Simple on the Surface

Illinois is gearing up to eliminate cash bail through a new law that takes effect in January 2023. The Pretrial Fairness Act, which passed last year, contains a range of provisions to ensure that people are not held pretrial unnecessarily.
 

What’s Happening: For decades, Illinois has required people to pay a cash bond in order to secure their release while they await trial. Now counties, judges, state’s attorneys, reformers, and victim advocates are working together to pilot and implement a system that limits pretrial incarceration to people at high risk of flight or causing harm, requires police to give tickets for some low-level offenses instead of making arrests, and eliminates incarceration for misdemeanor arrests, among other measures.
 

Why it Matters: The cash bail system detains thousands of people convicted of no crime simply because they lack money to pay for their release, resulting in wealth-based detention that disproportionately affects poor people of color. The new system will create greater equity in pretrial detention while preserving measures to promote public safety.
 

What’s Next: Despite pushback from critics, who falsely claim the bill will cause crime spikes, Illinois lawmakers and advocates are holding the line. The new system will be unveiled early next year.

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AV Fellow Clare McCann is no stranger to thorny policy about American schools. After stints at the Education Department and New America, she recently joined Arnold Ventures to think about how higher ed can better serve students, families, and the public. Whether at work, curled up with a book in Maine, or en route to an international zoo, McCann’s policy mind keeps moving; she is a person whose goals are deeply rooted in a commitment to broadening opportunities for all students.
 

What’s Happening: The Biden administration canceled up to $20,000 of student debt, helping many students, but persistent problems still plague American higher ed. We spoke to McCann about laws and regulations that could address the underlying issues.
 

Why it Matters: Students are being asked to take on more debt than they can afford to repay. Grad school programs often cost more than the earnings they can realistically yield, and many for-profit schools leave students with burdensome loan debt for poor-performing certificate programs. “Too many people are not getting value out of their higher education,” McCann says. Congress needs to hold institutions accountable to provide a quality education.
 

What’s Next: Policymakers on both sides of the aisle are coming forward with proposals to reform higher education, suggesting progress may soon follow.

What's happening: Key provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act are moving forward, including a reform that requires manufacturers to pay rebates to Medicare Part D when drug prices exceed inflation. The Part D program provides outpatient prescription drugs to older adults and people with disabilities, covering nearly 50 million Medicare beneficiaries. Because the inflation penalty will slow growth of list prices over time, many patients in Part D will, over time, see their out-of-pocket costs reduced.

Why it matters: Efforts to lower prescription drug prices have met fierce opposition from the pharmaceutical industry for decades. What's changed? Research played a major role in getting a slate of drug pricing reforms over finish line, including reforms to lower prescription drug prices by allowing Medicare to negotiate the prices of some of its most expensive medications. Mark E. Miller, the executive vice president of health care for Arnold Ventures, dives deep in a recent podcast with Relentless Health Value.

What's next: Arnold Ventures is committed to lowering drug prices to improve patient access to affordable medicines by addressing patent abuses and anticompetitive behaviors, market distortions, and the high and unjustified launch prices of prescription drugs. For more, read AV's Drug Pricing Fact Sheet and our issue brief.

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Criminal Justice
 

• Keri Blakinger's harrowing essay on the "human rights crisis" at the overcrowded Harris County jail all but demands that the public and policymakers start to pay attention.

  
  Related: Two die at Harris County jail as critics blame unsafe conditions for the highest death toll in years, the Houston Chronicle reports.

• The Chronicle of Philanthropy quotes AV's Director of Criminal Justice Asheley Van Ness in its story about non-profits and charities supporting gun policy research and advocacy.
   
• Even after the Bruen decision, there is still room for research to inform court decisions about gun policy, write Rosanna Smart, an economist at RAND Corporation, Darrell A.H. Miller, a professor of law at Duke University, and Andrew R. Morral, director of RAND's Gun Policy in America initiative, in a Newsweek op-ed.
   

• In a Fox News op-ed, former U.S. Rep. Doug Collins explains how conservatives can and should lead on bail reform.
   

• To prevent the spread of COVID-19, the Justice Department released more than 11,000 people from federal prison to home confinement during the pandemic. Only 17 committed new offenses. Only one was violent. The lesson? We should be releasing more people from prison, writes Molly Gill, vice president of policy for Families Against Mandatory Minimums, in the Washington Post.
   

Charitable Giving Reform

• How the wealthy use a loophole to reap tax breaks — and delay giving away charitable dollars, via Bloomberg.

