloomberg reports.
   

• A patient got on a Zoom meeting with the Mayo Clinic to get information about a study he ultimately decided not to participate in. That patient was billed almost $500, Axios reports.
   
• Good news for patients: More states are imposing new limits on hospital billing practices, making fresh attempts to help patients avoid heavy medical debts, per the Wall Street Journal. (free link) (Nearly one in five households carry medical debt, and medical bills are the biggest source of debt, more than all other types combined, including utilities and credit cards.)
   
• Dig into the data on how organ procurement organizations are performing (not well).

Higher Education

• A deep dive on the Senate's interest in online program managers and their tuition-sharing agreements with schools, which lead to higher tuitions and student debt, via Higher Ed Dive.
   
• Details on the Department of Education's proposed Gainful Employment rule — to be discussed in negotiated rulemaking — which connects the amount of debt students can take out to their future employment earnings, via The Chronicle of Higher Education.
  
  Related: AV Director of Higher Education Kelly McManus recommends a stronger Gainful Employment rule in her five goals for this year’s negotiated rulemaking.
   
• This Inside Higher Ed interview with author Amelia Parnell about how to use data for better institutional decision-making.

• News that the North Carolina Supreme Court declared the state’s congressional senate, and house maps unconstitutional beyond a reasonable doubt, barred them from being used in any future election, and launched a process for adopting new, remedial maps to take their place, via The New York Times. (free link)
   
• Can Alaska be a model for election system change? “It’s first to employ the electoral reform that’s most likely to save democracy,” writes Edward B. Foley in the Washington Post. (free link)
   
• Former Utah Republican Party Chair Stan Lockhart making the case for ranked-choice voting in Florida. “I’ve come to believe that RCV is a faster, cheaper, and better way to run our local elections in Utah.”

Also

• The Open Research Funders Group and Arizona State University highlight the Evidence-Based Policy team’s recent report in favor of “prespecification” in randomized controlled trials as an Open Science Success Story.

“Heaven: Can You Hear Me?”, a no-nonsense portrayal of gun violence trauma in Philadelphia, told through the eyes of mothers who have lost their children to the epidemic. Dorothy Johnson-Speight is one of them: Her son was shot seven times and killed over a parking space. She is also the founder of Mothers in Charge, which started as a vehicle to help herself and other survivors heal. We may be numbed to the statistics, but every gun death is shocking to those close to the victim. The women of Mothers in Charge and other violence interrupters in Philadelphia aim to change the narrative, but the work is not easy.


 

Also: “A Sincere Second Look: Second Chances,” a short piece about the need for second look laws in Virginia, from Families Against Mandatory Minimums and featuring Sistas in Prison Reform. 

Also: Catch up on the work of the Square One Project as it enters a new chapter focused on racial reckoning and justice with this convening in Oklahoma, one of the sites chosen for the Safety and Justice Challenge.

• An in-depth treatise on mid-life friendship. 
   
• Two American athletes are celebrating their hard-won gold medals: American snowboardcross racer Lindsey Jacobellis and figure skater Nathan Chen.
   
• WORLDle is much more difficult than Wordle. And here you can play the original as many times a day as you want.
   
• "He thought it was hysterical. It was hideous, and it embarrassed his sister.” Eleven-year-old Allan Baltz’s mullet also won him a nice prize, which he donated to foster care groups.
   
• Here’s a roundup of the best (and sometimes worst) part of the Super Bowl: the commercials. How could they leave out Zendaya and André 3000?
   
• This kid’s snowboarding commentary is a metaphor for life.