Drug courts are specialized court-docket programs that target defendants and offenders (adults and juveniles), as well as parents with pending child welfare cases who have alcohol and other drug dependency problems. Although the features of drug courts vary according to the population served, as well as the resources allocated, programs are generally managed by a multidisciplinary team that includes judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, community corrections, social workers, and treatment service professionals. This flyer provides an overview of drug court and other problem solving court program models and available guidance. The document is updated regularly with information on program and research resources supported by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, and the National Institute of Justice, with hyperlinks to current training and technical assistance providers and relevant documents. There are more than 3,500 drug courts across the United States, about half of which are adult treatment drug courts. Participants reported less criminal activity (40% vs. 53%) and had fewer rearrests (52% vs. 62%) than comparable individuals. Treatment investment costs were higher for participants, but with less recidivism, drug courts saved an average of $5,680 to $6,208 per individual overall.

The Washington State Remote Jury Trials Workgroup has produced Best Practices in Response to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) covering remote jury trials in light of continuing challenges by the COVID-19 pandemic. The workgroup's goal is to help courts analyze issues with remote jury trials and recommend best practices for them. The central premise is that remote jury trials must be structured around inclusivity. All involved: parties, lawyers, judges, and prospective jurors all need quality broadband internet, as well as the requisite hardware and software along with the required training to ensure that remote trials satisfy constitutional, statutory, and court rule requirements.

The evolving standards of decency doctrine, which affords Eighth Amendment protection to punishment practices that violate contemporary standards, has historically played a key role in interpreting the nebulous Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause, although the journey has been marked by controversy and contradictions. Today, as the continued vitality of the evolving standards doctrine has been increasingly called into question, it is worth pausing to remember where the doctrine came from, how and why it came about, and the work it has done and is poised to do going forward. This essay, a chapter in The Eighth Amendment and Its Future in a New Age of Punishment (Cambridge U. Press 2020), touches upon each of those topics, first discussing the origins of the evolving standards doctrine and how it revitalized the Eighth Amendment, then turning to the power of the doctrine and the problems that developed as it came into full flower, and then finally turning to the doctrine’s potential going forward. The power, problems, and potential of the evolving standards doctrine are what make the doctrine a lightning rod of criticism as well as a beacon of hope for progressive decisions to come, rendering it one of the most interesting and important areas of Eighth Amendment law.

People experiencing homelessness and serious mental illness exhibit high rates of criminal justice system involvement. Researchers have debated the causes of such involvement among people experiencing serious mental illness, including what services to prioritize. Some, for example, have emphasized mental illness while others have emphasized poverty. We examined factors associated with criminal convictions among people experiencing homelessness and serious mental illness recruited to the Vancouver At Home study between October 2009 and June 2011. Comprehensive administrative data were examined over the five-year period preceding study baseline to identify risk and protective factors associated with criminal convictions among participants (n = 425). Eight variables were independently associated with criminal convictions, some of which included drug dependence, psychiatric hospitalization, an irregular frequency of social assistance payments, and prior conviction. Collectively, findings of the present study implicate poverty, social marginalization, crises involving mental illness, and the need for long-term recovery-oriented services that address these conditions to reduce criminal convictions among people experiencing homelessness and serious mental illness.

