Guns and Children

With the mid-term elections in the rearview mirror, 2023 is shaping up to be a pivotal year in policy for criminal justice, higher education, health care, and more. In a series of stories rolling out in the coming weeks, we'll be looking ahead at the reform landscape and grantees to watch in the new year. Read below the first in our series:

5 Things to Watch in Criminal Justice in 2023

Good news: There is already evidence that media and political misinformation around crime has started to abate. We can also look forward to efforts to pass bipartisan federal legislation that will create a more fair justice system; a national campaign to end unjust fines and fees; the potential end of cash bail in Illinois; evidence-based strategies to curb violence; and reforms to state drug laws. Read the story >

3 Things to Watch in Higher Education, Contraceptives, and Evidence-Based Policy in 2023

The FDA is on track to approve the pill for over-the-counter use; the U.S. Department of Education is forging ahead with much-needed regulations to help students and taxpayers; and investments continue in determining what higher education and workforce training programs deserve more dollars. Read the story >

Grantees to Watch in Higher Education, Evidence-Based Policy, and Contraceptive Choice and Access

Our stellar grantees are working at the heart of their fields to maximize opportunity and minimize injustice by protecting students from fraudulent institutions; designing poverty reduction programs backed by research; and helping more people access birth control. Read the story >

Related:
5 Big Wins for Criminal Justice in 2022
6 Big Wins Elsewhere in 2022 
22 Stories of Change from 2022

By Juliana Keeping, communications manager

A new analysis from Reuters finds the median launch price of a drug in 2022 exceeded $200,000. "I don't see anything changing that trend," says Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

What's Happening: The latter half of 2022 brought the approval of the most expensive drug in history: $3.5 million, for a one-time gene therapy to treat hemophilia B. And just last week, the FDA approved an Alzheimer’s drug with a $26,500 price tag. Our health care system can't afford these prices.

Mark E. Miller, executive vice president of health care for Arnold Ventures, tells Axios: "These kinds of drugs, like cell and gene therapies, or very expensive drugs that might cure sickle cell, or very expensive drugs that could help with Alzheimer's, may force us as a country to rethink whether we pay for all drugs in the same way.”

Why it Matters: The launch prices of prescription drugs are not addressed in the drug pricing provisions that passed in 2022 as part of the Inflation Reduction Act.

What is addressed? The new law will give the Medicare program negotiating power for some of the country’s most expensive medications that have been on the market for some time; penalize drug companies that raise prices for Medicare above the rate of inflation; and cap out-of-pocket prescription drug expenses for certain Medicare beneficiaries at $2,000 a year, beginning in 2025. (Today, cancer patients who take one of the most common 10 anticancer drugs in Medicare Part D, and who do not qualify for low-income subsidies, pay between $10,000 and $15,000 out-of-pocket for one year’s worth of medicine).

What’s Next: The U.S. will announce a list of 10 prescription drugs up for Medicare negotiation on Sept. 1, and the prices a year later. It's all part of the rollout of the drug pricing reforms in the Inflation Reduction Act. There is still plenty of hard work ahead when it comes to lowering prescription drug prices, like reforming a patent system that rewards the drug industry’s clever use of loopholes at the expense of families, businesses, and taxpayers. As we move forward in the prescription drug debate, sky-high drug prices and policies that balance affordability and access should remain top-of-mind for policymakers both in the states and federally. 

Related: Read AV’s Drug Pricing Fact Sheet.

By Thomas Hanna, communications manager

A new center at the University of Maryland is combining research and real-world know-how to point policymakers toward strategies that work to curb the violence that is plaguing so many communities.

What’s Happening: Thomas Abt, a professor of criminology at the University of Maryland, recently launched the Center for the Study and Practice of Violence Reduction, also known as the Violence Reduction Center (VRC). The VRC will gather and share the most rigorous evidence on effective community violence interventions with policymakers and the public, free of charge. It will also help city leaders choose and apply the right combination of strategies to reduce violence locally, working collaboratively with both government officials and community representatives to improve public safety for the long term. “We’re here to save lives by stopping violence,” Abt says.

Why it Matters: Cities across the U.S. continue to struggle with tragic increases in community violence. Homicides jumped by 30% in 2020 and 4% in 2021, disproportionately affecting communities of color. But for local leaders, the solution is often unclear — and there’s little rigorous, publicly available information to help the stop the violence.

