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IN THIS ISSUE:

CRIMINAL JUSTICE

The Decline in Arrests of Juveniles Continued Through 2019

Federal Deaths in Custody and During Arrest, 2016-2017 - Statistical Tables

Expunging Juvenile Records: Misconceptions, Collateral Consequences, and Emerging Practices

Classification of Urban, Suburban, and Rural Areas in the National Crime Victimization Survey

Crime in Florida Abstract: January - June 2020


EDUCATION

Two-Generation Strategies to Improve Educational Attainment

The Long-Run Impacts of Head Start on Human Capital and Economic Self-Sufficiency

Virginia Preschool Initiative Plus: Cost Study Final Report


GOVERNMENT OPERATIONS

Commercial Space Transportation: Federal Aviation Administration Should Examine a Range of Options to Support U.S. Launch Infrastructure

Measuring Unemployment in Crisis: Effects of COVID-19 on Potential Biases in the Current Population Survey

Emerging Best Practices for COVID-19 Emergency Rental Assistance Programs


HEALTH AND
HUMAN SERVICES

Health Insurance Coverage Among Young Adults Aged 19 to 34 Years: 2018 & 2019

A COVID-19 Primer: Analyzing Health Care Claims, Administrative Data, and Public Use Files



January 8, 2021

Criminal_Justice
CRIMINAL JUSTICE

This bulletin presents findings from the U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention’s Juvenile Residential Facility Census, a biennial survey of public and private juvenile residential facilities in every state. Findings from the 2018 census show that nationally, 1,510 facilities housed 37,529 juvenile offenders under age 21. The data also indicate that the number of youth in residential placement continues a two-decade decline. After falling 67% since 2006, the number of juvenile arrests reached a new low in 2019. Youth under age 15 and females each accounted for about a third of juvenile arrests in 2019. The number of juvenile arrests for violent crime offenses were cut in half between 2006 and 2019. Juvenile arrests for property crime index offenses fell 73% between 2008 and 2019. And by 2019, arrest rates for violent crimes fell substantially from the 1994 peak for every age group younger than 45.

Source: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, U.S. Department of Justice

This report is the first in a series that examines deaths that occur during federal arrest, detention, and incarceration in the United States. It describes decedent, incident, and facility characteristics of deaths in federal custody and during arrest by federal law enforcement agencies during Fiscal Years 2016 and 2017. Federal agencies reported 51 arrest-related deaths and 468 deaths in custody in Fiscal Year 2016 and 41 arrest-related deaths and 429 deaths in custody in Fiscal Year 2017. Homicide (47%) and suicide (42%) accounted for nearly 90% of federal arrest-related deaths in both years combined. Also during that period, almost all federal arrest-related decedents were male (97%), 66% were white, and 26% were black. Nearly 90% of federal deaths in custody in Fiscal Year 2016 (86%) and Fiscal Year 2017 (87%) were due to illness.

Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice

This bulletin discusses common misconceptions surrounding expungement, the process of destroying and eliminating juvenile records. The goal of expungement is to make it as though the records never existed. It also provides information about the collateral consequences of juvenile records as well as federal, state, and local emerging practices. The key information and findings include the following: 1) Expungement, sealing, and confidentiality are three legally distinct methods for destroying or limiting access to juvenile records. However, these methods may permit police, courts, or the public access to juvenile records, depending on state laws; 2) The public and impacted youth often erroneously believe that once police and courts expunge juvenile records they no longer exist. The handling of expunged juvenile records varies widely from state to state; 3) Youth with juvenile records frequently experience collateral consequences of their arrest or adjudication, which may include difficulty accessing educational services, obtaining employment, serving in the military, and finding and maintaining housing; and 4) States, localities, and the federal government have implemented promising practices to decrease collateral consequences, including “ban the box” legislation and expungement clinics.

Source: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, U.S. Department of Justice

In 2020, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics provided new classifications of urban, suburban, and rural areas for the 2019 and future versions of the National Crime Victimization Survey with the goal of presenting a more accurate picture of where criminal victimizations occur. This report illustrates how these classifications are determined and how the new definitions more closely fit U.S. residents’ own sense of where they live. Under the new definitions, 12% of the population lives in urban areas, 69% in suburban areas, and 19% in rural areas, compared to 33% in urban areas, 53% in suburban areas, and 14% in rural areas under the old definitions. Of the main cities in the 15 largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the U.S., the new definitions classify 13 as urban. The two not classified as urban—Phoenix, Arizona and Riverside, California—had 2010 weighted housing unit densities below that of the U.S. as a whole. Riverside is classified as 99% suburban and Phoenix as 72% suburban under the new definitions, with the remainder of each being rural.

Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice

The statistics presented in this release are an indication of crime and criminal activities known to, and reported by, Florida law enforcement agencies for the first half of 2020 as of November 10, 2020. The report compares crime and criminal activities from 2019 to those from 2020. Based on the report, total violent crime increased by .8% and total property crime decreased by 13.9%. The report also presents information on murder, rape, robbery, burglary, and larceny among other offenses.

Source: Florida Department of Law Enforcement

Education
EDUCATION

Two-generation strategies are based on the principle that children thrive when their parents do and vice versa. They intentionally and simultaneously weave child-focused and parent-focused policy and programs together to improve outcomes for all generations within the family. While there are a multitude of two-generation strategies, one common approach pairs education and workforce programs serving students who are parents with high-quality early childhood education programs that serve their children. Policy opportunities to support two-generation strategies exist across the Prekindergarten-20 education spectrum. They include providing parents with resources for and referrals to early childhood programs, connecting families to community resources in community schools and removing barriers, such as the lack of child care, to ensure that parents can further their postsecondary education and workforce goals. Connecticut established, through legislation in 2015 (Senate Bill1502), a “two-generational school readiness and workforce development pilot program.” Since then, it has evolved into a “two generational initiative to disrupt cycles of poverty and advance family economic self-sufficiency,” with a focus on early childhood care and education, health, workforce readiness and economic self-sufficiency. In 2018, legislation (House Bill 5335) was passed to align the state’s coordinated reading plan with the two-generation initiative, further connecting parent literacy and engagement with student literacy and school readiness.

Source: Education Commission of the States

This paper evaluates the long-run effects of Head Start using large-scale, restricted 2000-2018 Census- American Community Surveys (ACS) data linked to Social Security Administration data which contains exact date and county of birth. Using the county rollout of Head Start between 1965 and 1980 and age-eligibility cutoffs for school entry, the authors find that Head Start generated large increases in adult human capital and economic self-sufficiency, including a 0.65-year increase in schooling, a 2.7% increase in high-school completion, an 8.5% increase in college enrollment, and a 39% increase in college completion. These estimates imply sizable, long-term returns to public investments in large-scale preschool programs.

Source: National Bureau of Economic Research

In 2015, Virginia was awarded a federal Preschool Development Grant-Expansion Grant and launched the Virginia Preschool Initiative Plus (VPI+) in 11 school divisions across the Commonwealth. The goal of VPI+ was to provide high-quality preschool to children in Virginia by (1) supporting new VPI+ classrooms that meet specific quality standards and (2) enhancing the quality of existing Virginia Preschool Initiative classrooms. This investment was intended to support positive school readiness outcomes for children. These intended benefits for children also translate to benefits for society, as improved educational outcomes for children enable them to grow into adults who make positive contributions to their communities. The potential for these positive outcomes necessitates a cost study that can help state leaders better understand the investment in and benefits of the VPI+ program. This cost study is part of a larger evaluation of VPI+ that also examined the impacts of VPI+ on children's literacy, math, and social-emotional outcomes at kindergarten entry. The study found that across all participating divisions, VPI+ program expenditures averaged $16,210 per child. More than two-thirds of the VPI+ expenditures represented salaries and benefits for classroom staff and other school personnel. The remaining one-third of expenditures includes transportation, materials and supplies, professional development, indirect costs, and other expenditures. The VPI+ per-child expenditures varied by division, ranging from $12,036 to $21,663, but this variation may partly be due to differences in divisions’ ability to achieve full enrollment and differences in the specific types of expenditures that divisions included in their data. The VPI+ grant paid for the majority (75%) of VPI+ expenditures. The remaining 25% of expenditures were funded through local match.

Source: RAND Corporation

Government Operations
GOVERNMENT OPERATIONS

Demand for commercial space launches is anticipated to increase in the coming years. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the agency responsible for overseeing the sites where these launches occur, was directed by statute to submit a report— and update it every 2 years until December 2024—that makes recommendations on how to facilitate and promote greater investments in space transportation infrastructure. The FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018 included a provision for the U.S. Government Accountability Office to review issues related to space transportation infrastructure. This report discusses launch providers’ and site operators’ views on the sufficiency of infrastructure in meeting market demand and assesses the steps FAA has taken to identify options for federal support of space transportation infrastructure, among other things. The authors reviewed relevant regulations; assessed FAA’s actions against identified leading practices; and interviewed FAA officials, commercial launch providers, and representatives from U.S. commercial launch sites that the authors identified as having hosted an FAA-licensed launch since 2015 or having an FAA launch site operator license as of August 2020.

