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The national movement to reform law enforcement, sparked by the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others, has highlighted America’s over-reliance on police to handle all manner of civil disturbances and minor lawbreaking — as well as mental health crises. The energy behind this activism may be new, but the core idea isn't. Arnold Ventures has been funding research on alternatives to arrest for years and now, more than ever, that research should guide public policy.

The problem: Law enforcement routinely serves as the primary response to those experiencing crises, but more people are coalescing around the idea that armed officers often are not the responders best-equipped to deal with these vulnerable populations — and jail isn’t the best place for people with mental illness or substance use disorder. Some startling facts:

• An estimated 64 percent of the people in local jails suffer from mental illness. 
• 68 percent have a substance use disorder. 

• There are more than three times as many mentally ill people in U.S. jails than in our underfunded mental health facilities. 

How we got here: Until the 1970s, many people would have received treatment at state-run psychiatric hospitals, but poor conditions led to a deinstitutionalization movement that closed many such facilities — without securing funding for alternative forms of treatment. As a result, America’s jails and prisons have become de facto mental health facilities.

What’s next: Cities and counties around the country are experimenting with ways to divert vulnerable populations away from the criminal justice system, promising approaches that advocates say can be scaled up. And the momentum is clearly there. "We do recognize that in some ways a moment has found us,” says Walter Katz, AV’s Vice President of Criminal Justice.

Related: Vox takes an in-depth look at the emerging dialogue around defunding non-criminal police services.

Related: Harris County is ahead of the curve with a new telehealth program that pairs mental health experts with law enforcement to help deescalate mental health calls and keep people out of jails. 

Related: Addressing chronic homelessness through policing isn't working. Housing first strategies are a better way.

By Rhiannon Collette, Communications Manager

Picture this: You have heartburn. Your doctor prescribes you Vimovo, a relatively new drug that carries a list price of $2,061 for a 60-day supply. (For context, that’s more than the average American’s monthly mortgage).

But when you go to pick up your meds, the pharmacist lets you in on a secret: You could get the same treatment at a fraction of the price. Vimovo, after all, is little more than a combo of a 40-year-old drug called omeprazole and a run-of-the-mill over-the-counter painkiller called naproxen, commonly known as Aleve. The cost of these two components of Vimovo? Less than $30 for the same two-month supply. (For context, that’s a month’s worth of Starbucks iced coffees — OK fine, a week’s worth.)

Right now, this can’t happen. Federal law currently prohibits pharmacists from substituting expensive brand name drugs prescribed by doctors with cheaper generic versions that are just as safe and effective, unless those drugs are “therapeutically identical” — having the same active ingredients, dosage, formulation, etc. But giving pharmacists greater latitude to substitute less expensive but still effective drugs would not only save patients money at the pharmacy counter, it could also lower U.S. drug spending overall, according to a new analysis by researchers at Harvard’s Program on Regulation, Therapeutics, and Law (PORTAL).
 

Public finance systems, the interstitial tissue keeping the body politic intact, are coming apart at the seams. Shutdowns and fear of the pandemic have pushed consumer spending down, and businesses are shutting down or laying off workers. This means a steep decline in government revenues at a time when the need for spending on unemployment, education, and health care is rising. 

Our grantees have pivoted in response to the dual health and economic crises, and their work offers a snapshot of what we’ve learned so far. They’ve assessed policy responses to the crises and provided insight into what should be done to ensure better fiscal sustainability in the future. (Spoiler alert: We need at least one economic relief package focused on state and local governments to ensure cities and states can manage these important services.)

By Rhiannon Collette, Communications Manager

Health care has become more consolidated in recent years — which has resulted in more expensive care. But states can exert greater authority to constrain the type of anticompetitive mergers and acquisitions that have led to rising health care costs, writes AV’s Alexandra Spratt, Health Care Manager.

Spratt’s analysis comes on the heels of a new report from researchers with the Source on Healthcare Price & Competition, a project of the University of California Hastings College of Law. It outlines five policy recommendations for states to strengthen antitrust oversight.  

This work has taken on new urgency: The COVID-19 pandemic has strained the finances of some health care providers — most notably small, independent doctors and hospitals — making them likely targets for acquisitions post-pandemic. “States can play a role in ensuring larger, well-off health systems don’t take advantage of the crisis to further increase their market power,” Spratt writes.

Related: When not-for-profit hospitals become “money-making machines,” U.S. families, employers, and taxpayers are the ones who suffer, writes Washington Monthly.

As parts of the country start opening back up and (some) people venture out of quarantine, it might be easy to forget that the coronavirus is still ravaging parts of this country, specifically prisons and jails. It’s astounding the volume of stories coming out each day about incarcerated people who are fearing for their lives, writing goodbyes to loved ones, and contradicting officials’ claims about the health and safety of their confinement. Two tragedies stand out:

• Andrea Circle Bear was in her third trimester of pregnancy when she was sent to a crowded federal women’s prison in Fort Worth on a two-year sentence related to a minor, nonviolent drug charge. Inmates and staff there had already warned that coronavirus was spreading, and the 30-year-old soon tested positive. She gave birth while on a ventilator, and just weeks later, Andrea died of COVID-19. Holly Harris of Justice Action Network wrote a powerful New York Times op-ed that holds the Justice Department to account, saying it could have saved Andrea’s life but "instead sent her to the deadliest place on earth right now: an American prison." (In 2015, Andrea’s sister, Sarah Lee Circle Bear, died in custody while pregnant.)
   

• And there is Susan Farrell, the first woman to die from the coronavirus in a Michigan prison. The 74-year-old had served more than 30 years in the death of her husband, who she said physically and sexually abused her, resulting in various health issues. There have been more deaths in Michigan prisons since.

The bottom line: Andrea Circle Bear and Susan Farrell are the direct result of policy failures by the leaders we charge with protecting health and safety, and they are only the tip of the iceberg — corrections facilities are exploding with cases. They are why we have argued for compassionately releasing as many people as possible.

Call to action: Policymakers can’t ignore jails and prisons in their COVID-19 response, write my colleague Kelli Rhee, President and CEO, and Marc Levin of Right on Crime. The health of those behind bars — inmates and staff — is “intertwined with the health of our communities.”

Who's taking action: The Prison Policy Institute is tracking which state and local governments are taking meaningful steps to reduce incarcerated populations, and the Fines and Fees Justice Center has compiled a state-by-state, real-time look at what reforms are happening right now to keep people out of prisons and jails and relieve some burdens for those who are there.

By Evan Mintz, Criminal Justice Communications Manager

Juvenile justice reform is gaining new attention as COVID-19 forces the nation to assess the conditions within criminal justice and corrections systems. Children held in detention are isolated from their families, at risk of contracting the coronavirus, and forced to live in lockdown conditions that border on solitary isolation. That’s why the Columbia Justice Lab, an Arnold Ventures grantee, called for juvenile systems to release children from detention at the beginning of the crisis. 

• Pew drew attention to the role juvenile facilities play in spreading the virus and encouraged elected and appointed leaders to reduce the number of young people behind bars. Program administrators in some states, such as Michigan and California, are already working to transition young people from detention facilities to residential placement within their communities. 

• The Philadelphia Inquirer editorial board called for vast reforms within Pennsylvania’s juvenile justice system, including expanded testing, transparent data, and a plan to release youths currently in the system. The editorial critically points out that juvenile justice is specifically designed not to be punitive. However, the social distancing necessary to prevent the spread of COVID-19 makes the actual goals of supervision, treatment, and rehabilitation nearly impossible within juvenile facilities. 

• Local governments continue to collect court debt, jeopardizing families’ already precarious financial stability during the economic downturn. Last month, Arnold Ventures signed onto a call for a national moratorium on juvenile fines and fees during the duration of the health and economic crisis. 

• Meanwhile, the Associated Press reported that coronavirus lockdown measures at juvenile facilities across the country are leading to riots, escape attempts, and an atmosphere of fear for children and their families. 

