Tied in a Single Garment of Destiny

By Thomas Hanna, communications manager

Over the past few years, parole grant rates as well as hearings across the country have plummeted due to pressure from politicians, the media, and other groups who often question the use and value of parole.

What’s happening: To address this situation, some parole board members and states are sharing best practices and advocating for more resources, training, and transparency to better communicate with stakeholders and advance evidence-based parole processes.

Why it matters: Parole is a critical component of the criminal justice system. It promotes and incentivizes second chances, positive behavior behind bars, and desistance from criminal activity. Paroling authorities should be empowered to make transparent, evidence-based decisions on parole free from political pressure.

What’s next: In addition to resources for training on how to use risk assessment tools and make better informed parole decisions, parole board members have seen the value of greater lines of communication with crime victims, law enforcement, and the families of incarcerated people regarding the parole process. Laws that provide and standardize methods for review of parole decisions may also be useful in insulating parole board members from undue political and social pressure.

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$6 Trillion

Roughly the size of the government’s credit portfolio at the peak of Covid-era financial relief programs

Government lending programs have grown to an unprecedented level in the 15 years since the 2008 financial crisis, AV Fellow Doug Criscitello writes in a new report, The Rise of U.S. Government Lending: Emergency Response or the New Normal? Policymakers have embraced credit programs for homeowners, students, and businesses across a spectrum of issues because they’re scored in the federal budget process as being cheaper than other forms of assistance. After all, most loans get repaid. However, that budgeting process may not fully consider the risks involved in lending, and reforms may be necessary if loan programs are going to be used to address new public policy challenges.

Read our report>

Criminal Justice

• The Marshall Project covers the ongoing corrections staffing crisis and how it negatively affects staff, incarcerated people, and community safety.
   
• A new brief from the Prison Policy Initiative shows that in 2022 prison and jail populations rose for the first time in almost ten years, and that the trend appears to have continued in 2023.
   
• In a New York Times op-ed, Michael Romano, Director of the Three Strikes Project at Stanford Law School, highlights President Biden's lack of significant action in combating over-incarceration and proposes solutions. (free link)
   
• Several media outlets, including the Huffington Post, the Mirror, the Crime Report, and the Houston Chronicle, cover a new report from the Wren Collective that investigates deficient legal representation in capital cases.
   
• ProPublica reports on how people held in Mississippi jails awaiting trial or transfer for mental health treatment face critical safety issues.

Health Care

• Two dozen organizations, including Arnold Ventures, signed an open letter calling upon Congress to act on site-neutral payment and billing transparency. The Alliance to Fair Health Pricing, an AV grantee, also sent an open letter to Senate leadership.
   
• An op-ed in the Daily Caller from Dr. Marion Mass looks at how healthcare consolidation is driving higher costs, often leaving patients underserved and overcharged.
   
• AV grantee Georgetown Center on Health Insurance Reforms’ new blog on the Lower Costs More Transparency Act and the provision calling for unique national provider identifiers (NPI). The blog also includes ways Congress could go a step beyond NPI provisions to facilitate future reforms to lower prices.
   
• A new paper from AV grantee The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity shows substantial savings to Texas state employees and taxpayers if commercial prices for hospital services and Medicare rates were aligned.
   
• A new blog from AV grantees Emily Stewart from Community Catalyst and Jim Baker from the Private Equity Stakeholder Project highlight the growing trend of private equity hospital acquisitions, calling on the Federal Trade Commission to aggressively evaluate these types of transactions and recommend other federal agencies to increase hospital ownership transparency.

Public Finance

• Timothy P. Carney outlines one path to modest expansion of the child tax credit in the Washington Examiner.
   
• Reason's Sofia Hamilton explains the mental, physical, and economic impacts of steep cliffs faced by welfare beneficiaries.
   
• AV grantee the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget released a report identifying the causes of surging federal debt since 2001.
   
• National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins released her annual report to Congress, outlining priorities for IRS improvement and modernization.

Higher Education

• There is a growing bipartisan consensus around the need to improve college accreditation, AV grantee Bob Shireman co-writes in an Inside Higher Ed op-ed.
   
• “Our accreditation system is not doing enough to ensure quality. Our state authorization system is not doing enough to oversee institutions. The changes are a really good starting point for getting us back on track on that,” said AV Director of Higher Education Clare McCann in a story on the Education Department’s efforts to ensure accreditors and states are holding colleges accountable for student outcomes, published in Inside Higher Ed.
   
• In USA Today, reporter Alia Wong writes about the Third Way’s survey of graduate students, which found that 30% of graduates had not been consistently employed in the field they students, and 35% earn less than they expected.

Democracy

• The national Republican Party should embrace ranked-choice voting for its primary, write the former chairs of the Utah and Michigan GOP in a RealClearPolitics op-ed.
   
• Louisiana’s Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser, a Republican, defends the state’s unique open primary system as a way to help discourage political extremism, Politico reports.

On Tuesday, January 16, 2024, from 12 to 1:30 p.m. EST, the Niskanen Center will host the first in a series of criminal justice-focused lunch conversations. At this event, Kevin Ring, vice president of criminal justice advocacy at Arnold Ventures, will moderate a discussion with Greg Berman, distinguished fellow of practice at the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and coeditor of Vital City, and Aubrey Fox, executive director of the New York City Criminal Justice Agency. They cowrote Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age. RSVP here.

Based on an exhibition by the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Smithsonian put together a traveling exhibition entitled "Solidarity Now! The 1968 Poor People's Campaign," and it's fantastic. Go see it if you haven't already.

The Poor People's Campaign, initially led by Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, aimed to make poverty a human rights issue. After King's assassination in April 1968, the movement continued that spring and summer with the construction and inhabitation of Resurrection City, built on the National Mall. The campaign's presence on the Mall became a six-week, 3,000-person, live-in, mud-soaked, deeply moving, peaceful protest.

Photographer Jill Freedman's photos of Resurrection City, first published in Life Magazine on June 26, 1968, give an intimate view inside the protest. Professor Lenneal Henderson describes in Smithsonian Magazine his time living in Resurrection City.

In this short video, NPR profiles the late documentary photographer Roland Freeman, who captured on film the Mule Train, whereby protesters traveled from Marks, Mississippi, to the National Mall by mule to participate in the Poor People's Campaign.

The Criminal Justice team is supporting a new Social Science Research Council fellowship program. This program will provide generous and unrestricted support to postdoctoral fellows working to innovate and evaluate more effective and equitable criminal justice policy solutions. The application deadline is January 15, 2024.

The Higher Education and Evidence-Based Policy teams have created a request for proposals for rigorous impact evaluations of programs and practices (“interventions”) to promote college success in the United States.

The Criminal Justice team has released a new request for proposals (RFP) titled “Causal Research on Community Safety and the Criminal Justice System.” The RFP seeks research proposals across all issues related to the criminal justice system and will remain open.

The Evidence-Based Policy team invites grant applications to conduct randomized controlled trials of social programs in any area of U.S. policy. Details are here.

View our RFPs here>