What California’s Crazy Recall Election Needs

Amber Ward left high school in rural West Virginia to get a jump on living the rest of her life. Ten years and too many low-paying jobs to count later, she made a decision: She would go to college. When she was accepted at West Virginia University at Parkersburg, she became the first person in her family to attend college, and thanks to the university’s Ascend program, her future has "blossomed."

What’s Happening: Before finding the Ascend pilot program at WVU, which provides advising, financial assistance, and other support, Ward was struggling to juggle school, a job, three children — and anxiety that she would fail. Too many at-risk students like Ward leave college in debt and without a degree. But there are a handful of programs shown to dramatically improve the nation’s dismal six-year college completion rate, which is just over 60%. Ascend is based on the rigorously researched Accelerated Study in Associate Programs model at the City University of New York, which was shown in a previous randomized controlled trial to nearly double three-year graduation rates.
 

What's Next: College completion programs that are proven to work are rare. They are also prohibitively expensive. The Biden administration's proposed $62 billion College Completion Fund could change both those things.

By Evan Mintz, Communications Manager

Congress should build and improve the data infrastructure for our nation’s criminal justice system, argue Measures for Justice CEO Amy Bach and Arnold Ventures Executive Vice President Jeremy Travis in an op-ed published this week in The Hill. 

Why it Matters: Even as the nation grapples with calls for reforming law enforcement and confronting a spike in homicides, politicians just can’t seem to agree about the right path forward. A key problem standing in the way is that policymakers lack a shared set of facts. They simply don’t have fundamental, objective information about the way our criminal justice system functions. 

For example, a recently published report by Measures for Justice found that only two of 20 studied states had information available about the pretrial process, including bail, detention, and release practice. The federal government has a responsibility — and the capability — to collect, store, and share the data that could fill this information gap. “We need an objective sense of police practices if we hope to have a serious conversation about the proper role of policing,” Bach and Travis write.

What’s Next: The federal government can work to build this needed data infrastructure by setting national standards for data collection and release, providing support and incentives for the local agencies, and pushing for greater transparency across the board. An expert roundtable organized by AV specifically recommended the creation of a National Commission on Criminal Justice Data Modernization to help spearhead this work.

By Rhiannon Meyers Collette, Communications Manager

For the more than 12 million people covered by Medicare and Medicaid, integrated care plans appear well-positioned to help beneficiaries knit together and navigate their otherwise fragmented care experiences. Yet, only 10% of dual-eligible individuals are enrolled in integrated care plans — an indication that these plans may not be meeting consumers' needs. To better understand the experiences and perspectives of dual-eligible individuals, AV's Complex Care team has issued a request for information seeking feedback from consumer advocates, thought leaders, and technical assistance providers to help shape policy approaches best suited to meet consumers' needs.

Why it Matters: This consumer engagement project is just one of many efforts underway at AV to build deeper relationships within the dual-eligible consumer community as we work to enhance our understanding of the challenges this population faces, facilitate an exchange of ideas among those working to improve dual-eligible care, and identify effective solutions.

The Fine Print: Interested respondents can read the full details of the RFI. We are collecting responses until Sept. 16. Questions? Email complexcare@arnoldventures.org.

Related: AV grantees ATI Advisory, Community Catalyst and IMPAQ International have developed a wealth of resources to shine a spotlight on the experience of dual-eligible consumers. Check them out.

• The New Yorker profiles AV grantee Andrea Armstrong, a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans, and her Herculean efforts to expose the loss of life inside Louisiana’s prisons and jails, where many of the in-custody deaths involve people awaiting trial. “Armstrong’s work seeks to shift the focus to the dangerous, at times unconstitutional conditions inside the nation’s penal institutions, where more than 2 million people are confined. If we believe that the lives of incarcerated people matter, she maintains, we have a legal and moral obligation to make these conditions less inhumane.”
  
  Related: Deaths in the Sacramento County jails are not being reported to the public, which experts say “makes it harder for watchdogs and families to understand what’s going on inside the jails. It fuels distrust, particularly in an era when law enforcement practices are under scrutiny,” The Sacramento Bee reports.
   
