January 8, 2021
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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.
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Source: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency
Prevention, U.S. Department of Justice
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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.
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Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of
Justice
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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.
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Source: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency
Prevention, U.S. Department of Justice
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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.
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Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of
Justice
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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.
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Source: Florida Department of Law Enforcement
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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.
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Source: Education Commission of the States
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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.
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Source: National Bureau of Economic Research
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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.
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Source: RAND Corporation
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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.
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Source: U.S. Government Accountability Office
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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.
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Source: National Bureau of Economic Research
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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.
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Source: Aspen Institute
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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.
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Source: U.S. Census Bureau
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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.
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Source: Mathematica
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