While children rights’ groups and criminal justice experts are calling for large-scale releases, massive action is difficult because often individuals have control over juvenile cases. Governors or county executives don’t have the power to let children go. Any release likely has to happen on a case-by-case basis. 

Related: We were thrilled to see a victory for #debtfreejustice yesterday. A Maryland bill to eliminate fees and fines for youth in the justice system will become law. Bonus: It’s retroactive so will eliminate previous debt.

Lawmakers will be returning to Washington to consider the next round of federal aid for the COVID pandemic, and it’s important they consider lessons learned from the last recession when distributing funds:

• Higher education has seen immediate fallout from the pandemic, and the CARES Act gave colleges and students much-needed support to deal with it, including $15 billion in funding to institutions and the suspension of most student loans. Any new funding should come with guardrails to ensure accountability and “mitigate the potential harms we see coming,” writes my colleague Kelly McManus, Director of Higher Education. She cites three ways it can do that.
   

• In the case of aid to state budgets, the foremost question is whether the federal government should provide any at all. My colleague Patrick Murphy, Vice President of Public Finance, says that answer is yes. State and local governments represent more than 10 percent of the U.S. GDP. “From that perspective, it becomes difficult to understand why the job held by the person who processes unemployment claims in a state agency is more or less valuable than the airline ticket agent.” As far as strings attached? He looks to the fiscal stimulus passed during the Great Recession as a starting point.

Nursing homes have become an epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak, as illustrated by the devastating news last month that 70 people were found dead of coronavirus in a New Jersey nursing home. There are many reasons for this outcome, but such facilities have been incentivized historically to provide bare minimum services for complex care patients, write my colleagues Arielle Mir, Vice President of Health Care, and Amy Abdnor, Health Care Manager.

What can be done: They argue that integrating Medicare and Medicaid services for the dual-eligible population “is one of the best ways to eliminate perverse incentive structures that cost the system more money and lead to worse outcomes for people.” And while integrating two behemoth systems sounds difficult, there is precedent for the concept.

Lastly, some links to take your mind off the world right now:

• This adorable 2-year-old cook who is winning fans on social media. Meet Chef Kobe. His mother’s patience must be infinite.
• Any zoo that is giving animal lovers a live-stream right now. Watch giant pandas at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo, soothing videos of jellyfish from a California aquarium, and even sloths. (My love of sloths can be exceeded only by my son’s, whose most prized possession is a picture of him and a sloth friend, and by Kristen Bell. Her sloth meltdown is legendary.) If you’re more of a dog person, tune into an elderly canine sanctuary in Tennessee.
• This year's Pulitzer Prize winners will give you plenty of new reading material if you missed their work the first time around.
• If you can’t get out of the house, you can still see spring unfold with virtual walks through the New York Botanical Garden.
• You might also feel less isolated after watching a day in the life of a lighthouse keeper, via National Geographic.
• The start of baseball season is upon us, at least in Korea and Taiwan.

Did someone forward you this newsletter? If you enjoyed what you read today, please sign up for our weekly missive here.

By Rhiannon Meyers Collette, Communications Manager
 

Even before COVID-19 and the economic crisis, Americans were worried about how to pay for their health care. Millions skip needed care every year because they can't afford it. Compounding that financial threat is a predatory practice known as surprise medical billing.

What’s happening: Surprise medical billing happens when patients get unexpected — and often very expensive — medical bills from hospitals and physicians who aren't in their insurance networks. Worse, these bills often come from providers patients couldn't choose — like emergency room doctors or anesthesiologists. Sometimes, these doctors are working inside hospitals and clinics that are actually in-network, but the providers themselves are out-of-network, a business strategy that has been used especially by private equity-backed providers to maximize profits.

Bottom line: Surprise medical billing was bad before 2020, but this year’s crises have only amplified the threat. In a new video, Arnold Ventures explores the problems posed by surprise medical billing and explains what needs to happen next to protect patients, employers and taxpayers from the impacts of this practice.

TL;DR: Congress has a bipartisan solution that it could pass now to end surprise medical billing once and for all.

Related: Debunking the myths in the surprise medical billing debate.
 

Related: New polling finds that half of all Americans are concerned that a major health event could lead to bankruptcy. 

Podcast: In a new episode, Tradeoffs tackles the scope of the surprise billing problem and who's to blame.

By Adrienne Faraci, Communications Manager

Josue Perez dreamed of starting his own spa business. After leaving high school he enrolled in Everest Institute, then a subsidiary of the since-shuttered for-profit higher education company Corinthian Colleges. The school promised ease of access with rolling admissions, and Perez powered through 11 months of classes for eight hours a day, five days a week — and even received honors. But when the time came for him to get his diploma, it never materialized. Scrambling for work and now with mounting debt, Perez’s dream is far away.

What’s happening: Latino students like Perez account for a fifth of today’s U.S. undergraduates, and their enrollment is increasing at a faster rate than their Black and white peers. But research shows many are struggling to finish their degrees — and their overrepresentation at predatory for-profit schools is a key reason. Latino students, according to a new study by UnidosUS, face a number of systemic challenges that make them uniquely vulnerable to the predatory recruitment tactics employed by for-profit colleges, where just one in five first-time, full-time undergrads get their degrees within six years. 

What can be done: UnidosUS is working to remove barriers to postsecondary access, completion, and success. Many of their initiatives center on strengthening accountability when it comes to for-profit institutions through updates to the Higher Education Act, which hasn’t been reauthorized in more than a decade. The group is also advocating for the Obama-era gainful employment rule to be reinstated and restoration of the 85/15 rule, which would limit the share of revenue that for-profit colleges receive from federal aid.

By Rhiannon Collette Meyers, Communications Manager

Here’s a startling fact: Drug prices in Australia are substantially less than what those same medications cost in the U.S. — so much that flying there for your medication would be cheaper in some cases, according to a new analysis from 46Brooklyn. Discounts down under are so deep that U.S. taxpayers would save billions of dollars every year if drugs were priced at Australia’s negotiated rates. The report comes amid renewed interest in a “most-favored nation" policy that calls for linking U.S. drug prices to international rates.

Why it matters: President Trump has said he signed an executive order tying Medicare Part B drug prices to the lower rates paid abroad, but the order has not been published or made public, and the details are thin. 46Brooklyn conducted a side-by-side comparison of the top 10 drugs in Medicare Part B that drive nearly half of the spending in that program and discovered that, if they were priced at Australian rates, U.S. taxpayers would save 68 percent, or about $10 billion per year. The savings are even more substantial for Medicare Part D, and the two combined are enough to give every public school teacher in America an $11,000 pay raise. (And they deserve it — especially now.) 

What’s next: The most-favored nation proposal has been maligned by the pharmaceutical industry. Will the administration stand up to pharma and publish its rule? How would it be implemented? What impact would it have on drug prices? These are questions that remain to be answered.

Related: Bloomberg reports that the pharma lobby is disputing President Trump’s claims that drug companies are negotiating on his “favored nations” executive order.

Related: “It should be offensive to all that President Trump and the drug industry are competing to offer the most disingenuous plan for making prescription meds more affordable,” writes columnist David Lazarus in the Los Angeles Times.

Related: Fact Check: The Trump Era has been a gold mine for drug companies.

“The most beautiful, gutting prose I’ve read in a long time,” said one friend. “Best read of the day,” said another. So I clicked. Facebook is good for something. 

“My beloved died in January. He was a foot taller than me and had large, beautiful dark eyes and dexterous, kind hands. He fixed me breakfast and pots of loose-leaf tea every morning. He cried at both of our children’s births, silently, tears glazing his face. Before I drove our children to school in the pale dawn light, he would put both hands on the top of his head and dance in the driveway to make the kids laugh. He was funny, quick-witted, and could inspire the kind of laughter that cramped my whole torso. Last fall, he decided it would be best for him and our family if he went back to school. His primary job in our household was to shore us up, to take care of the children, to be a househusband. He traveled with me often on business trips, carried our children in the back of lecture halls, watchful and quietly proud as I spoke to audiences, as I met readers and shook hands and signed books. He indulged my penchant for Christmas movies, for meandering trips through museums, even though he would have much preferred to be in a stadium somewhere, watching football. One of my favorite places in the world was beside him, under his warm arm, the color of deep, dark river water.