In 2007, the District of Columbia (DC) began a systemic reform of educational governance and processes that sought to produce dramatic improvements in student outcomes. These reforms included implementation of a more rigorous staff evaluation system, steady growth of the public charter school sector, and the introduction of a unified enrollment system. This study estimates the cumulative impacts of these reforms by analyzing how changes in achievement levels of DC schools compare to changes observed for similar students in similar geographic areas without such reforms. This analysis improves on prior efforts to study these reforms in several ways. The authors use nearly a quarter century of data (from the early 1990s to 2017), which enables coverage of more cohorts of students than previous studies—including achievement in grades 4 and 8 for five cohorts of DC students before 2007 and three cohorts after. The authors also take advantage of recent advances in constructing counterfactual outcomes in situations where one or very few units are treated. They find that the reforms in DC were associated with larger than expected growth in grade 4 math and reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). They also find similar gains in grade 8 math, especially for cohorts with more exposure to the reforms, but not in grade 8 reading. These results suggest that the reforms improved math education in kindergarten through grade 4 with impacts lasting to grade 8. At one-third of a standard deviation for math, the impacts found in DC are similar in magnitude to those observed for math in New Orleans, where major school reforms were implemented starting in 2006–2007, immediately after hurricane Katrina, and larger than for some well-known education interventions like Success for All and the class size reductions in Tennessee. The results are less clear for reading and for achievement in high school, where data limitations precluded a credible impact analysis.

Before the 2020-21 school year, educators, policymakers, and parents confronted the stark and uncertain trade-offs implied by the health, educational, and economic consequences of offering instruction remotely, in person, or through a hybrid of the two. Most public schools in the U.S. chose remote-only instruction and enrollment fell dramatically (i.e., a loss of roughly 1.1 million K-12 students). This study examines the impact of these choices on public-school enrollment using unique panel data that combine district-level enrollment trajectories with information on their instructional modes. Offering remote-only instead of in-person instruction reduced enrollment by 1.1 percentage points (i.e., a 42% increase in disenrollment from -2.6 to -3.7%). The disenrollment effects of remote instruction are concentrated in kindergarten and, to a lesser extent, elementary schools. The authors do not find consistent evidence that remote instruction influenced middle or high-school enrollment or that hybrid instruction had an impact.

As the COVID-19 pandemic pushed firms to comply with social distancing guidelines, the relative demand for work that could be performed from home was expected to increase. However, while employment in remotable occupations was relatively resilient during the pandemic, online job postings, which measure demand for new hires, for these occupations dropped disproportionately. This apparent contradiction is not explained by prior job churning in non-remote jobs, nor by the re-composition of the labor market across economic sectors. The underperformance of postings in remotable jobs during the pandemic concentrates in essential occupations and occupations with high returns to experience. Report findings uncover a relevant divergence between employment and hiring along the remotability dimension of work during the COVID-19 pandemic: Hiring efforts and employment retention efforts did not moving consistently along the remotability dimension of work. Given the ongoing policy efforts to stimulate the rehire of laid-off workers, as well as the potentially growing relevance of remote work, additional research on this apparent contradiction is necessary.

Millions of workers in the U.S. rely on social policy to sustain them during challenging times—from unemployment to food insecurity, social safety net programs allow people to participate more fully in their lives and the economy despite financial uncertainty. As one of the foundational programs of the social safety net, Social Security ensures a basic level of financial support for people as they age. Shifting demographics combined with little policy change has pushed this program into crisis, with reserves predicted to be depleted as early as 2035 without intervention. Yet, Social Security presents a model of exactly the type of benefit workers need in the 21st century—portable across jobs and available to all workers. In order to offer actionable solutions and to illustrate the magnitude of the current crisis, this proposal examines 1) mandating increased employer contributions to Social Security from medium and large employers, 2) requiring companies relying heavily on independent contractors to contribute to Social Security on their behalf, and 3) allowing and incentivizing additional contributions from small employers and self-employed workers.

The U.S. Coast Guard seeks to attract, recruit, and retain a workforce that represents all segments of U.S. society. However, in the current active-duty Coast Guard, representation of women and of members of racial and ethnic minority groups declines as rank increases, ultimately resulting in a less diverse senior leadership. These demographics are largely the cumulative effect of the service's personnel system in which the pool of potential senior leaders narrows at each stage of the career life cycle, along with the number of candidates from underrepresented groups. To identify the root causes of the underrepresentation of women and of members of racial and ethnic minority groups in the Coast Guard, researchers used a mixed-method approach involving literature reviews, analysis of personnel data, interviews with subject-matter experts, focus groups, and a survey of active-duty personnel. The team examined the factors that shape representation at each phase of the military career life cycle — recruiting, career development, promotion and advancement, and retention — and identified facilitators of and barriers to improving diversity in the Coast Guard. The report includes recommendations to help the Coast Guard achieve its ultimate goal of a workforce that looks like the nation it serves.

