We Believe in Second Chances

By Stephanie Getman, director and managing editor

My mother, who is a Medicare beneficiary, was recently prescribed a drug by her doctor that gave her sticker shock when she got to the pharmacy counter: The co-pay for a two-week supply was almost $200. She declined, gave it some thought, and went back to her health provider seeking a cheaper, generic alternative. She was told this high-priced drug was the generic. After pushing further, her health provider offered a less-than-ideal solution: Skip this medication, and buy a popular over-the-counter medicine for $7 a box. In the end, my mother went several days without the medication she needed as she tried to negotiate her way to a more affordable alternative. 

What’s Happening: I tell this story because it is a familiar one to so many Americans. This week, President Biden released a budget proposal that while reaffirming his commitment to lowering prescription drug prices, offered only the promise of more work ahead. That’s because Biden alone cannot enact the kind of reforms that would have saved my mother from heartburn at the pharmacy counter — only Congress can. There are proposals on the table that would lower drug prices by allowing Medicare to negotiate the prices of prescription drugs, penalize drug makers for raising prices faster than inflation, and cap out-of-pocket expenses in Medicare Part D to ensure seniors can afford life-saving medications without going bankrupt. And a recent U.S. Senate Finance committee hearing showed the need for action is urgent. 

What Is in the President’s Budget: Biden’s proposed $5.8 trillion budget plan includes funds to reduce violence and accelerate criminal justice reforms, investments in evidence-based higher education programs, and a boost for climate change and clean energy needs. It also suggests a concerning delay in the reform of failing organ procurement organizations. Read more about what’s included here.

By Evan Mintz, communications manager
 

Last year, Arnold Ventures partnered with the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy (CEBCP) of George Mason University to conduct a review on the current state of empirical knowledge around police clearance rates and to identify evidence gaps. These findings provided the framework for a follow-up workshop where researchers, academics and police practitioners — including CEBCP Director Cynthia Lum, Philadelphia Police Department Chief Inspector Frank Vanore, and University of Maryland criminology professor Rod Brunson — convened to discuss and better understand the factors that help law enforcement solve crimes.

What's Happening: Solving homicides is one of the more important duties for local law enforcement, yet clearance rates for these types of cases remain persistently low in many U.S cities. In an interview with Arnold Ventures, Lum, Vanore, and Brunson pointed to how a breakdown in trust between police and the communities they're supposed to protect and serve has raised barriers to solving cases.

"There’s frustration from detectives who can't get the information necessary to help solve cases," said Brunson. "And there’s frustration from community members who see known shooters and violent crime offenders walking around the neighborhood after they’ve committed crimes."

Why It Matters: As the national debate over criminal justice police becomes increasingly partisan, the actual role of police in reducing crime has been oversimplified and — all too often — overlooked. Closing cases is key to improving effective policing and keeping communities safe. Assembling the existing research can help guide police practices while also identifying where more research is needed.
 

"I think the bottom line is that the police can be effective in investigating criminal activity and, in many cases, linking that investigative activity to deterrence and prevention efforts," said Lum. "We now have a much better understanding about how investigators, detectives, and agencies can implement certain strategies that can be effective in improving clearance rates and solving crime."

What's Next: Technological advances, including home cameras, cell phones, and social media, provide new avenues for police to collect evidence. But more research is still needed on the best way to utilize those innovations, while also building on traditional policing relationships at the neighborhood level.
 

By Juliana Keeping, communications manager

“As Wall Street firms take over more nursing homes, quality in those homes has gone down and costs have gone up. That ends on my watch,” President Biden said in his March 1 State of the Union address. Improving nursing home quality has never been more important. More than one in five people who have died from COVID-19 were living or working in a nursing home. The sheer volume of lives lost — 200,000 — has brought renewed scrutiny from policymakers of dangerous conditions in nursing homes. 

What’s Happening: More evidence is needed to drive policy changes that would protect nursing home residents from private equity business practices that put the bottom line ahead of the health and safety of people who need long-term care in nursing facilities.
 

“While policies to expand care for older adults and people with disabilities at home and in the community have received renewed focus, the need for institutional settings for individuals who require intensive supports will always exist,” says AV’s Arielle Mir, vice president for health care. “Greater transparency into the costs, quality, and management structure of these facilities is essential to ensuring that care is delivered safely, equitably, and efficiently.”

We’re wrapping up our series for Women's History Month with an incredible group of women who are maximizing opportunity and minimizing injustice in health care and criminal justice.
 

Leena Sharma: Empowering
People Who Are Dual-Eligible

Sharma works to improve policies that impact people who are dually eligible
for Medicare and Medicaid and must navigate two programs with different rules that too often result in fragmented and uncoordinated care, with a special focus on Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities.