In early January, we became ill with what we thought was flu... Read “On Witness and Respair: A Personal Tragedy Followed by Pandemic” by Jesmyn Ward.

“After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News,” a 2020 HBO documentary that somehow feels both dated (a blow-by-blow of Jade Helm and Pizzagate, which seem like eons ago) and very relevant amid this week’s news of Russian disinformation campaigns on social media (and what I’ve seen on Facebook with my own eyes). While I thought I knew the extent of the deceptions retold in this film, it was still a mind-boggling journey into how quickly disinformation can be planted and spread in the new age of information warfare. One part that especially hit home for me was Alex Jones and his Infowars attempt to paint the Sandy Hook school massacre as a hoax — with agonizing impacts on the victims’ parents. I visited Newtown in 2012 as a journalist to help a sister paper cover the story, and the idea that someone would use that tragedy to further their wild political agenda is abhorrent. As with all of the events covered here, peddling fake news does real damage to real lives. I’m awaiting the inevitable sequel.

By Stuart Buck, Vice President of Research

This week, I'll just recommend a column by David Spiegelhalter, the respected statistician at Cambridge University. It’s a rallying cry for better statistics about the COVID-19 crisis, including from expert regulators who should know better than to proffer dishonest claims. (He says of a recent press conference by FDA Commissioner Hahn: "This is possibly the most statistically dim-witted utterance I have witnessed from any authority during this crisis, and he’s up against some pretty stiff competition.") Worth reading. 

We need to rethink probation and parole policies, which are responsible for driving nearly half of all people into state prisons — at a time when coronavirus cases are spiking across the country. Safely reducing the supervision population is good for public health and safety (Between 2007 and 2016, 37 states experienced declines in both supervision and crime rates.)

#1 Probation and parole funnel people into jails and prisons; we need to reverse this flow to reduce the number of people exposed to the virus in correctional facilities, which are hotbeds for the virus. The five largest known outbreaks occurring in jails or prisons and nationwide, the known infection rate for people behind bars is 2.5 times higher than the general population.

#2 Continued supervision unnecessarily risks the health of millions of people — those serving probation or parole terms, community corrections staff, their families, and communities. This is a population that disproportionately suffers from the types of pre-existing health conditions that increase fatality rates from COVID-19. 

Related: Vincent Schiraldi of the Columbia Justice Lab writes in USA Today about the experience of Rayshard Brooks, who was well aware of the flaws of probation before he was killed by police, and says his words should be heeded amid calls for reform. “Supervision systems can, and routinely do, incarcerate people for non-criminal acts, like using alcohol or having contact with a police officer. Brooks knew this and knew that his liberty and the life he had built was in jeopardy before a shot was fired.”
 

Related: Hear Brooks talk about the justice system's impact on his family, in his own words.

When COVID-19 hit, Christian Alvarez-Silva saw his vibrant college experience at The George Washington University dwindle to a stream of one-way virtual lectures while his on-campus support system crumbled. Add to that new stressors at home, and “there are a lot of distractions,” said Alvarez-Silva, 19. “It takes away from being able to focus on my studying.”

The problem: The shift to online learning has put students like Alvarez-Silva at greater risk of falling behind and, if patterns from previous recessions hold, primed the higher education landscape for a new crop of predatory for-profit institutions eager to put students in massive debt for a subpar online education. “Outcomes across the board for online education are worse than in-person,” says Kelly McManus, Director of Higher Education at Arnold Ventures. “But those outcomes and gaps for low-income students and students of color are even more pronounced.”

A spring 2020 survey revealed some worrying statistics about the realities of online learning: 

• 20 percent of students are using their mobile data plan to access courses

• 20 percent have problems connecting to live video lectures

• A stunning 40 percent reported that they predominantly use their smartphone to complete coursework. 

Bottom line: The pandemic has exacerbated inequities that already existed in higher education (like it has in almost every other system across America), and advocates worry that disadvantaged students will fall further behind. They’re looking to a range of policy interventions to deliver quality education and regulate for-profit entities.

By Rhiannon Meyers Collette, Communications Manager

It’s like they took the words right out of our mouths. In a new report, a key Congressional advisory committee on Medicaid policy stated that integrating care for individuals who qualify for both Medicare and Medicaid would help to better address the needs of vulnerable people and reduce healthcare spending.

It’s precisely what our Complex Care team has been saying all along.

Medicaid and Medicare are two big and very different government programs that were never designed to work together, which has led to fragmented care and misaligned incentives. Health outcomes for the dual-eligible population are among the worst in the nation — and despite comprising only a fraction of the Medicaid/Medicare demographic, they drive one-third of total spending.

The Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission (or MACPAC, in health wonk circles) says evidence shows integrated care and financing models work best — but only 1 out of every 10 dual-eligible beneficiaries is enrolled in one.

More can — and should — be done to boost enrollment in these models, MACPAC says. We couldn’t agree more.

Read the story >

Related: Dual-eligible beneficiaries are among the hardest hit demographic in the pandemic, according to new data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. These findings underscore the need to fix broken coverage incentives.

By Stuart Buck, Arnold Ventures Vice President of Research
 

In the past few months, COVID-19 research has been released at a breakneck pace: MedRxiv (the preprint server) has 4,602 papers mentioning "COVID" as of 6/25/2020, while PubMed has archived over 25,000 such papers. Unfortunately, as we've seen, quite a few of the high-profile findings covered in the news turn out to be shaky or even deserve retraction. 

Some observers have criticized the rise of preprints, assuming that their lack of peer review makes them more unreliable or even dangerous. But is that really so? Some of the most egregious COVID papers so far have appeared in the top 5 peer-reviewed medical journals. And perhaps that is no surprise. In a Wired column, psychology professor Simine Vazire makes the case that "journals don't even pretend to ensure the validity of scientific findings" by reexamining data or code; instead, peer reviewers are stuck judging the surface-level write-up, which is "like asking a mechanic to evaluate a car without looking under the hood."

Perhaps worse, journals often can be overly influenced by factors that don't actually bear on scientific quality — the anticipated publicity a study might gather, or how famous a scholar is. Vazire has an alarming story from her editor days at a top psychology journal: She chose to reject a submission from a famous psychologist because of "serious methodological flaws." But the famous scholar complained to the journal committee that had hired Vazire; the committee then warned her about stepping on toes.  

The jury is still out on how much value (if any) peer review adds once all the costs and benefits are taken into account. But that fact is itself surprising — with so little evidence that peer review actually works, why not experiment with new models of scientific publication?  

By Rhiannon Meyers Collette, Communications Manager

In his latest swipe at drug prices, President Trump signed and published an executive order directing HHS to develop rules that would tie Medicare drug prices to the lower prices paid by other developed nations. In an interesting twist, the proposal shares a provision included in House Democrats' signature drug pricing bill they passed last year, but that has not been considered by the Senate (and is not expected to be).

Why it matters: High drug prices are hurting Americans, and while President Trump has recently issued a number of executive orders to address this problem, don't expect this executive action to bring down drug costs any time soon, writes Kristi Martin, AV's VP of Drug Pricing. "We will have to wait for proposed rules to see if these announcements come to fruition or remain just another announcement from the Administration promising to lower drug prices," she writes. "The process is likely to take months, and court challenges should be expected."

What's next: President Trump's executive actions have centered on Medicare, but none of his actions have addressed the prices paid by commercial insurers and people without insurance. Comprehensive reform is needed to make drugs more affordable for patients, employers, and taxpayers.

Read the story >

Related: After receiving $1 billion in taxpayer money to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, AstraZeneca is now aggressively hiking prices on some of its biggest selling drugs, reports the Los Angeles Times — and it’s done so in “in a way that stood out even among other big drug companies.”

