The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained approximately 48,500 foreign nationals a day, on average, for 72 hours or more in Fiscal Year 2019. ICE was appropriated about $3.14 billion in Fiscal Year 2020 to operate the immigration detention system. ICE has three ways of acquiring detention space—intergovernmental service agreements with state or local government entities; agreements with the U.S. Department of Justice Marshals Service to join an existing contract or agreement (known as a “rider”); or contracts. This report examines (1) what data show about the characteristics of contracts and agreements; (2) the extent to which ICE developed and implemented processes and a strategic approach to acquire space; and (3) the extent to which ICE has overseen and enforced contracts and agreements. The authors reviewed documentation of acquisition and oversight efforts at facilities used to hold detainees for 72 hours or more; analyzed ICE data for the last 3 fiscal years—2017 through 2019; conducted site visits to new and long-standing detention facilities; and interviewed ICE officials. The authors found that ICE contracts and agreements have increasingly guaranteed minimum payments to detention facility contractors—paying for beds regardless of use. ICE spent $20.5 million in May 2020 for over 12,000 unused beds a day, on average. In most recent contracts, ICE has not documented its need for new space or followed other portions of its own process for obtaining it. The ICE officers who oversee contracts in 8 of 12 field offices where the authors conducted interviews said office management hindered their ability to independently and effectively oversee detention contracts. The authors recommend oversight among other recommendations.

Between 2017 and 2019, the authors visited 11 correctional facilities managed by the Florida Department of Corrections, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, and the Montgomery County Department of Correction and Rehabilitation to develop an understanding of the challenges and practices involved in managing correctional contraband. The authors conducted facility observations and semi-structured interviews with staff and leadership. This report summarizes lessons learned from the site visits and discusses the scope of contraband issues and contraband interdiction strategies employed by the correctional agencies. Four takeaways from this study include: 1) contraband is a universal critical issue for correctional agencies, but some facilities face unique challenges; 2) because challenges with contraband are facility-specific, interdiction strategies need to be tailored to each agency and facility; 3) agencies should take a robust approach to combating contraband; and 4) prison and jail administrators should collect timely and reliable data to inform their approaches to contraband interdiction.

Diversification is a widely proposed policing reform, but its impact is difficult to assess. The authors used records of millions of daily patrol assignments, determined through fixed rules and pre-assigned rotations that mitigate self-selection, to compare the average behavior of officers of different demographic profiles working in comparable conditions. Relative to white officers, Black and Hispanic officers make far fewer stops and arrests, and they use force less often, especially against Black civilians. These effects are largest in majority-Black areas of Chicago and stem from reduced focus on enforcing low-level offenses, with greatest impact on Black civilians. Female officers also use less force than males, a result that holds within all racial groups. These results suggest that diversity reforms can improve police treatment of minority communities.

Bachelor’s degrees are important marks of progress for both individuals and society. Compared with non-college-graduates, individuals who hold a bachelor’s degree have higher lifetime earnings, lower odds of unemployment, and better health outcomes. This brief uses the 2005-2009, 2010-2014, and 2015-2019 American Community Surveys 5-year estimates to examine national and county-level changes in bachelor’s degree attainment from 2005–2009 to 2015–2019. The percentage of the population 25 years and older with at least a bachelor’s degree increased by about 5 percentage points (from 27.5% to 32.1%) from 2005–2009 to 2015–2019. From 2005–2009 to 2015–2019, the percentage of people with a bachelor’s degree increased for all racial and ethnic groups. However, growth in bachelor’s degree attainment varied by race, with each race group following a different pattern. Race groups that began with relatively high levels of educational attainment (Asian alone, White alone, and non-Hispanic White) experienced greater percentage-point increases than race groups with lower rates of bachelor’s degree attainment in the first 5-year estimate.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created unprecedented, urgent challenges for the child care and early education workforce. Though the workforce has always been fragile, new stressors presented over the past year have highlighted fundamental structural problems in the system, including the inequities facing Black, Latina, and Native American child care and early education staff and providers. Based on interviews with 20 experts about strategies to support the child care workforce, this report presents a set of 19 diverse state and local policy strategies that policymakers, philanthropists, and key stakeholders could implement to address these structural inequities and build a stronger and more equitable workforce in the future. Examples of the recommended policy strategies include expanding online access for training and credentialing of childcare workers, providing language translation services for workforce members who are not proficient in English, and reforming licensing systems to better support home-based child care.

The purpose of this study is to develop a bus bike rack sensing system that can detect bicycle usage per rack position and perform usage analysis and behavior study of bike users. The outcomes are expected to help the City of Gainesville increase user satisfaction of bus-bike multimodal commuters, enhance attractiveness of multimodal commuting by enabling better trip planning for bus-bike riders, and maximize cost effectiveness of infrastructure investment with help from the University of Florida’s advanced information technology. A University of Florida team has developed a remote real-time sensing system for the detection of bike presence on the bus bike rack using pressure sensors and readout electronics in this project. For the consideration of future usage by potential bike riders, a “BikeRide” mobile app has been developed. The report details the hardware of sensing system, the developed app, and the bus bike rack usage data in different time scales (for example, day, week, and season) and on different bus routes.

