May 15, 2020
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In June 2012, the Supreme Court of the United
States ruled in Miller v. Alabama that mandatory
life without-parole (LWOP) sentences were
unconstitutional for individuals who were under the age
of 18 at the time of their offense (hereafter,
juveniles). In January 2016, the Supreme Court ruled in
Montgomery v. Louisiana that Miller applied
retroactively. Following Montgomery, individuals
previously sentenced to mandatory LWOP as juveniles
(hereafter, juvenile lifers) became eligible for
resentencing. Accordingly, in almost all such cases, the
district attorney’s office makes an offer for a new
sentence to the defendant, who is free to accept the
offer or to have his new sentence decided by the judge.
In Philadelphia, re-sentence offers are decided by The
Juvenile Lifer Resentencing Committee, which
comprises 8 members of the executive staff at the
District Attorney's Office. The author conducted
semi-structured interviews with four members of the
committee to understand the resentencing process and then
performed a content analysis of the case-summary memos
prepared by the lead assistant district attorney for each
case to identify the case facts that were available for
consideration by the committee. The authors present
several key findings. One findings is that juvenile
lifers can be considered low-impact releases in terms of
risk posed to public safety. At the time of the analyses,
269 lifers have been re-sentenced in Philadelphia and 174
have been released. Six (3.5%) have been re-arrested.
Charges were dropped in four of the cases and two (1%)
resulted in new convictions (one for contempt and the
other for robbery in the third degree). In comparison,
nationally, an estimated 30% of individuals convicted of
homicide offenses are rearrested within two years of
release. Another finding is that overall, release of
Philadelphia's juvenile lifers, to date, will result in
an estimated minimum $9.5 million savings in correctional
costs for Pennsylvania over the first decade.
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Source: Montclair State University
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This web resource provides information and visual
dashboards related to six key policy decisions by state
courts during the COVID-19 pandemic. The policy areas
include jury trial restrictions, court operations,
in-person court proceedings, remote oral arguments for
state supreme courts, virtual hearings, and links to
state court websites with information related to
COVID-19. This resource notes that, in Florida, jury
trial restrictions are in place through July 2020, the
state has a statewide plan for resuming court operations,
court in-person proceedings are suspended through July 2,
2020, and video conference arguments are permitted for
the Florida Supreme Court.
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Source: National Center for State Courts
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This resource guides counties through the process of
defining the most important cross-system changes to help
reduce the number of people in jails who have serious
mental illnesses. To reduce the prevalence of serious
mental illness in jails, changes should address one or
more of these four key measures: (1) the number of people
booked into jail who have serious mental illnesses; (2)
their average length of stay in jail; (3) how many people
are connected to treatment and services; and (4) their
recidivism rates. The recommendations include starting
with baseline data, determining the projected effect of
proposed improvements, prioritize potential high-impact
strategies, work to obtain buy-in, and determine funding
sources.
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Source: Council of State Governments: Justice Center
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The National Center for Education Statistics surveyed
12,330 U.S. adults ages 16 to 74 living in households
from 2012 to 2017 for the Program for the International
Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), an
international study involving over 35 countries. Using
small area estimation models, the researchers produced
indirect estimates of literacy and numeracy proficiency
for all U.S. states and counties. According to this
research, an estimated 24% of adults in Florida perform
at the lowest literacy level and 35% perform at the
lowest numeracy level. This puts Florida slightly below
the national average on both metrics. Adults at the upper
end of Level 1 can typically read short texts and
understand the meaning well enough to perform simple
tasks, such as filling out a basic form. Adults who are
below Level 1 may be able to understand only very basic
vocabulary or even struggle to do this. Approximately 34%
of Florida adults are estimated to perform at Level 2 in
literacy, and 42% function at Level 3 or above. Adults
whose skills are below Level 3 are generally not
considered to be fully proficient in working with
information and ideas in text.
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Source: National Center for Educational Statistics, U.S.