Related: Pharma is waging a stealth war on drug price watchdog ICER, reports Reuters.

By Adrienne Faraci, Communications Manager

For more than a decade, state and local governments have become addicted to heavy and increased use of fines and fees from the criminal justice system to help replenish their general revenue funds. Ramsey County, Minn., is among the latest to give up those funds, eliminating more than a dozen criminal justice fees, such as those tied to probation supervision, home electronic monitoring, and diabetes supplies while incarcerated.

The problem: Relying on revenue sources that aren’t paid by a majority of residents is putting an unfair burden on those that may be least able to afford it. "From a public finance perspective, it is a 'bad tax.' Fines and fees treat people unfairly," says Patrick Murphy, AV’s VP of Public Finance. And they create incentives to keep people involved in the criminal justice system. “It’s offensive that cities are nabbing money from people where they can, because they can, using the police power of the state,” says grantee Tracey Gordon from the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.  Fines and fees are also an inefficient, unreliable funding source: One New Mexico county pays $1.17 to collect every dollar it brings in, and many jurisdictions spend 40 cents of every dollar they bring in on collection costs, which often goes to private vendors. 

What’s next: Advocates and policy experts from both the criminal justice and public finance worlds are starting to work together on strategies to help jurisdictions limit or eliminate their reliance on harmful fines and fees. “If there’s a window, it’s going to be because policymakers care about the two big threads of economic crisis and overdue racial reckoning,” says Juliene James, AV’s Director of Criminal Justice.
 

Read the story >

Related: A federal appeals court has blocked hundreds of thousands of felons in Florida who still owe fines and fees from registering to vote, reports The Washington Post. “Nobody should ever be denied their constitutional rights because they can’t afford to pay fines and fees,” says Paul Smith of the Campaign Legal Center.

By Adrienne Faraci, Communications Manager

There are myriad ways this fall's move to online education is changing the sector. With many colleges and universities moving to remote learning, the drop-out rate for low-income and students of color is rising, largely due to a lack of adequate WiFi that makes it nearly impossible for students to keep up with their studies.

The problem: This is happening amid the backdrop of a rush by colleges and universities to grow and diversify their online enrollment numbers. Education experts at New America have been meeting with colleges, accreditors, and other experts to learn how COVID-19 has impacted higher education. Not surprisingly, issues with distance learning were a top priority. Clare McCann of New America raises a red flag in her tweet thread on the trend by many universities and colleges to partner with Online Program Management (OPM) companies in an effort to diversify their enrollment and revenue pools. But many of these partnerships leave the university with little to no direct authority over the curriculum or caliber of these online programs, and they can result in higher tuition costs and predatory marketing and recruiting practices.

What's at stake for students? Accountability, and most importantly, the quality of their education. 

Read the story >
 

Related: Students deceived by the now-defunct ITT Tech, a for-profit chain that led students into predatory loans, will now be eligible for private student loan forgiveness. 

Related: The Department of Education is appealing an order to cancel student loan debt of students like Josue Perez, who was scammed by a for-profit college. 

“Policymakers, having left America unprepared for what’s next, now face brutal choices about which communities to save — often at exorbitant costs — and which to sacrifice. Their decisions will almost inevitably make the nation more divided, with those worst off relegated to a nightmare future in which they are left to fend for themselves. Nor will these disruptions wait for the worst environmental changes to occur. The wave begins when individual perception of risk starts to shift, when the environmental threat reaches past the least fortunate and rattles the physical and financial security of broader, wealthier parts of the population. It begins when even places like California’s suburbs are no longer safe. It has already begun.” — Read “Climate Change Will Force a New American Migration” by  Abrahm Lustgarten in ProPublica.

“Policing the Police 2020,” a Frontline documentary hosted by the New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb, who returns to Newark, N.J. — a city he visited four years ago — to see how policing reforms instituted in the wake of a Department of Justice Settlement have played out. Newark’s reforms include tougher policies on body cameras, search and seizure, and use of force, as well as training on community engagement, bias, and alternative tools to help police better diffuse a tense situation. The film makes the case for looking at “defunding the police” in terms of a public health crisis: diverting those dollars to services that can prevent people from becoming victims of and perpetrators of violence. Newark has done this in part through street outreach teams whose mission is to reduce need for a police presence in the first place. It’s “an experiment that’s trying to move beyond policing and, at least in some measure, address problems that have plagued Black America for far too long.” The type of DOJ oversight that led to Newark’s reforms has weakened over presidential administrations, and the debate has now largely been framed as “a few bad apples” versus a deeper, more systemic problem. But a report on Newark done 50 years ago, in the wake of the 1967 riots sparked by police brutality, pointed to racial inequities caused by discriminatory policies in housing, education, and employment, and it posed a simple question: Do we have the will to act? As Cobb says, “Fifty years later, the question remains the same.”

(Viewer warning: This film opens with audio of George Floyd’s murder.)



Worth mentioning: I can’t open Facebook or talk to a friend or family member without hearing about Netflix’s new documentary-style PSA “The Social Dilemma.” It's a mind-bending look at how social media is, well, bending our minds. The conversations with top former executives of the companies this film targets (many of whom don’t let their kids go near a screen) are fascinating, but the interspersed dramatizations feel a little hokey. (It’s Pete Campbell from “Mad Men”! An apt casting choice, truth be told — he would have loved social media.) Yes, it will make you want to delete your apps and put your phone down, thanks to the alarm bells it rings so effectively. But does it oversimplify our scary slide into the age of disinformation? Some think so. 

By Rhiannon Meyers Collette, Communications Manager

The federal government has provided hundreds of billions of dollars to help hospitals weather the COVID-19 pandemic, but there’s been little transparency and accountability around this funding, despite the possible implications for our health care system, Medicare, and the deficit, write my health care colleagues Mark Miller and Erica Socker. Providers do need federal support right now, but not all hospitals and physicians are in the same financial boat. Some hospitals have enough cash reserves to continue paying their expenses for five months or more, without any additional revenue coming in. Unfortunately, the government’s approach to disbursing the relief funds has at times failed to account for these differences.

Why it matters: Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars are being spent with little transparency or oversight — and for the provider loans in particular, the potential impact on the Medicare program is worrisome. Pre-pandemic, the Medicare hospital insurance trust fund was careening toward insolvency by 2026 — the pandemic and economic crisis have hastened that timeline to as early as 2024. If providers are granted their requests for loan forgiveness, this could leave holes in the trust funds with negative consequences for the Medicare program and beneficiaries.

What’s next: “Congress should resist calls for loan forgiveness,” Mark and Erica write. If Congress does consider loan forgiveness or additional financial support, the aid should go to the subset of providers who need it most.

Read the story >

Related: In Health Affairs, Mark, Erica, and our colleague Alex Spratt explain the shortcomings in the distribution of the federal relief funding and sketch out a roadmap on where we should go from here.

Related: Speaking of hospital finances, my colleague Alex Spratt examines a new report from the RAND Corporation that, once again, reinforces the reason health care is expensive: because hospitals charge excessively high prices. Big hospital bills don’t just hurt those needing care; they drive up premiums for people with private insurance and increase the amount people pay out-of-pocket.

By Evan Mintz, Communications Manager

Early voting began in California on Monday, and while the presidential race may be a foregone conclusion in the solid-blue state, there are still heated contests further down the ballot. With Proposition 25, voters are facing perhaps the largest singular criminal justice reform effort ever put up for popular vote. If it passes, the referendum will eliminate the discriminatory and outdated system of cash bail. 

Why it matters: Legislators, judges, sheriffs, district attorneys and activists from across the political spectrum are leading a nationwide movement away from cash bail — and California voters will determine whether the momentum continues to build or comes to a sudden halt. Pretrial reforms in places like the state of New Jersey, Mecklenburg County, N.C., and Bernalillo County, N.M., stand as successful examples that should inspire Californians to vote yes on Prop. 25. 