• Zachary Swain has fallen into “a punishing cycle he can’t seem to break” while incarcerated in Maine, The Bangor Daily News reports. Because of his mental health diagnoses, officials keep him isolated from the general population, so he has spent most of his time in solitary confinement, which only further deteriorates his mental health. Requests for treatment have been denied. Dive deeper: AV examined the damaging effects of solitary confinement and how some states are realizing they’ve gone too far in the name of punishment. 
   
• Prosecutors in Delaware County are partly crediting a decrease in homicides and a higher clearance rate to a targeted gun violence prevention program that “opens a clear line of communication between residents and investigators,” The Crime Report writes.
   
• A group of more than 100 former and current prosecutors and law enforcement officials sent a letter to President Joe Biden urging him to prioritize criminal justice reform, noting that the important role prosecutors play is often neglected and policy changes such as ending cash bail and declining to prosecute smaller crimes can address racial inequity, poverty, and over-incarceration, the Associated Press reports.
   
• Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences analyzed millions of 911 across nine U.S. cities and found that only a small percentage involved mental health crises. Their findings could influence police reform, Time reports.
   
• The Philadelphia Citizen profiles an intergenerational therapy program that is helping formerly incarcerated men address trauma and thrive post-incarceration. Some think it could offer a path to less gun violence.
   
• As jobs go unfilled amid our economic recovery, it’s time to normalize the hiring of people with criminal records, argue Stacy Schusterman, Darren Walker and Nancy Roob in this Washington Post op-ed. 
   
• We need more gun research, now, urges U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro in the CT Post. “Disagreements over the causes of gun violence and the best prevention methods have led to bitter partisan gridlock and ultimately put our communities and the safety of our law enforcement officers at risk.” 
   
• Children’s firearms injuries jumped by nearly 40% during the pandemic last year, The Washington Post reports.

• A Kaiser Family Foundation analysis finds that spending is higher and growing faster for Medicare Advantage enrollees, adding to Medicare's long-term sustainability woes.
   
• A new resource from Patients for Affordable Drugs Now provides in-depth information on the mechanics of a proposed policy to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices and enables constituents to amplify this issue directly with their elected officials.
   
• North Carolina patients are suing insurers over claims of thousands of dollars in surprise medical bills, the Charlotte Observer reports.
   
• Sarah Kliff offers tips on how to avoid a surprise medical bill as the Delta variant drives a new wave of coronavirus testing. 
   
• The Sackler family is threatening to withhold $4.5 billion that would help communities devastated by the opioid epidemic unless a judge grants Purdue Pharma immunity from lawsuits, The New York Times reports.

• “Some of The Oomph”: The Biggest Story in the Billionaire Philanthropy World”: Teddy Schleifer digs into the history of how our Co-Founder John Arnold and Boston College Law School professor Ray Madoff joined forces to propel the “most sweeping change to the rules surrounding nonprofit funding in a half-century.” 
   
• Philanthropic leaders could do more to move rural people toward economic parity by supporting the ACE Act, which would close loopholes that slow the distribution of charitable dollars, argue Paul Major of the Telluride Foundation and Lora Smith of the Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky in this Hill op-ed.
   
• This fact-check from Alan Cantor refutes — with data — the common arguments made against reforming our laws around charitable giving from donor-advised funds. 
   
• Inside Philanthropy rounds up the campaigns and proposals that aim to speed up charitable giving.

• A new initiative from George Washington University, Columbia University, and the National Student Legal Defense Network will explore how better data can protect students from predatory colleges and evaluate strategies for holding schools accountable, MarketWatch reports.
   
• ICYMI: The Great Master’s-Degree Swindle, or how colleges are profiting from selling dubious credentials to students, via The Chronicle of Higher Education. 
   
• ThirdWay breaks down which college programs give students the best return on their investment. Read more about the report with this free New York Times link.

Everything Else

• FairVote looks at how redistricting battles are likely to unfold across the country.
   