Department of Education
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With increased tensions and political rhetoric
surrounding immigration enforcement in the United States,
schools are facing greater challenges in ensuring support
for their students of immigrant and Latino/a origin. This
study examined the associations between deportations near
school districts and racial/ethnic gaps in educational
outcomes in school districts across the country. With
data from the Stanford Educational Data Archive, the
Civil Rights Data Collection, and the Transactional
Records Access Clearinghouse, this study used
longitudinal, cross-sectional analyses and found that in
the years when districts had more deportations occurring
within 25 miles, White-Latino/a gaps were larger in math
achievement and rates of chronic absenteeism. No
associations were found for gaps in English language arts
achievement or rates of bullying. Implications for
researchers, policymakers, and school leaders are
discussed.
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Source: American Educational Research Association
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The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that U.S.
secondary schools begin after 8:30 a.m. to better align
with the circadian rhythms of adolescents. Yet due to
economic and logistic considerations, the vast majority
of high schools begin the school day considerably
earlier. The leverage a quasi-natural experiment in which
five comprehensive high schools in one of the nation’s
largest school systems moved start times forty minutes
earlier to better coordinate with earlier-start high
schools. Here, disruption effects should exacerbate any
harmful consequences. They report on the effect of
earlier start times on a broad range of outcomes,
including mandatory ACT test scores, absenteeism, on-time
progress in high school, and college-going. While the
authors fail to find evidence of harmful effects on test
scores, they do see a rise in absenteeism and tardiness
rates, as well as higher rates of dropping out of high
school. These results suggest that the harmful effects of
early start times may not be well captured by considering
test scores alone.
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Source: Economics of Education Review
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Many state and local officials are making
social-distancing policy decisions based on the actions
of other locations rather than through a decision-making
framework that evaluates these measures and their
reduction of the spread of coronavirus disease 2019. To
help provide one piece of that information, researchers
developed a series of economic models aimed at filling in
the gap and at estimating a rough order of magnitude of
the economic consequences associated with a small set of
social-distancing policies. The model examines five
policy scenarios: 1) Close schools; 2) Close schools,
bars, restaurants, and ban large events, 3) All of
scenario 2 and close non-essential businesses, 4) All of
scenario 3 and quarantine the most vulnerable, and 5) All
of scenario 4 and quarantine all but essential workers.
The models also examines a low-impact, baseline, and
high-impact cases for each scenario. For Florida, the
weekly percentage losses in income for these scenarios
vary between 4.5% and 20.8%.
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Source: RAND Corporation
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There are few silver linings to the COVID-19 pandemic,
but free-flowing traffic is certainly one of them. For
the essential workers who still must commute each day,
driving to work has suddenly become much easier. The same
applies to the trucks delivering surging e-commerce
orders. Removing so many cars from the roads has even led
to cleaner air, clearer views, and more room for outdoor
recreation, even in major cities. Every metro area in the
country experienced a traffic decline of at least 53%
since the beginning of March. Still, the largest and
smallest vehicle miles traveled drops tend to cluster in
similar places. College towns such as Ann Arbor,
Michigan, large metro areas along the Northeast corridor,
and most of coastal California’s metro areas all saw
their traffic levels drop by at least 75% since March 1.
Meanwhile, many medium-sized metro areas in the South,
running from Texas through the Carolinas, saw the
smallest declines. Research finds that employers who
offer more flexible work schedules tend to see more
remote work occur. Regional business groups and large
national companies should promote more flexible work,
especially in some of the country’s most congested metro
areas. Even small decreases in traffic can lead to huge
time savings on the road. Now is the perfect time to
account for driving’s high costs, and price it more
appropriately. Private vehicles help us make trips at
incredible speeds, but they have major consequences on
the communities around us. Roadway fatalities are the
first or second leading cause of unintentional death
across all ages. Transportation is also the country’s top
source of greenhouse gas emissions, with private vehicles
the primary culprit. With gas prices at multi-decade
lows, now is the ideal time to better reflect on
driving’s social costs.
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Source: Brookings Institute
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Economic and demographic data drive research, policy
development, distribution of government resources, and
private investment decisions. But many of the datasets
that policymakers, practitioners, and researchers rely on
to understand and guide resources to rural communities
fall short in representing rural realities. Given the
increasing attention to rural areas in public policy and
popular discourse, along with notable trends
disadvantaging rural places—persistent poverty and global
economic shifts—this search for good rural data is
timely. The report recommends the following additional
measures be considered to identify policies and practices
unique to rural areas: work readiness, individual health,
owned assets, and seasonal employment. The report also
recommends 1) increasing the size of rural samples in
survey research; 2) trying new strategies to increase
rural participation in important surveys like the
American Community Survey; 3) reexamining practices
around data suppression and noise as they relate to rural
communities; and 4) for owners of proprietary data,
partnering with government and university researchers to
increase access to rural-specific data for the purpose of
policy making and research.