What’s next: If it passes, 39 million Californians will no longer have to worry about being stuck behind bars simply because they can’t pay for bail. The for-profit cash bail industry, which opposes a litany of criminal justice reforms across the country, will be dealt a major blow. Meanwhile, criminal justice advocates are already working to further improve SB 10 — the bill underlying Prop. 25 — in the next legislative session. 

If it fails? The reform movement suffers a critical setback. 

By Adrienne Faraci, Communications Manager
 

The evidence was in on hydroxychloroquine: High-quality randomized controlled trials (RCTs) “indicate no therapeutic efficacy” against COVID-19, in the words of Dr. Anthony S. Fauci. However, that didn't stop policymakers from putting time and money behind hydroxychloroquine based on less rigorous studies.
 

Why it matters: This classic case of medical reversal illustrates the importance of high quality randomized control trials as applied to social policy, says Jon Baron, Arnold Ventures’ Vice President of Evidence-Based Policy. We have seen public officials and researchers routinely rely on less rigorous studies and their findings when championing and funding programs and policies, sometimes even in the face of contrary RCT evidence.
 

What’s next: We’ve been fighting major problems like educational failures, stagnant wages, poverty, crime, and opioid use disorder for years with unproven strategies — or even strategies already found to produce disappointing results. While RCTs are far less common in social policy than in medicine, they have shown the same ability to identify exceptional programs that produce important improvements in people’s lives. If we hope to make progress on the nation’s social problems, we must deploy RCTs on a much larger scale.
 

Few people are able to connect the injustices of our past with our current reckoning as effectively and devastatingly as Sebastian Johnson, AV’s Advocacy Chief of Staff. (Case in point: “Why Would They Kill Me for Something I Didn’t Do?” — our most-read story ever.) He does so again in a reflection on the fourth Square One roundtable, examining the insistence on “white innocence” implicit in our news cycle and laying bare the threads of our nation’s tattered social contract. 

“America is in a season of furious discontent. A cascading series of crises — economic, ecological, existential — threaten to overwhelm the nation’s ability to respond. These unprecedented challenges could not have come at a worse time, or under worse leadership. People are deeply divided, fearful, distrustful of our common institutions and disdainful of whatever ties still bind us. The future of our Republic is in peril, by no means assured; this may, in fact, be its moment of maximum danger.

The mass uprisings against police brutality, and for racial equality — the largest demonstrations of their kind in our nation’s history, spread across many countries, creeds and colors — have sparked hopes for a renewed Civil Rights movement. But another mobilization, happening concurrently, should give us pause. Armed white citizens storming state capitol buildings to protest pandemic-related restrictions. Armed white citizens convoying into cities across the country to confront protesters, sometimes violently. White citizens whipped into mass hysteria, deploying conspiracies about pedophilic cabals and Antifa arsonists to justify the increasingly authoritarian actions of the state.” Read “To Ourselves and Our Posterity: Reflections on the Fourth Square One Roundtable” by Sebastian Johnson.

This Nightline report on the wave of progressive prosecutors working to reform the criminal justice system from within. You’ll hear from Jamila Hodge of the Vera Institute for Justice, St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, and Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins, who says her run for office was prompted by the all-too familiar pattern of Black men losing their lives after a police interaction: “I just one day said I’m gonna stop yelling at my television, and I’m gonna change the system from the inside.” Their goals: Confront racial disparities, bring more transparency to prosecutors' offices, and end mass incarceration by addressing nonviolent, societal problems without using jail as a remedy. Naysayers are here as well, calling the approach “soft on crime.” Rollins’ response? “Change is never easy, but for the people that are not happy with what we’re doing, they are deeply invested in the system working exactly the way that it does.”

“The Redaction Project” from Art for Justice and the Civil Rights Corp. It’s a marriage of art and poetry by Titus Kaphar and Reginald Dwayne Betts that’s focused on abuses of the criminal justice system — specifically money bail and fines and fees. Alec Karakatsanis of Civil Rights Corp puts it plainy: “The existence of the criminal punishment bureaucracy and all of its horror is allowed to exist in part because so few people know about it.” This visual project aims to tell those stories using redacted legal documents from cases in Texas, Ferguson, Mo., and California to uplift the visages and voices of those caught in the cycle of debt and incarceration. “What we wanted to do was to take something that was essentially used to demean people, used to signal that a person was less, and we wanted to turn that whole thing into a way to say that a person was more," says Betts, an attorney and Civil Rights Corp Board Member. It’s a revolutionary way to start a conversation.



Also:

• The 13-minute guitar solo that made Eddie Van Halen a legend. You never saw the man without a smile on his face. He died this week at 65.
   
• Work, float, eat, dream: first-person accounts of life on the International Space Station. (Sounds like a great getaway right about now.)
   
• If you need a laugh, this musical TikTok collaboration about a fight in a grocery store is it. Please scroll to the soup can at least. (h/t Julie James) 
   
• I am very excited about the coming Selena series on Netflix. For the uninitiated, here's “Como La Flor,” from her iconic, record-smashing 1995 rodeo concert at Houston’s Astrodome. (It was a pleasure to see Kacey Musgraves recreate this at last year’s rodeo — really missing live music right now.)

By Evan Mintz, Communications Manager

While the presidency may dominate the election headlines, California is on the verge of approving perhaps the single largest criminal justice reform ever put up for a popular vote. We’re talking about Proposition 25.

What it does: If it passes, Prop. 25 will officially replace California’s cash bail with a risk-based system in order to shrink jail populations and better protect individual liberty. The referendum actually began as a 2018 state law, SB 10, but the bail bond industry worked to repeal the new law at the ballot box.  

Who’s for it: So far Prop. 25 has earned the support of major newspapers, including the San Francisco Chronicle and Orange County Register, and also Gov. Gavin Newsom. A bipartisan coalition is lining up behind the referendum because they recognize the core problem with cash bail — it punishes people simply for being poor while also freeing wealthy people who may pose a legitimate danger to the public or of skipping court. “Poverty is not a crime, but for people who are arrested and can’t afford bail, it is punished as if it were,” the Register said in its endorsement. 

Why it matters: The question isn’t just about criminal justice reform in California. A victory for Prop. 25 would be a sign that pretrial reform is a winning issue and potentially inspire similar efforts across the country. It would also undercut the cash bail industry, which funds opposition to criminal justice reform efforts nationwide. 

Read the story >

Related: A report from the ACLU of Ohio finds bail reform measures could save the state more than $200 million per year.

Related: The Wisconsin Law Journal details arguments for bail reform from AV grantee APPR versus the bail industry. “What [reform] is really about is releasing people, not detaining people,” says APPR’s Alison Shames.

Related: Read an excellent op-ed by a high school student in Los Angeles calling for the passage of Prop. 25. 

By Rhiannon Meyers Collette, Communications Manager

Through the manipulation of intellectual property laws and regulators, Big Pharma has been able to artificially sustain monopolies and keep drug prices high. Now, a new database exposes just how often this tactic — called "evergreening" — has been used by drug makers to block competition. Of the roughly 100 top-selling drugs, more than 70 percent have extended their protection from competition at least once (with more than half extending protection multiple times).

Why it matters: Evergreening is a known key driver of high drug prices, but this new comprehensive database — released by the Center for Innovation at the University of California Hastings College of Law (and supported by Arnold Ventures) — is the first of its kind to reveal the true scope of the practice. When companies engage in evergreening, they block generic competition, leaving consumers and taxpayers paying more for drugs. The database shows that this practice is common even among widely prescribed drugs, such as medicines for heartburn, HIV, and opioid addiction.

What's next: The database's lead creator, Professor Robin Feldman, said that it's clear from the data that pharma is weaponizing the U.S. patent and regulatory system; however, there are steps Congress can take to restore balance, including imposing restrictions on the number of patents drug manufacturers can defend in court, limiting the patentability of so-called secondary patents, and reforming the 180-day generic exclusivity.