Health Care
 

• If health care affordability in the U.S. were a student, it would be flunking, new polling from Gallup and West Health suggests. Seventy-five percent of Americans graded affordability as a D or F; 1 in 3 Americans are concerned about their ability to pay for health care in the next year; half of Americans worry about affording care as they age; and 2 in 3 are concerned Medicare won’t exist when they need it.
   

• Massachusetts has told Mass General Brigham —  one of the state’s dominant health systems with the highest prices — to get its spending in line. In the latest turn of events, regulators overseeing the state's efforts to rein in health care costs approved the system’s plan to slash $128 million in annual costs — including $90 million annually in price reductions.

  Related: Massachusetts holding a major health system accountable for its role driving state health care spending higher is a first-of-its kind move. More states are following suit.

   

• IHEP’s latest case study, Student Success is in the DNA of Northern Arizona University, summarizes key strategies NAU is leveraging to champion the Equitable Value Movement and improve outcomes for students.
   
• The Washington Post reports on the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty’s claims that President Biden’s student loan cancellation plan  violates federal law by attempting to reduce the racial wealth gap and aid Black borrowers, which the group considers an “improper racial motive.”
   
• Higher Ed Dive gives a state-by-state breakdown and analysis of where student borrowers live who will receive forgiveness.
   
• In the Chicago Sun-Times, Senator Dick Durbin points out that students defrauded by for-profit colleges, often low-income and/or first generation students, will be some of the biggest beneficiaries of the student loan forgiveness program.

• Biden speaks out against the University of Idaho’s guidance against distributing contraception on campus, in The Hill.
   
• Fortune reports on the FDA’s consideration of the first over-the-counter birth control pill in the U.S.

• The New York Times hails Year Up among top evidence-based workforce training programs as a model for other programs to follow. A 2020 study by Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard University, showed that programs such as Year Up, Per Scholas, and Project Quest made lasting wage gains of 11% to 40%. “There are very valuable lessons here for the government to improve its programs,” Katz said. (Free link)

  
  Related: Unique Workforce Development Program Shows Promise in Reducing Inequality and Boosting Economic Growth 
   

• In the latest example of impactful journalism produced by nonprofit news outlets supported by AV: After the Hechinger Report revealed the practice of transcript withholding by colleges, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ruled that colleges cannot withhold transcripts to force students to repay the loans they provided directly to students.

"The Box: Minds Lost in Solitary Confinement," is an intense, immersive view into the psychologically damaging experience of solitary confinement, told through the stories of three survivors. The camera is never far from its subject in this short documentary by James Burns and Shal Ngo — forcing the viewer into the same oppressive, cramped, and suffocating spaces as those locked in solitude. It is unsettling and effective.
 

Burns is also one of the film’s narrators. He was charged as an adult at age 15 and sentenced to 12 years in prison: "My story isn't unique. There's many kids growing up in environments that aren't safe, that aren't conducive to success, and they fall into the narrative that society has given to them. And that's the way I saw myself."

Burns, along with Five Mualimm-ak and Pamela Winn, describe the unpredictable violence of prison life, and the minor infractions that can land someone in solitary: having too many pencils or too much toilet paper, talking back to officers, talking too much at all. Once there, in a cell the size of a parking space, all sense of time and hope of human connection is lost. “Every mistake that you make is gonna get you more time in the box. And the more time you get in the box, the more mistakes you're gonna make.”
 

Burns spent 11 consecutive months in solitary confinement — at age 16.

Related: A staggering number of people are held in isolation for months, years, even decades, and many will leave broken in mind and body. Some states are realizing they’ve gone too far.

• AV's Evan Mintz joined Lisa Gray on City Cast Houston to discuss Houston's preparedness for climate change and the economic turmoil of the energy transition.

   

• On Tuesday, October 18, 2022, at 2 p.m. ET, Arnold Ventures’ Higher Education and Evidence-Based Policy initiatives will host a 60-minute Zoom webinar for prospective applicants seeking grant funding through our joint request for proposals (RFP): rigorous impact evaluations of programs and practices (“interventions”) to promote college success in the United States. Register here.
   
• On Wednesday, Oct. 19, at 1 p.m. PT / 4 p.m. ET, join a webinar on charitable giving reform: "Where Has All the Money Gone? Why Food Banks and other Basic Needs Nonprofits Should Support Philanthropic Policy Change" will explore why more than a trillion dollars in charitable “gifts” are locked up in private foundations and donor-advised funds (DAFs), rather than being used to support our nation’s charities. Speakers include Susannah Morgan of Oregon Food Bank; Ray Madoff of Boston College Law School Forum on Philanthropy and the Public Good; Vu Le of Nonprofit AF; and Chuck Collins of Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies. Register here.