Digital transformation is a defining feature of our time. The COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating this transformation. The new technologies hold considerable promise, but they also pose new challenges. They have not yet delivered the expected dividend in higher aggregate productivity growth. And inequality has been rising. As digitalization and new advances in artificial intelligence transform markets, policies should be put in place to align with these changes. The digital economy must be broadened to disseminate new technologies and productive opportunities among smaller firms and wider segments of the labor force. Policies must play a part to better harness the potential of innovation in the digital era and turn it into a driver of stronger and more inclusive growth in economic prosperity. The report includes five policy recommendations. First, competition policy should be revamped for the digital age to ensure that markets continue to provide an open and level playing field for firms. Second, in an increasingly knowledge-driven economy, the innovation ecosystem should be improved so that it spurs new knowledge and technological advances, but also fosters their wide diffusion. Third, digital infrastructure must be strengthened to expand access to new opportunities – this requires increased public investment as well as frameworks to encourage more private investment to improve digital access. Fourth, education and training programs must be revamped to emphasize the acquisition of skills that complement the new technologies. Finally, social protection systems should be strengthened to realign them with the changing economy and nature of work.

Designing policy for climate change requires analyses which integrate the interrelationship between the economy and environment, including: the immense risks and impacts on distribution across and within generations; the many failures, limitations or absences of key markets; and the limitations on government, both in offsetting these failures and distributional impacts. Much of the standard economic modelling, including Integrated Assessment Models, does not embody key aspects of these essentials. The authors identify fundamental flaws in both the descriptive and normative methodologies commonly used to assess climate policy, showing systematic biases, with costs of climate action overestimated and benefits underestimated. The authors provide an alternative methodology by which the social cost of carbon may be calculated, one which embraces the essential elements they have identified.

Interactive Quarterly Early Release Estimates provide health statistics based on data from the 2019-2020 National Health Interview Survey for selected health topics for adults aged 18 years and over. All estimates are unadjusted percentages based on preliminary data files and are released prior to final data editing and final weighting to provide access to the most recent information from the survey. Estimates presented are based on quarterly data. Users can examine data reports on topics related to health status, health care service use, health care service access, and health behaviors (such as cigarette or electric cigarette use). The reports also include quarterly trend data analysis for each topic.

The experimental Household Pulse Survey is designed to quickly and efficiently deploy data collected on how people’s lives have been impacted by the coronavirus pandemic. Data collection for Phase 3 of the Household Pulse Survey began on October 28, 2020 and ran until December 21, 2020. After a two-week break, Phase 3 resumed on January 6, 2021 and will run through March 1, 2021. Survey data includes questions related to education, employment, food sufficiency, health, housing, Social Security, household spending, stimulus payments, and transportation.

A federal fund gives subsidies to low-income families to pay for child care while parents work or attend school. An estimated 1.9 million children received child care subsidies in Fiscal Year 2017, representing approximately 14% of all children estimated to be eligible under federal rules – and 22% of all children estimated to be eligible under state rules -- in an average month. These figures are from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) analysis of Fiscal Year 2017 data, the most recent year for which such analysis is available. Generally, fewer families qualify for subsidies under state eligibility rules than under federal eligibility rules since most states use flexibility provided by HHS to set their income eligibility limits below the federal maximum. Lower-income families with preschoolers got the most subsidies. Some states use wait lists to manage caseloads, but it's hard to maintain the lists. Some states reported higher child care costs as more families sought full-day care for older kids due to school closings and other effects of COVID-19.

In response to the increase in opioid overdose deaths in the United States, many states recently have implemented supply-controlling and harm-reduction policy measures. To date, an updated policy evaluation that considers the full policy landscape has not been conducted. The purpose of this study is to evaluate 6 U.S. state-level drug policies to ascertain whether they are associated with a reduction in indicators of prescription opioid abuse, the prevalence of opioid use disorder and overdose, the prescription of medication-assisted treatment (MAT), and drug overdose deaths. In this cross-sectional study of state-level drug overdose mortality data and claims data from 23 million commercially insured patients in the U.S. between 2007 and 2018, state policies were associated with a reduction in known indicators of prescription opioid misuse as well as deaths from prescription opioid overdose and increases in diagnosis of opioid use disorder, overdose, and drug overdose mortality from illicit drugs. Although existing state-level drug policies have been associated with a decrease in the misuse of prescription opioids, these policies may have had the unintended consequence of motivating those with opioid use disorders to switch to alternative illicit substances, inducing higher overdose mortality.

In this report, the authors used a network simulation model to illustrate five different vaccination strategies for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), showing that vaccinating the most-active members of the population might be the best way to save lives overall and still protect the vulnerable. Recent models of COVID-19 vaccination have tended not to take into account the person-to-person contact structure that results in the disease's spread. The authors used a model based on a realistic contact network (derived from a data set of 2.2 billion mobile device location points) to run five different vaccination models. What varied between each case was the number of contacts of the people who were vaccinated. The base case assumes no vaccination; the low-contact model vaccinates those with the fewest contacts (corresponding to those already identified as high risk who are able to limit contacts); the uniform model vaccinates 15% of the population at random; and the final two models vaccinate those with the most contacts—the high-contact model vaccinates the 15% of people with the most contacts, and the high-contact imperfect model vaccinates one-half of the 30% of people with the most contacts. The authors found that the high-contact imperfect strategy is at least as effective (and probably more effective) at protecting the vulnerable than direct vaccination and indicates that the United States might be able to provide more protection for vulnerable people by vaccinating people with many contacts than by vaccinating vulnerable people directly.