This report presents state, regional, and national estimates of the percentage of persons who were uninsured, had private health insurance coverage, and had public health insurance coverage at the time of the interview. Data from the 2019 National Health Interview Survey were used to estimate health insurance coverage. Estimates were categorized by age group, state Medicaid expansion status, urbanization level, expanded regions, and state. Estimates by state Medicaid expansion status, urbanization level, and expanded regions were based on data from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. State estimates are shown for 32 states and the District of Columbia. In 2019, among persons under age 65, 12.0% were uninsured, 64.3% had private coverage, and 25.9% had public coverage at the time of the interview. Among adults aged 18–64 (working-age adults), the percent uninsured ranged from 12.4% for those living in large fringe (suburban) metropolitan counties to 17.5% for those living in non-metropolitan counties. Working-age adults living in non-Medicaid expansion states (20.8%) were about twice as likely to be uninsured compared with those living in Medicaid expansion states (10.9%). Similar patterns were observed among children aged 0–17 years. The percentage of working-age adults who were uninsured was significantly higher than the national average (14.5%) in Florida (20.6%), Georgia (22.3%), Oklahoma (25.6%), and Texas (30.5%), and significantly lower than the national average in California (11.5%), Minnesota (6.9%), New York (7.4%), Ohio (10.8%), Pennsylvania (9.8%), and Wisconsin (7.7%). The percentage of people under age 65 who were uninsured was lowest in the New England region (4.6%).

Black and Hispanic/Latinx adults report experiencing discrimination when seeking health care at higher rates than white adults, which raises the question: How might these reported experiences adversely affect health care? The Urban Institute’s December 2020 Well-Being and Basic Needs Survey asked respondents about the consequences of and actions they took in response to being treated or judged unfairly because of their race or ethnicity at a doctor’s office, clinic, or hospital in the past 12 months. Among the 3.2% of nonelderly adults who reported feeling treated or judged unfairly in these settings, more than three-quarters (75.9%) reported such treatment or judgment disrupted their receipt of health care. This includes 39% who delayed care, 34.5% who looked for a new health care provider, and 30.7% who did not get needed care. These new data highlight the need for greater attention to policies and practices that can improve health care quality and interactions with health care providers and staff for all patients, particularly for Black patients, 1 in 13 of whom reported these experiences on the Well-Being and Basic Needs Survey.

Prior to 1980, U.S. national demographic and health data collection did not identify individuals of Hispanic/Latina/o heritage as a population group. Post-1990, robust immigration from Latin America (e.g., South America, Central America, Mexico) and subsequent growth in U.S. births, dynamically reconstructed the ethnoracial lines among Latinos from about 20 countries, increasing racial admixture and modifying patterns of health disparities. The purpose of this study is to determine the state of available Latina/o population demographic and health data in the United States, assess demographic and health variables and trends from 1960 to the present, and identify current strengths, gaps, and areas of improvement. The authors conducted an analysis of 101 existing data sets that included demographic, socioeconomic, and health characteristics of the U.S. Latina/o population, grouped by three, 20-year intervals: 1960–1979, 1980–1999, and 2000–2019. The authors found that increased Latina/o immigration and U.S. births between 1960 and 2019 was associated with increases of Latino population samples in data collection. Findings indicate major gaps in the following four areas: children and youth younger than 18 years, gender and sexual identity, race and mixed-race measures, and immigration factors including nativity and generational status. The analysis of existing ethnoracial Latina/o population data collection efforts provides an opportunity for critical analysis of past trends, future directions in data collection efforts, and an equity lens to guide appropriate community health interventions and policies that will contribute to decreasing health disparities in Latina/o populations.