• The 19th* highlights how women of color are leading the fight for voting rights 101 years after the ratification of the 19th Amendment. 
   
• In the middle of many global crises, it is becoming increasingly difficult to “stay positive.” The Atlantic suggests an antidote: “tragic optimism,” or “the search for meaning during the inevitable tragedies of human existence.”

“A Crime on the Bayou” tells the story of Gary Duncan, who was arrested in 1966 at age 19 for touching a white boy’s arm in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, and charged with cruelty to a juvenile. What follows is a legal odyssey rooted in racism and the ethos of “total control” so entrenched in the Deep South. The driving force behind Duncan’s persecution is political boss Leander Perez, the unequivocal villain in this story, who fought against school desegregation and whose bigotry is made plain in disturbing clips from an interview with William F. Buckley on “Firing Line” (where Perez laughingly claims he is “not a bigot at all” — this is a man who built a jail on an alligator-infested island to imprison his perceived political enemies, basically anyone fighting for civil rights.) Duncan’s case goes all the way to the Supreme Court with help from a cadre of civil rights lawyers. Told through news clips (including early reporting by Dan Rather), courtroom re-enactments, and interviews with the key players — Duncan, civil rights lawyers Richard Sobol and Armand Derfner, and Lolis Eric Elie, the son of civil rights lawyer Lolis Elie — the film offers a very deep history of the lawyers fighting for civil rights and the role of Jewish lawyers especially, who themselves become targets of Perez. It’s a story that is inextricably linked to the current day. Also touching is the friendship that forms between Duncan and Sobol. “Frederick Douglass used to talk about the abolitionists caring a great deal about slavery but no so much about the slave,” says Lolis Eric Elie. “For Richard Sobol to effectively argue Gary Duncan’s case, he had to see it as a case about a human being and not a case about a civil right.” 



Also: In "Unlivable Oasis," ProPublica tells the story of the climate gap in Eastern Coachella Valley. People there live in two starkly different worlds: One has lush green lawns, reliable power sources, and ample clean water; the other has dusty roads, failing electrical systems, and poison flowing from the faucets. "It’s a cartoonishly horrible expression of a moral and practical issue that exists, at some level, in every society on earth. The climate crisis is an inequality magnifier. The heat and the hurricanes, the flooding and the wildfire smoke, slam down with full force on the disadvantaged. Meanwhile, the more privileged remain comparatively safe, protected by money and power."

The Aspen Institute’s “Shades of Freedom” podcast speaks with Daryl Atkinson of Forward Justice and AV’s Jeremy Travis about their Square One Project report “The Power of Parsimony” — the idea that the state should use the lightest possible touch when intruding on a person’s liberty in the interest of a legitimate social purpose — and how this idea can be applied to reimagining our criminal justice system. They discuss over-incarceration, sentencing reform, and our culture of punishment. 

On WYPR's "Midday," host Tom Hall talks to Gwen Levi and Kevin Ring, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums. You've read about Levi in this space before: The 76-year-old was on home confinement when she was sent back to prison for missing a phone call from officials during a computer class. She has since been released and gives us an update on her case. Levi and Ring make the COVID-era case for compassionate release. 

RCT Training Opportunity: Register by Sept. 1 for discounted access to J-PAL North America’s Research Staff Training, a four-week virtual course that will run from Oct. 18 to Nov. 12. It’s designed for research staff working on randomized controlled trials and provides an opportunity for participants to develop practical skills necessary for their work, refine technical skills, and meet other research staff working on RCTs around the world. Register here. 

• Meek Mill was recently honored with the Nelson Mandela Changemaker Award for his work with REFORM Alliance and efforts to reshape the country’s probation and parole system. To celebrate, he dropped a powerful video for “Mandela Freestyle.” Watch it here.
   
• The 19th* talks to the women of The Daily Show about their push for diversity and equity in the issues they cover and how they bring humor to the country’s biggest problems.
   
• Men incarcerated in a Missouri prison formed a quilting circle to make personalized gifts for children in foster care.
   
• Courageous female Afghan journalists are continuing to report on what’s happening in their country despite the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul.