This report uses data from BJS’s Federal Justice Statistics Program to describe criminal prosecutions over federal hate crimes from 2005 to 2019. It presents the number of hate crimes investigated by U.S. attorneys, percentages of suspects who were prosecuted, and reasons that U.S. attorneys declined to prosecute. It provides statistics on case disposition in federal court, including sentencing outcomes for defendants who were convicted of a hate crime, and an analysis of the federal response to hate crimes. The report relies on existing administrative data received from the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys and the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts for BJS’s Federal Justice Statistics Program. Data from the report indicates that while hate crime matters investigated by U.S. attorneys’ offices declined 8% from the 2005-2009 period to the 2015-2019 period, the conviction rate for hate crimes increased from 83% during 2005-2009 to 94% during 2015-2019.

The National Center for State Courts released its 2021 edition of Trends of the State Courts. One article, "From the Doghouse to the Courthouse: Facility Dogs as Trial Aids for Vulnerable Witnesses" examines the pros and cons of these types of support dogs, as well as legal considerations for courts that might be weighing the use of facility dogs. The authors start by noting that facility dogs, or therapy dogs, are currently used in more than 40 states. It cites data that supports the position that facility dogs are beneficial to vulnerable witness well-being. While there are advantages to the use of these animals, the authors revealed some concerns, chiefly the potential effect that it might cause on the jury. "[F]or example, the dog could lead the jury to think the victim must be injured if she needs a dog to testify, or that the dog is a ploy to trick the jury into thinking her injuries are severe." This issue came up in the criminal arena in 2021, as noted in NCSC's NCSC's Jur-E Bulletin, where a judge held that a witness’s emotional support animal did not prejudice a criminal jury. In addition, the article provides practical elements for courts and judges that might be thinking about implementing this type of aid in their courtrooms. Judges and courts should take into consideration possible allergic reactions to dogs, and should also determine what training handlers will need.

This article discusses the challenges faced when addressing the needs of youth involved in both child welfare and juvenile justice systems. The article recommends conducting timely and systematic identification of dual system youth, improving collaboration across child welfare and juvenile justice systems, and assessing services provided. The article also describes the OJJDP Dual System Youth Design Study, highlighting best practices for jurisdictions to prevent maltreatment and delinquency among dual system youth. Using case studies from 41 jurisdictions implementing the Center for Juvenile Justice Reform’s Crossover Youth Practice model, researchers identified best practices for guiding collaboration regarding dual system youth. The study identified several practices most commonly implemented and prioritized across the sites, including early identification of dual involvement, improved information sharing across child welfare and juvenile justice systems, and coordinated case supervision.

The onset of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has prompted school districts in the United States to offer remote schooling options for their K–12 students. The authors of this report fielded the third American School District Panel (ASDP) survey in June 2021 to assess districts' plans to offer both temporary and more-lasting remote instruction options starting in fall 2021. The key ASDP findings presented in this report draw on the responses of 292 district leaders after weighting those responses to make them nationally representative. Results from the June 2021 ASDP survey suggest that K–12 remote instruction will outlast the pandemic. Remote instruction can be delivered in various forms, however, and the survey questions delved into three: a temporary option for fully remote instruction in fall 2021, fully online courses, and standalone virtual schools. The authors explore differences in districts' pre-pandemic offerings and plans to offer multiple remote instructional modes in the 2021–2022 school year by district type. Virtual schools have had the most marked growth. Only 3% of surveyed districts ran a virtual school before the pandemic began. Since the pandemic began, however, the number of districts running virtual schools has grown nine-fold. And nearly one-quarter of surveyed districts that had no plans to operate a virtual school in the 2021–2022 school year had at least some interest in operating a virtual school sometime in the future.

Based on data collected through the Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study, a nationally representative study which followed first-time college students for 6 years, these tables provide information on students' characteristics and their withdrawal, stopout, and transfer rates. Stopout is defined as a break in enrollment of 5 or more consecutive months. Among 2011–12 first-time postsecondary students who did not attain a credential after six years, 28% were still enrolled in 2017. The percentage of females still enrolled (29.2%) was greater than the percentage of males still enrolled (26.8%). Students who took higher levels of mathematics in high school tended to stay enrolled even after six years with 39.2% of students who took calculus or higher still enrolled and only 23.6% of students who took less than Algebra 2 still enrolled after six years.

Relatively few studies provide rigorous estimates of the long-term effects of large-scale public preschool programs, and their findings vary greatly. This study investigates the effects in third through tenth grade of New Jersey's Abbott preschool program which has many of the features and contexts hypothesized to mitigate fadeout. The program was designed and implemented in the context of a court mandated systemic reform of education and its funding from preschool through high school. The authors describe in detail the program's features including an extensive, multi-tiered continuous improvement system. Sample size for analyses ranged from 426 to 785 depending on the grade and assessment. Participants were primarily Black and Hispanic students living in 31 communities with high concentrations of poverty. Inverse weighting by propensity scores was employed with multiple imputation for missing data to estimate effects on achievement, grade retention, and special education. Substantial positive effects were found in language arts and literacy, mathematics, and science on statewide assessments. Effects did not fade after grade 3. Achievement effects appear to be larger for 2-year than 1-year of the preschool program. Grade retention was significantly lower through grade 10. Effects on special education placement were imprecisely estimated but consistent with other findings of reduced special education. Results were robust with respect to alternative methods to control for measured and unmeasured differences between preschool and comparison groups and for missing data. This study adds to the evidence on preschool program features and contexts associated with long-term effects.

The federal Small Business Administration provides physical disaster loans to help businesses, homeowners, and others rebuild damaged property and to assist with recovery in declared disaster areas. Through the Recovery Improvements for Small Entities (RISE) After Disaster Act of 2015, borrowers can obtain a loan for up to $25,000—instead of the previous $14,000 limit—without pledging any collateral. The U.S. Government Accountability Office reviewed more than 20 years of loan data and found that the loans approved before the change in collateral requirements had higher default rates than the loans approved after the change. However, this statistic may change over time as newer loans mature.

Public transportation offers residents of cities, towns, and villages throughout the United States access to jobs, schools, and other essential resources at an affordable cost and with low impacts on the environment. In this report, the author examines the current allocation of public funds for transit operations—the money required to pay for the energy and labor needed to run services. The author finds that higher-income towns and cities benefit from better public transportation access than their lower-income peers. Although federal funding has no political leanings and is redistributive in that it funds smaller and lower-income communities at higher levels, most transit operations are funded by states and localities. Reliance on those governments to keep trains and buses running reinforces inequalities between communities. Building off a proposal from advocates to expand federal transit operations funding by $20 billion a year, the author then explores whether such a program would improve access. The author shows that an equity-focused formula could more than double transit funds for the typical community while reducing differences in transit quality.

Recent policy debate on minimum wages has focused not only on raising the minimum wage, but on eliminating the tip credit for restaurant workers. The authors use data on past variation in tip credits – or minimum wages for restaurant workers – to provide evidence on the potential impacts of eliminating (or reducing) the tip credit. The authors’ evidence points to higher tipped minimum wages (smaller tip credits) reducing jobs among tipped restaurant workers, without earnings effects on those who remain employed sufficiently large to raise total earnings in this sector. And most of their evidence provides no indication that higher tipped minimum wages would be well targeted to poor or low-income families or reduce the likelihood of being poor or very low income.

This report presents data on poverty based on information collected in the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). The report focuses on data collected in the 2014 Panel of the SIPP covering January 2013 through December 2016. The report describes patterns of poverty using measures with different time horizons and provides a dynamic view of the duration of poverty spells and the frequency of transitions into and out of poverty. The poverty measures discussed include monthly, annual, episodic, and chronic poverty rates. The report also examines the persistence of annual poverty, the movement of people across income-to-poverty ratio groupings, the duration of poverty spells, and the poverty survival rate. Additionally, estimates are compared across various demographic groups such as sex, race, Hispanic origin, age, family status, and educational attainment. Data from this report indicates that from January 2013 through December 2016, approximately 34% of the U.S. population was in poverty for at least two months, but that of all poverty spells, 35% ended within six months. However, the median length of a given poverty spell was 11.1 months. Across the 48-month period, the average monthly poverty rate was 15.2%.

U.S. health care payment policy is shifting from fee for-service to more capitated or value-based payments. At the same time, technology is increasingly becoming a part of health care delivery. As a result, health care providers, health care systems, and health plans are relying more and more on population health management algorithms to identify potentially high-cost, high-utilization patients and target these patients in efforts to improve outcomes or reduce health care costs. Algorithms use a variety of data sources, including medical claims data, electronic health records, and individual or neighborhood-level social determinants of health data to identify patients at high risk for hospitalization or death. Once the algorithm identifies a cohort of patients at greater risk for hospitalization or death, the provider or other stakeholders can act, including increasing outreach to these patients, involving care coordinators, or encouraging patients to participate in disease management programs.

The authors describe post-COVID symptomatology in a national sample of 11-17-year-old children and young people with PCR-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection compared to test-negative controls. The study is a cohort study of test-positive (n=3,065) and age-, sex- and geographically-matched test-negative children and young people (n=3,739) completed detailed questionnaires 3 months post-test. Results show that at PCR-testing, 35.4% of test-positives and 8.3% of test-negatives had any symptoms whilst 30.6% and 6.2%, respectively, had 3+ symptoms. At 3 months post-testing, 66.5% of test-positives and 53.3% of test-negatives had any symptoms, whilst 30.3% and 16.2%, respectively, had 3+ symptoms. Latent class analysis identified two classes, characterized by few or multiple symptoms. This latter class was more frequent among test-positives, females, older children and young people and those with worse pre-test physical and mental health. Test-positive children and young people had a similar symptom profile to test-negative children and young people but with higher prevalence of single and, particularly, multiple symptoms at PCR-testing and 3 months later.

The Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program assists people who have a disability or who are over age 65 and have low incomes and few assets. But SSI benefits are limited, and the base federal benefit has not been increased since the program began. This fact sheet estimates the antipoverty impacts of four SSI program changes proposed in the Supplemental Security Income Restoration Act of 2021. The authors find that, taken together, these four provisions would reduce the number of people in poverty by 3.3 million, including 1.2 million people over age 65, 1.2 million adults with disabilities, 558,000 adults who live with an SSI recipient, and 402,000 children. Further, the provisions would more than halve the percentage of SSI recipients in poverty, from 35.7% to 16.1%.

Mass incarceration is known to foster infectious disease outbreaks, amplification of infectious diseases in surrounding communities, and exacerbation of health disparities in disproportionately policed communities. To date, however, policy interventions intended to achieve epidemic mitigation in U.S. communities have neglected to account for decarceration as a possible means of protecting public health and safety. The objective of this study was to evaluate the association of jail decarceration and government anticontagion policies with reductions in the spread of SARS-CoV-2. In the 1,605 counties included in this study, the mean (SD) prison population was 283.38 (657.78) individuals, and the mean (SD) population was 315.24 (2151.01) persons per square mile. An estimated 80% reduction in U.S. jail populations, achievable through noncarceral management of nonviolent alleged offenses and in line with average international incarceration rates, would have been associated with a 2.0% (95% CI, 0.8%-3.1%) reduction in daily COVID-19 case growth rates. Jail decarceration was associated with 8 times larger reductions in COVID-19 growth rates in counties with above-median population density relative to those below this median. Nursing home visitation bans were associated with a 7.3% reduction in COVID-19 case growth rates, followed by school closures, mask mandates, prison visitation bans, and stay-at-home orders. These findings suggest that, among other anticontagion interventions, large-scale decarceration and changes to pretrial detention policies are likely to be important for improving U.S. public health, biosecurity, and pandemic preparedness.