What’s Next: The VRC is beginning to work with a small number of cities. Staff will collaborate intensively with senior city leadership, social workers, and community representatives, helping them plan what anti-violence strategies to use and assisting as cities begin implementation.
 

Philadelphia's recently re-elected District Attorney Larry Krasner has been under attack from police unions and politicians critical of his efforts to enact a series of criminal justice reforms in the city. In a new story, Matt Keyser
of the National Partnership for Pretrial Justice discusses how these attacks have been underpinned by research published in a peer-reviewed journal from Thomas Hogan, a self-proclaimed Krasner critic, supposedly linking Krasner's "de-prosecution" to increased homicides. However, Hogan's findings are described as biased and riddled with errors by other independent researchers, who are calling for the journal to issue a correction.

Read the story >

Criminal Justice

• Most people in Washington who are assessed legal fines and fees meet the state's indigency standard, a new report from the Vera Institute of Justice finds. Moreover, this debt has serious negative consequences on people's lives, and the majority is not repaid.
   
• The Washington Post Editorial Board calls for Congress (through grant-making authorities) and state governments to intervene and require police departments to report crime and police violence data in a timely manner to the FBI.
   
• The Kansas Leadership Center discusses the National Decertification Index for tracking police who are decertified for illegal and unethical behavior — and how only 59 of the state’s 371 agencies use it.
   
• With the presidential term at its halfway mark, The Brennan Center offers mixed reviews on the Biden administration's criminal justice reform agenda.
   
• Reducing long sentences in Illinois would significantly reduce the number of people incarcerated in the state without imperiling community safety, finds a new report commissioned by the Council on Criminal Justice's (CCJ) Task Force on Long Sentences.

Health Care

• Catalyst for Payment Reform lays out different “policy menus” for states to address anti-competitive health care markets and excessively high prices charged to privately insured patients.
   
• California Attorney General Rob Bonta has sued drug companies and supply chain middlemen called pharmacy benefit managers over sky-high insulin prices. Read more from Kaiser Health News.

Higher Education

• Inside Higher Ed reports on the Education Department's recently released regulatory agenda, which will include another negotiated rulemaking process in April 2023. It will examine accreditation, state authorization, distance learning, and student loan deferments and forbearance.
   
• Third Way reports on key findings from an online survey of 1,400 registered Republican voters nationwide conducted by the Global Strategy Group to better understand their viewpoints on higher education reform. The team found that Republican voters want to stop taxpayer dollars from going to schools that provide no return on investment, accept the need for government intervention to hold predatory schools accountable, and see transparency as a key vehicle to hold schools and program accountable.

Contraceptive Choice and Access

• The Center for American Progress issues the first report in a series on contraceptive access and use on the state level, discussing one-year dispensing and extended supply policies.

Organ Donation

• Our nation's broken organ donation system leads to 33 unnecessary deaths a day — disproportionately people of color — and reforming it will save lives, argue Dr. Ebony Hilton and attorney Bakari Sellers, whose infant daughter received a lifesaving liver transplant, in this Grio op-ed.

• Krish Gundu of the Texas Jail Project talks to Democracy Now! about the spike in deaths at the Harris County jail.
   
• AV grantee the Louisiana Parole Project highlights the success of sentence commutations in Louisiana in The Power of Commutations.
   
• The AV-supported Second Look Project profiles clients who have had a Second Look Project attorney help them reduce their prison sentences and support their re-entry into society. 
   
• The AV-supported Promise of Justice Initiative launched its End Plantation Prisons Project, documenting the reality of thousands of people forced into invisible incarcerated labor in Louisiana.

• Coretta Scott and Martin Luther King Jr. met as college students and dreamed of a life of activism and family. The documentary "Legacy of Love," streaming on PBS, details their story, and a new monument in Boston, "Embrace," pays homage to the pair.
   
• For those with access to virtual reality, a new project from TIME Studios allows users to explore the relevance and power of King’s “Dream” speech 60 years later. Learn more about the project.
   
• Mark Monday's Martin Luther King Jr. Day by reading or listening to King's "I Have a Dream" speech in its entirety here.