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Source: Aspen Institute
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Paid medical leave is a benefit that allows individuals
to take time off from their jobs while continuing to
receive their wages and salaries to address their own
serious medical condition that limits their ability to
work. The term medical leave generally refers to leave
that lasts weeks or months. Research suggests that paid
medical leave could affect economic outcomes by reducing
income volatility, helping workers to return to
employment after taking leave, reducing productivity
loses due to presenteeism, and supporting greater labor
supply and long-term labor force participation. There are
several different mechanisms through which paid medical
leave may have an effect on health outcomes. These
include improved health management, earlier treatment,
greater healthcare utilization, improved income
stability, and reduced financial stress. The authors
argue that future research should investigate several
gaps in understanding including how worker use paid and
unpaid leave, how outcomes may vary by sociodemographic
characteristics, and how to most effectively provide
return-to-work services.
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Source: Washington Center for Equitable Growth
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Until a vaccine or effective antiviral treatment is
available, managing the response to COVID-19 means moving
beyond social distancing and testing in small numbers to
include a variety of evidence-informed solutions that can
help minimize the virus’s resurgence, reduce mortality
rates, relieve overloaded health systems, safely re-open
schools and businesses, facilitate economic recovery, and
restore vibrant community connections. As an overarching
response to these needs, there is a Curated Data,
Modeling, and Policy Resources page to help policymakers
COVID-19 locate the most valuable and trusted data and
policy resources in the massive amount of available
information. In addition, the COVID-19 Data Primer helps
researchers, data scientists, and others looking to
uncover insights from health care data better understand,
track, and contain COVID-19. These materials are free to
access and continually updated.
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Source: Mathematica
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Thirty million workers filed initial unemployment claims
between March 15 and April 25. As workers lose their
jobs, many will also lose their employer-sponsored health
insurance, as will their dependents. Some of these
workers and dependents will qualify for Medicaid
coverage, particularly in states that expanded Medicaid
eligibility under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Others
will purchase individual coverage on the health insurance
Marketplaces, possibly with a subsidy to offset the
premium cost. And many will be unable to replace their
employer-sponsored health insurance coverage and become
uninsured. In this brief, the authors estimate how health
insurance coverage could change as millions of workers
lose their jobs during the COVID-19 recession. The
authors present national and state-level estimates of
coverage changes if unemployment rates rise from
pre-crisis levels (around 3.5% nationally) to 15%, 20%,
or 25%. For each unemployment level, they provide a base
case scenario of coverage changes and a high scenario,
derived from two different estimation methods. In the
base scenario, the authors estimate that at 20%
unemployment, approximately 25 million people will lose
ESI coverage, and of them, 12 million would gain Medicaid
coverage, 6 million would gain Marketplace or other
private coverage, and 7 million would become uninsured.
In the high scenario, the authors estimate that 43
million people would lose employer-sponsored health
insurance coverage. The increase in Medicaid coverage and
uninsurance rates will be uneven across the country, with
a greater share of those estimated to lose
employer-sponsored health insurance gaining Medicaid
coverage and a lower share becoming uninsured in states
that expanded Medicaid under the ACA.
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Source: Urban Institute
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OPPAGA is
currently seeking applications for
Legislative Policy Analysts
and Senior Legislative Analysts. Positions are available in the following
policy areas: Criminal Justice, Education, Government Operations,
and Health and Human Services. Salary is commensurate with experience.
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Government Program Summaries (GPS) is a free resource for legislators and the public
that provides descriptive information on over 200 state government programs. To provide
fiscal data, GPS links to Transparency Florida, the Legislature's website that includes
continually updated information on the state's operating budget and daily expenditures
by state agencies.
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A publication of the Florida Legislature's Office of Program Policy Analysis & Government Accountability
PolicyNotes, published every Friday, features reports, articles, and websites with timely information of interest to policymakers and researchers. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations
expressed by third parties as reported in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect OPPAGA's views.
Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of
PolicyNotes provided that this section is preserved on all copies.
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