“It’s my deep belief that transformational, systemic change is possible,” Sharma said. “And that our voices matter when it comes to policy change. I think stories matter, narrative matters, and that makes change. And I have two young daughters and I want them to grow up as empowered women of color who understand the value of their voice, and really use it to make change.”

Read the story >

Andrea Armstrong: Fighting
to Expose Death Behind Bars

After a career in international human rights, Armstrong became interested in the conditions people face behind bars here in the U.S.  The Loyola University New Orleans law professor channeled this interest into documenting the deaths of people who have died in prisons and jails through the Deaths Behind Bars in Louisiana project and its website, Incarceration Transparency.
The project, which collects and publishes deaths by facility and cause, as well as memorials for people who died in the New Orleans jail, is the first of its kind for the state and shines a light on an otherwise black box of incarceration.
 

“It's really in prisons, and jails and detention centers, that we see who we are,” she said.

Read the story >
 

Hillary Blout: Working to End
Unjust Confinement
 

Blout’s experiences growing up during the height of the crack cocaine epidemic in Pittsburg, California, a high-crime neighborhood in the Bay Area, propelled her into a career in law. Seeing people she knew murdered or sent to prison spurred early aspirations to become a public defender. “I always thought that I wanted to change the world,” she said.
“I set my sights on something that felt a way to kind of pull myself up out of this and survive this environment of poverty and violence.”
 

Blout talks with us about her experience working for now-Vice President Kamala Harris in the San Francisco District Attorney's office, and her realization that prosecutors could become critical advocates for the release of people serving overly punitive sentences. 

Read the story >

Christopher Lowenkamp, who authored the Hidden Costs Revisited study you read about in this newsletter last week. His research looked at nearly 1.5 million people booked into Kentucky jails between 2009-2018 and found that any amount of time spent in custody pretrial was not associated with any consistent public benefit. This finding built on a similar 2013 study but was able to go more in depth. "What we saw with the more granular data is a gradual increase of failure rates almost every hour someone was locked up, and it begins from day one of someone being detained," Lowenkamp said.

Read the Q&A >

Criminal Justice

• A shocking exposé in the Palm Springs Desert Sun reveals how California bail agents dealt drugs, committed fraud, and drove drunk — but they’ve still kept their licenses. 
   
• What does successful bail reform look like? To start, look to Harris County, Texas, writes the Prison Policy Initiative.
   
• Intensive, specialized training of police officers leads to reduced crime, fewer arrests, and more positive interactions and community evaluations, according to a new study supported by AV and the National Policing Institute.
   
• A North Carolina court ruled the state’s law banning many people with felony records from voting after they get out of prison is unconstitutional. “This landmark decision is the largest expansion of voting rights in NC since the Voting Rights Act of 1965,” Daryl Atkinson of Forward Justice and a lead attorney in the case tells The News & Observer.
  
  Dive Deeper: “Case Ties North Carolina’s Voting Law to Its Racist History”
   
• The cost of communicating with loved ones from prison is notoriously burdensome for families. Congress has an opportunity to change that with bipartisan legislation, argues The Washington Post editorial board. (free link for our readers)
   
• Pennsylvania's “compassionate release” rules are broken, and costs to taxpayers soar, writes The Philadelphia Inquirer.
   
• The police chief in Bellevue, Nebraska is hiring more female officers in an effort to change policing’s “toxic” culture, reports The Washington Post in this in-depth piece. (free link for our readers) It’s part of the 30x30 Initiative to increase the representation of women in policing.
   
• After more than 100 years and 200 attempts, lynching is a now a federal hate crime with the signing of the Emmett Till Anti-lynching Act. Vox discusses the significance of the new law.
   
• This week’s Supreme Court nomination hearings highlight strained yet resilient bipartisan efforts to reform the nation’s criminal justice system, write Blake Hounshell and Leah Askarinam in The New York Times On Politics newsletter. (free link for our readers)

Health 

• AV has outlined a series of federal policy recommendations for improving health care affordability in response to a Request for Information (RFI) from the House of Representatives’ Healthy Futures Task Force. The response is focused on addressing excessive provider prices, a primary driver of rising health care costs for the more than 180 million Americans with private insurance.
   

• Strengthening existing tools at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office could address high prescription drug prices by weeding out weak patents that keep older drugs overpriced and out of reach for people who rely on them to survive, writes Tahir Amin of AV grantee I-MAK in Health Affairs.
   

• A new report from the Oregon Health authority shows capping hospital prices at 200% of Medicare rates would save $200 million every year. 
   