Source: U.S. Government Accountability Office

From February to April 2020, as COVID-19 hit the U.S. economy, the official unemployment rate climbed from 3.5%—the lowest in more than 50 years—to 14.7%—the highest since current measurement began in January 1948. This unprecedented, speedy quadrupling of unemployment rate coincided with major disruptions in survey-data-collection procedures and a dramatic, differential drop in response rates. To what extent did measurement issues contribute to this quadrupling? The authors revisit two recently studied potential biases in the Current Population Survey: rotation group bias and difficulty-of-reaching bias. Rotation group bias is the tendency for the unemployment rate in a given month to be higher among households who are in their earlier rotation groups (i.e., their earlier interview months). The difficulty-of-reaching bias is the tendency of an outcome of interest to relate systematically, after controlling for other observables, to the difficulty of reaching a respondent (e.g., as measured by the number of contact attempts). The authors extend the original analyses to the years prior to the crisis and focus on the six months of peak unemployment rate, from April to September 2020. The authors’ ballpark estimates suggest that the peak official unemployment rate figure could be biased by up to approximately 1.5 percentage points in either direction.

Source: National Bureau of Economic Research

On December 21, 2020, Congress passed a COVID-19 relief package that includes $25 billion in rental assistance to support tenants struggling to make monthly housing payments and extended the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) eviction moratorium through January 2021. According to survey data from the Census Bureau, 18% of tenants are currently behind on rental payments and 30% have little or no confidence that they will be able to make rental payments next month. Missed payments put tenants at risk of eviction while also compromising the ability of property owners to pay mortgages and maintain properties. This report lays out emerging best practices for the design and administration of rental assistance programs for states, localities, and their non-profit partners who will be called upon to disburse billions in rental assistance. Failing to move quickly could spell disaster, and successful implementation will be critical to household stabilization. Drawing on lessons from around the United States and recent insights gained through a rental assistance pilot, the report lays out a framework to guide policymakers, program administrators, and elected officials as they attempt to deploy rental assistance on an unprecedented scale.

Source: Aspen Institute

Health and Human Services
HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES

Health insurance coverage for young adults provides a means for financing health care costs, ensures access to preventive health services and promotes well-being. Under the Young Adult Provision of the Affordable Care Act, young adults under the age of 26 may remain as dependents on their parents’ health insurance plans. Young adults aged 19 to 34 may also receive coverage through their employer, through public coverage, or through purchase on the healthcare marketplace. Yet, young adults may be less likely to purchase health insurance coverage, and, thus, may be more likely to be uninsured than other age groups. This brief uses data from the 2018 and 2019 American Community Surveys (ACS) to examine the uninsured rate and to compare changes in the uninsured rate among young adults aged 19 to 34 in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. In 2019, 15.6% of young adults aged 19 to 34 were uninsured, higher than the uninsured rate for children under the age of 19 (5.7%), other working-age adults 35 to 64 years (11.3%), and adults 65 and older (0.8%). Young adults aged 26 had the highest uninsured rate among all single years of age, at 18.3% in 2019. In 2019, the District of Columbia (5.2%) and Massachusetts (5.6%) had among the lowest uninsured rates among states for young adults aged 19 to 34, while Texas had the highest uninsured rate (29.2%) for this age group. In 2019, the uninsured rate was higher for young adults aged 26 to 34 than for those aged 19 to 25 in 22 states (including Florida). The percentage of young adults aged 19 to 25 without health coverage was significantly higher than the percentage uninsured among those aged 26 to 34 in three states: Missouri, New Mexico, and Texas. The percentage of uninsured young adults increased in ten states and decreased in four states between 2018 and 2019.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau

As COVID-19 disrupts people’s lives and livelihoods and threatens institutions around the world, the need for fast, data-driven solutions to combat the crisis is growing. This primer is designed to help researchers, data scientists, and others who analyze health care claims or administrative data quickly join the effort to better understand, track, and contain COVID-19. Readers may use this guidance to help them assess data on health care use and costs linked to COVID-19, create models for risk identification, and pinpoint complications that may follow a COVID-19 diagnosis. The updates to this edition include: added codes for vaccines administered in the outpatient setting; added 21 procedure codes effective January 1, 2021; added diagnosis codes effective January 1, 2021; added information about updated telehealth codes.

Source: Mathematica


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