Read the story >

Related: The latest Tradeoffs podcast breaks down where Trump and Biden stand on health policy, including Trump’s record on drug pricing.

By Evan Mintz, Communications Manager

When Congress took swift action this year to help business owners and employees survive the economic fallout from COVID-19, it left out hundreds of thousands of people simply because they had prior criminal records. 

Arnold Ventures’ VP of Criminal Justice Amy Solomon called on Congress to fix this mistake in an op-ed published this week in the Washington Examiner. “At a time when the nation is grappling with the reality of structural racism, this policy only works to perpetuate inequality.” 

A bipartisan group of senators has lined up behind a bill to open the Paycheck Protection Program to people who had been involved with the criminal justice system, and the House already passed similar language in its latest COVID relief package. While all action in the Senate is currently focused on the Supreme Court, there’s still hope — however fleeting — that Congress can do the right thing. 

“A Love Song for Latasha,” a brief but powerful tribute to the life of Latasha Harlins, who was 15 when she was shot and killed by convenience store owner Soon Ja Du as she tried to pay for a $1.79 bottle of orange juice. Du was later convicted of voluntary manslaughter and served no prison time, sparking outrage that laid the foundation for the 1992 Los Angeles riots. But this quiet film by director Sophia Nahli Allison is about Latasha’s life and the generational trauma that remains today, weaving together thoughtful narratives from her loved ones and ethereal imagery that evokes the time and space in which she existed. It leaves you wanting more of Latasha and her story — wanting desperately to know where her young life would have led. 

What we will be watching: Six pharmaceutical executives testifying next week before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform on pricing and competition in the drug industry. Drug pricing is unsustainable; we look forward to learning more about the Committee’s ongoing investigation.

Slate’s Amicus podcast, to learn about the other nine women in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Harvard Law class of ’59. Hear from them and feel like you’re in the room with RBG as she recalls memories of her trailblazing peers and what they were up against (including a cooking contest and that famous dinner, which is not identically retold). And this is just Part 1.

By Evan Mintz, Communications Manager

Actions of police violence, including the death of George Floyd under the knee of a Minnesota officer and the recent police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, continue to escalate the volume and intensity of the country’s debate over policing reform. However, a new poll by the Justice Action Network and #Cut50 shows this intensity doesn’t mean disagreement: An overwhelming majority of Americans want to see wide-ranging reforms to the criminal justice system.

What the polling shows: Conducted jointly by Democratic and Republican firms, the polling identified 11 specific reforms that had particularly strong bipartisan support — backed by at least 80 percent of Democrats, two-thirds of Independents, and two-thirds of Republicans —  including limits on unnecessary police force, more transparency in law enforcement, and more alternatives to arrest. Voters also support reforms aimed at reducing prison populations in the face of COVID-19 and rollbacks to qualified immunity. As the 2020 campaign heats up, criminal justice reform — including policing reforms — stands out one of the few remaining bipartisan issues. 

Also of note: Polling showed that these top reforms had support from policing professionals. More than 70 percent of voters in households with someone who worked in law enforcement supported each of the 11 policies. “You can obviously support law enforcement and also support reforms that make law enforcement and the communities they serve safer,” said Holly Harris, Executive Director of JAN. “You can be both of these things at once — a supporter of law enforcement and a supporter of policing reform.” 

Related: This Washington Post editorial calls for the compassionate release of people in U.S. prisons and jails, where coronavirus cases are exploding. “Even before the pandemic, the United States was shockingly out of sync with the rest of the world in the share of its population behind bars. No one is advocating the release of people who would endanger the community, but a large share of the inmate population does not meet that description.”

By Ashley Winstead, Director of Strategic Communications

Johnny Perez knows all too well that behind prison walls exists a culture of brutality that can erupt at the slightest provocation. Upon his arrival at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Upstate New York, Perez realized two things: He’d better get a knife like everyone else, and he may not make it home. After Perez was told by a correctional officer, “I can kill you in here and no one would know it,” he wrote to his mother, “Mom, if I don’t write you at least once a week or once a month, something happened.”

Bottom line: Despite such firsthand accounts from people incarcerated, as well as correctional staff — and what we see in the news when the violence escalates to such a fever pitch it attracts the media's attention — this culture has largely gone unstudied and unaddressed, at least systemically. Not only do stints in prison often inflict deep, and sometimes irreparable, physical and mental trauma, but allowing a culture of brutality to go largely unchecked undermines one of the key functions of correctional facilities: helping people leave violence behind and re-enter society capable of leading more productive and healthy lives.

What's being done: UC Irvine Professor Nancy Rodriguez will lead a three-year, seven-state study on prison violence that will — for the first time in U.S. history — dig into the data and set up a uniform system of documenting the sources of violence, how often it occurs, and the effects it has. The work is being funded with a $2.7 million grant from Arnold Ventures. “It’s a landmark study — an examination of an important dynamic where lives are at stake,” said Jeremy Travis, AV’s Executive Vice President of Criminal Justice. “We thought it was worth a big investment.”
 

Read the two-part series, where we hear from people who have lived in prison environments where “violence is the language of the land, and you need to learn to speak it quick,” as well as those trying to reform the system.
 

Part I: ‘I Can Kill You In Here and No One Would Know It’
 

Part II: How Can Prisons Eliminate Violence? One Researcher Is Determined to Find Out.

Epidemiologist Alex Kral from RTI International about his work combatting opioid use disorder. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to claim lives, so does the nation’s opioid epidemic. More than 40 states have reported increases in opioid-related mortality as well as ongoing concerns for those with a mental illness or substance use disorder. “The COVID-19 pandemic might not be increasing the number of overdoses, but it's increasing the number of overdoses that end in death,” says Kral. Just this past month, the American Medical Association called for increased research in evidence-based harm reduction services. Kral is researching new approaches that could help combat America's opioid overdose epidemic and save lives. 

Read the Q&A >

Related: Listen to “American Rehab,” an eight-episode podcast series from Reveal News that explores the dark history of an exploitive industry. Those looking for substance use disorder treatment were instead turned into an unpaid labor force. An eight-month program was really two years. No family contact. Odd punishments. And the pandemic has only added another dangerous layer to the scheme.

By Ashley Winstead, Director of Strategic Communications

Supporters of California’s YES on Proposition 25, which would replace California's predatory money bail system with a fairer system based on public safety. California Governor Gavin Newsom’s high-profile endorsement this week follows a wave of support from editorial boards up and down the state (see here, here, and here), giving bail reform advocates hope that Californians will make history Nov. 3 by voting to become the first state to abolish cash bail entirely.

Some background: The California Legislature in 2018 passed a law (SB 10) abolishing cash bail, instituting a presumption of release for people awaiting trial, and delineating certain cases where supervision or detention conditions could be imposed, based on public safety considerations. The bail industry promptly swung into action to undermine the bill, raising enough signatures to bring it to a referendum vote this November.

Bottom line: If Californians vote YES on Prop 25, they will reject a predatory cash bail system that determines release based on how much money people have in their pocketbook, rather than public safety. They will also help address a key driver of racial injustice in the criminal justice system — research shows money bail disproportionately harms people of color, particularly Black Americans, and can create a ripple effect of harmful consequences.

I’ve never recommended something in this space that I haven’t watched, but today I’m making an exception and sharing something I want to watch (but sadly, I don’t have Apple TV+). Boys State follows 1,100 boys who head to Austin, Texas, to participate in an annual leadership program sponsored by the American Legion. (It’s held in states across the country, and there is also a girls’ version.) Their mission is to form a mock government, and the filmmakers focus on four teens. Of them, René Otero might have the snappiest one-liners in the trailer: “I feel like everybody has a secret, underlying need for bipartisanship,” and “I think he’s a fantastic politician, but I don’t think a fantastic politician is a compliment either.” It was the winner of the U.S. Grand Jury Prize for Documentaries at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and has gotten overall favorable reviews. “It’s easy to be charmed by ‘Boys State,’ which is so good that you wish it were better,” the New York Times review opines. Variety calls it an “alternately encouraging and terrifying look at tomorrow’s politicians.” But not everyone is a fan. Still, this seems like a good way to end the two weeks of real-life political drama that’s filled our screens.