• A local health nonprofit and not the Montana state health department was awarded $2 million in federal family planning funding, after the state passed a law in 2021 barring the health department from disbursing Title X funds to some providers, greatly reducing the number of patients served by their programs for contraception, reports the Billings Gazette.
   
• Learn about Trust Her, a clinic that offers no-cost, same-day reproductive health care, including access to all methods of contraception, in this Dallas Morning News profile. “It’s a reproductive-justice strategy that puts women in the driver’s seat of their own lives.”

Higher Education

• The U.S. Department of Education announced this week a policy to hold the owners of private colleges financially liable for the cost of student loan discharges; this will prevent taxpayers from shouldering the cost of failed or failing schools, reports Higher Ed Dive.

Democracy

• Redistricting maps from both red and blue states continue to get rejected. After vetoing a map that made one of New Hampshire’s congressional districts a safe Democratic seat and the other a safe Republican seat, Republican Gov. Chris Sununu submitted his own map to legislators that makes both seats more competitive, reports NBC Boston. And The New York Times reports that in Maryland, the first Democratic-controlled legislature’s map was rejected by a judge who ruled it an “extreme gerrymander.” (free link for our readers) 

The Oscar-nominated “Writing With Fire” follows staff of the only all-women news outlet in India, Khabar Lahariya, as they shift from print to digital in a bid for survival. Their work carries with it significant personal risks and daily affronts: The forces these journalists must contend with are that much greater because of sex and caste. But they persist, dogged in their belief that journalism that holds power to account is essential to a healthy democracy. They are a voice for the voiceless, including victims of sexual assault and the families of those killed in illegal mining operations, and their reporting is credited with bringing health care to a village that had none, prompting infrastructure improvements, and getting water to farmers. It’s inspiring to watch the reach of their newsroom grow in the face of so many who wished to see them fail. The film is now streaming for free on Independent Lens.

Also: This excellent short video from Kite & Key explains why we should pay attention to the evidence around beautifying public spaces in high-crime areas to make them safer. It illustrates how the design of our physical environments — everything from item placement in the grocery store to the lack of windows and clocks in a casino — influence our behavior. Studies suggest that eliminating blight such as graffiti, vacant lots, trash, and abandoned buildings in high-risk areas can deter criminal activity. AV discusses efforts like Philadelphia’s “cleaning-and-greening” program, cited in the video, in this story on data-driven interventions that have the potential to reduce violence. My colleague Marc Krupanski put it best: If you believe in a "broken windows" approach to crime, then how about fixing the actual broken windows? 

Does America have a free speech problem? That was the thought-provoking question posed by 1A this week. Alex Abdo, litigation director with AV grantee the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, weighed in on the increasingly heated national debate over free speech and “cancel culture,” one that The New York Times fueled earlier this month with this controversial op-ed. (free link for our readers) The Constitution defines free speech protections in the First Amendment, but the American-held ideal in the cultural right of speech is deeply contested — and always has been, Abdo said. Free speech is under attack, he said, but not in the way the New York Times defined. Of bigger concern for Abdo: legislative attempts by the state and federal government to silence dissent and limit discussion, including bans on books, teaching materials, and criticisms.

• On Tuesday, April 5, from 1-5 p.m. EDT, AV’s Jocelyn Fontaine, vice president of criminal justice research, will be part of the Urban Institute's virtual conversation “Leveraging Research to Transform America’s Prisons.” The event brings together thought leaders from the advocacy, research, and practitioner communities to discuss strategies that promote the well-being of people who live and work behind bars. Learn more and register. 
   
• On Tuesday, April 5, at 10 a.m. PDT, AV’s Walter Katz, vice president of criminal justice, will be in a conversation with investigative journalist Aiko Kempen and moderated by Alexandra Lieben of the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations called “Reimagining Safety: Restoring Trust in Security Agencies.” It is part of a four-day program, “Restoring Public Trust,” hosted by  Thomas Mann House. Learn more and watch, read, or listen to the programs here.

• These kids’ adorable notes and drawings helped unwanted shelter pups find forever homes. 
   
• Get inspired every time you open a new browser tab with this Chrome extension from the Museum of Modern Art. You’ll see a new piece of art every time. 
   
• NASA’a Hubble Space Telescope has detected the most distant star ever seen.
   
• What I can’t stop thinking about after the Academy Awards is Beyoncé’s stunning performance of “Be Alive” for Best Original Song. Give that legend an Oscar — she deserves it after all she’s been through. 
   
• This program offers incarcerated men a “second chance” with a novel sentencing alternative: training dogs for adoption.