Also: “The Last Dance” is finally on Netflix. I know I’m late to the game here, and I’m definitely not a sports aficionado — I was once told in a performance review at my previous newspaper job that I needed to work on my sports knowledge — but I love a good documentary. And this is a great documentary. I found myself rewinding a lot to savor the best moments on the court, but it’s the off-court drama that's the most compelling.

Our Co-Founder and Co-Chair John Arnold in a wide-ranging, two-and-a-half hour discussion with Peter Attia on "The Drive" podcast. If you want to delve into the history and the why behind the Arnolds’ philanthropy, this is the podcast for you. Don’t have two hours to spare? Get a detailed breakdown of what he discusses (with timestamps) throughout the episode, including his early years trading baseball cards (geographic arbitrage), how he became a philanthropist, and a deep dive into AV's work in education, criminal justice, health care, climate change, and strategic philanthropy.

Also: The University of Arizona earlier this month announced a deal to acquire Ashford University, a fully online, for-profit institution enrolling roughly 35,000 students. Kelly McManus, AV's Director of Higher Education, sat down with Inside Higher Ed’s The Key Podcast to help make sense of what this "partnership" might mean for thousands of students, the controversy behind the deal, and the questions we should be asking to ensure students get a quality education.

By Evan Mintz, Communications Manager

Criminal justice reform was on the ballot this week. State and local referenda, elections for district attorneys and sheriffs, and a litany of down-ballot races all had outcomes that will shape the future of our nation’s courts, prisons, jails and law enforcement. 

What Happened: The defeat of California’s Prop. 25, which would have eliminated cash bail, was a blow to the reform movement, but other successes across the nation will work to expand oversight of policing, bolster alternatives to arrest, and bring a new vision into prosecutors’ offices. And Oregon’s decriminalization of opioids, cocaine, and other drugs shows that efforts to roll back the War on Drugs won’t end at marijuana. 
 

Why It Matters: Bipartisan support for criminal justice reform was brought into question as the “defund the police” movement and protests were used as attack lines by “tough on crime” politicians. Successes at the ballot box show that voters really do want to reimagine how the criminal justice system works. The failure of Prop. 25, which was opposed from the left and the right, also has advocates rethinking the best ways to hold together a broad coalition in support of reform.   

What’s Next: Voters did their part. Now lawmakers need to take this momentum into upcoming legislative sessions. Meanwhile, we’ll wait and see whether new DAs live up to their promises of change from within. 

This election cycle saw myriad down-ballot measures that are important to the health of our democracy. AV’s Vice President Sam Mar breaks down how they went:

Ranked-Choice Voting: First, an explanation: Ranked-choice voting is a system whereby voters literally rank their choices in order of preference: first, second, and third choice. If a candidate wins a majority of first-preference votes, they are the winner. If no candidate does, voting is counted by round, with lowest-ranked candidates eliminated in each round until only two candidates remain. Ranked-choice voting aims to increase electoral fairness by providing more choice for voters and ensuring majority support of candidates. Five cities had ranked-choice voting (RCV) on the ballot. All passed:

• Minnesota: The cities of Bloomington and Minnetonka have approved the use of ranked-choice voting for municipal elections. There’s potential for statewide reform in the future.

• Colorado: Boulder passed a measure for the use ranked-choice voting. It allows voters to elect the mayor directly rather than through the city council. The use of RCV reduces the likelihood of votes being divided among several popular but similar candidates.

• California: In Albany, Measure BB passed establishing ranked-choice voting for city council members and the Albany Unified School District Board. In Eureka, Measure C passed allowing ranked-choice voting for the office of mayor and council members.

• What Didn't Make It: Massachusetts did not pass Question 2, which would have implemented ranked-choice voting in primary and general elections for all Massachusetts statewide offices, state legislative offices, and federal congressional offices.

• What We're Still Watching: In Alaska, Ballot Measure 2 would replace closed partisan primaries with an open primary system and ranked-choice voting general election. We will not know the final results in Alaska until Nov. 10, when absentee and early votes are tabulated.

Redistricting Reform: This is a way to combat gerrymandering, where parties draw legislative districts that all but ensure their party remains in power. When lawmakers draw district lines to entrench one party’s political power, some votes end up counting more than others, skewing elections, often disenfranchising communities of color, and thwarting the will of voters. Anti-gerrymandering measures were on the ballot in Missouri and Virginia:

• Virginia: Amendment 1 passed, approving the 2020 Virginia Redistricting Commission Amendment, which would establish a political commission in order to draw the districts of the U.S House of Representatives seats in Virginia, as well as the districts of the Virginia House of Delegates and State Senate. The measure makes history by ending the state’s history of gerrymandering voting districts.

• Missouri: Amendment 3 was passed, rolling back reforms, preserving the status quo, and enabling the party in power to gerrymander voting districts.

By Evan Mintz, Communications Manager

In the 2020 election cycle, political tensions have reached an unprecedented level, and law enforcement agencies are finding themselves caught in the middle. That’s why the National Police Foundation is laying out best practices for local law enforcement during election season with the online resource kit “Policing In The Time Of Elections,” which was supported by AV. 

What It Is: The kit outlines recommended practices and helps ensure officers and communities know the role that police are expected and depended on to play in our democracy and includes proactive communications strategies and guidance for providing public safety responses.

Why It Matters: Political tensions have reached a level unprecedented in the modern era, and law enforcement agencies are caught in the middle. The civic health of our nation relies on law enforcement agencies supporting democratic values and systems. But it isn’t enough just to do the right thing — the public also has to perceive law enforcement as a neutral, nonpartisan actor. That’s not always easy when police unions and individual officers publicly endorse candidates. Law enforcement leaders need to communicate to their own staff and to their communities that law enforcement exists to defend the right to vote. 

As we’ve seen in real-time, states and counties in the U.S. have their own processes and laws around counting ballots. This Vox video does a good job of explaining how we vote, how news organizations make projections (sometimes erroneously), the way votes are certified, and why the process can take time, especially in a pandemic.


Also: This restored silent film of a snowball fight from 1897. Seems appropriate.

It felt like a good week to harken back to the somewhat musical origins of this section. If you’ve never heard of Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings, I’m here to tell you they are universally well-loved, and you should love them, too. Their music has a mesmerizing quality rooted in perspective: historical meets present day, and a guitar riff or lyric can lead you in a direction you weren't expecting. The duo had a tough year that led in many unexpected directions. In March, they almost lost all their recordings and equipment when a tornado ripped through their Tennessee home. Then came the pandemic. So they started making more music. “Boots No. 2: The Lost Songs,” salvaged from their flooded studio, is just the latest, writes Hanif Abdurraqib in this excellent New York Times Magazine profile. “With the country careering toward new depths of uncertainty, Welch and Rawlings have discovered a new emotional urgency. They are once again returning to what they know: songs about the slow, challenging, beautiful heat of living, about people having to make hard decisions on a path to goodness.” And about, as Abdurraqib says, redemption and optimism. My favorite quote of the interview comes at the end, as Welch considers her own optimism: “I don’t believe anyone is going to stop the spirit of all the humans out there.”

For the uninitiated, the classic track “Hard Times” is a good place to start: 

1. If schools can’t stay open, can they close in a way that protects students and taxpayers? “Congress must ensure measures of rigorous oversight of institutions' financial health,” writes Kelly McManus, AV’s Director of Higher Education. 
2. Can schools provide high-quality online education? With social distancing still the mantra in many areas, virtual education isn’t going anywhere soon, amplifying the need for a stronger regulatory structure, guidance and better oversight into distance learning. 
3. Can we prevent a rise in predatory institutions? If the 2008 recession was any indication, for-profit institutions will seek to exploit the weakened economy. Policymakers must step in, “hold the line on existing consumer protection standards” and maybe even create a secret shopper program to root out bad behavior. 

Raymond Rivera and Michael Tyson were both sent to Rikers for minor violations of their parole. And they were the first two people to die there after the coronavirus began spreading through the jail complex. It’s a tragedy that could have been averted with smarter policies around how we manage probation and parole in this country. “We’ve got to make sure we’re not risking someone’s life over rule-breaking that is minor and could be addressed in the community,” says my colleague Amy Solomon, Vice President of Criminal Justice. “This is a real wake-up call for state and local policymakers.”?

Community supervision, which was meant to be an alternative to incarceration, is now one of its biggest drivers, as people are sent behind bars for “technical” but not criminal reasons such as missed curfews, missed appointments, and failed drug tests.? This was a problem before COVID-19, but the implications of filling up prisons and jails with people who don’t need to be there have never been more dire. Now, a partnership between Arnold Ventures and Pew Charitable Trusts has produced a roadmap for state and local governments to improve probation and parole systems and decrease the number of those incarcerated for technical violations or placed under supervision altogether. (Today that number stands at 4.5 million, or 1 in 55 adults.)

The implications are two-fold: Keep more people out of prisons and jails and on the path to success, and save billions doing so for jurisdictions facing economic disaster. “COVID takes something that was always needed, a set of policy solutions, and makes it more urgent,” says Jake Horowitz, Director of Pew’s Public Safety Performance Project. “The promise of all this is that when jurisdictions get supervision right, there will be fewer people on it, those people will succeed more often, and fewer will end up back behind bars. That’s really the North Star that we set.”

Jurisdictions taking advantage of the expertise Policy Labs can provide in responding to the coronavirus pandemic. We know not all heroes wear capes. They wear scrubs, uniforms, or encouraging smiles sent over Zoom classroom chats. And some wear everyday clothes as they partner with cities, states, and counties to help fight COVID-19 with their most powerful weapon: data.

As my colleague Michelle Welch, Director of Public Finance, writes, policymakers across the country are teaming up with data experts and social scientists in Policy Labs — an initiative launched by Arnold Ventures to help local jurisdictions solve their most pressing social problems (learn more about them here) — and developing effective responses to this unprecedented situation:

• Harris County, Texas County Judge Lina Hidalgo has partnered with the Texas Policy Lab at Rice University to inform critical decisions such as the stay-at-home order and how to mitigate transmission in the county’s jails and juvenile detention facilities. 

• Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo assembled a team of epidemiologists, computer scientists, economists, statisticians, and data scientists from the Department of Health and The Policy Lab at Brown University to build a model the state can use to better understand and predict the virus’ path. 

• Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser is leaning on The Lab @ DC, an internal team of data scientists, social scientists, and design-thinkers, to support COVID response and plans for how to ReOpen DC. 

• Los Angeles is working with the California Policy Lab on outreach and services to the homeless and adapting the state’s Unemployment Insurance program to unparalleled demand (more than 10 million claims in the past two weeks). 
• Several jurisdictions are working with the Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT to learn how to help low-income workers find new jobs in a recession, ensure the welfare of children, and help small business owners.

Read the story >

The Opioid Epidemic was the public health crisis everyone was talking about until COVID-19 emerged. (U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams gave a nod to it when he used a “got naloxone?” T-shirt in a YouTube tutorial on homemade face masks.) Experts have long called for removing prior authorization requirements for medications to treat opioid use disorder because they can keep patients from getting access to the life-saving medications they need — a situation only compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, there’s more evidence that removing such barriers will help save lives and dollars.
 

A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association finds that requiring prior authorization for common medications such as buprenorphine and naloxone may be more harmful than helpful. Medicare prescription drug plans that eliminated prior authorization rules saw an increase in the use of those medications and fewer hospitalizations and emergency department visits for all medical conditions. (And anything that keeps people out of hospitals and ERs right now is a plus.)  

My colleague Asheley Van Ness, Director of Criminal Justice, argues in a new piece for our website that “street outreach workers” play a critical role in our communities during COVID-19 and thus should be added to the list of “essential workers” in any city — now and amid the economic fallout to follow. 

What they do: Street outreach workers provide not only a public service function, educating people on best practices in social distancing and handwashing, but also intervene in cycles of violence and keep residents safe. 

What’s next: The Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence has  recommended local governments leverage federal Victims of Crime Act dollars to support outreach workers’ violence intervention efforts and allow such workers to be exempt from shelter-in-place-orders and recognized as essential service providers — now and after the pandemic.

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The moving new Netflix documentary “Murder to Mercy: The Cyntoia Brown Story,” which follows Brown’s journey through the criminal justice system after her arrest at age 16 in the shooting death of Johnny M. Allen. Brown testified she was acting in self-defense but was sentenced to life in prison as a juvenile. Her case is a prime example of the system's punitive excess, and it became a global cause, with #FreeCyntoiaBrown trending on Twitter thanks to the help of Rihanna and Kim Kardashian West. Brown was finally freed last year after Tennessee’s governor granted her clemency and commuted her sentence. What struck me about the film was the distance and respect given to its subject. As the New York Times writes in its review, the film “is a quiet, elegant memoir that humanizes a systemic American challenge — and offers a narrative catharsis only possible with real-life mercy.”

Related: I was compelled recently to rewatch Ava DuVernay’s excellent 2016 documentary “13th.” This revelatory look at the intersection of race and the criminal justice system is always worth revisiting.

By Stuart Buck, Arnold Ventures Vice President of Research

The most questionable study of the week comes from a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled, “Do Lockdowns Save Many Lives? In Most Places, the Data Say No.” The main author is TJ Rodgers, founder of Cypress Semiconductor. Along with two other entrepreneurs (none of them researchers), he did a “simple one-variable correlation of deaths per million and days to shutdown,” meaning the number of days after one out of a million residents had died until a shutdown occurred.  The result: “The correlation coefficient was 5.5% — so low that the engineers I used to employ would have summarized it as ‘no correlation’ and moved on to find the real cause of the problem.”

Hmm. Just as correlation isn’t causation, the lack of correlation isn’t the lack of causation. After all, a governor of a densely-populated state with lots of international travel might correctly see a high risk of COVID-19 and decide to shut down earlier than a state that is mostly rural and sparsely populated. If the first state still sees a higher rate of COVID-19 deaths than the second state, that doesn’t mean that shutdowns don’t work — in both states, the death rate would likely have been even higher without a shutdown.

The real questions are how much shutdowns slow the transmission of COVID compared to not shutting down, and whether and how the shutdowns can be safely lifted. As to those questions, the Wall Street Journal article provides no information whatsoever. 

Being away from the office has increased my consumption of many things: wine, chili cheese Fritos, and memes, to name a few. That last one is thanks to a Slack channel created by a colleague and self-identified memelord, who shall remain anonymous but gets full credit for everything in this section. (And I will bow down because the memelord agrees gif is pronounced with a hard “g.”) Our unofficial King of Memes argues memes provide a necessary outlet for workers to address feelings of alienation and promote solidarity (see: Marx’s theory of labor alienation), that “dank memes” are the best (yes, I had to look that up, and you should, too), and that in lieu of exercise, a scroll through social media early in the day will get your heart rate up (that or fumbling with the technological challenges of homeschooling). As the memelord says, why vent to a coworker about your feelings of isolation and meaninglessness when it’s much easier to send them a gif of a bemused Doc Rivers staring forlornly into the middle distance? Some other choice advice:

• Posting your memes around 1 p.m. is ideal, data show (maybe this newsletter should try recalibrating send times?) 

• Memes shouldn’t punch down in weight — make sure the target of any joke is oneself or someone in a higher position.

• Do not post Facebook memes. They are not suitable for work.

• Each meme should be a lamp in the darkness, welcoming the weary salaryman or woman for a moment of respite.

Here’s hoping this week’s newsletter welcomed you for a dank moment of respite, as well as a link to my favorite meme of this whole experience (skip the ad). I know it’s hard to laugh right now, but it helps (a little).