This report presents data collected from state, federal, and private adult correctional facilities on the characteristics of facilities by type, operator, size, physical security level, capacity, court orders, and programs. Data on the prison custody population is presented for demographic characteristics, sentence length, and custody security level by facility type and operator. Also, the report includes data on facility security staff by sex and prisoner-to-security-staff ratios. Some highlights from the report include that at midyear 2019, there were 1,079 public confinement facilities operated by either state or federal authorities and 82 private confinement facilities. At midyear 2019, there were 376 maximum, 451 medium, and 287 minimum security confinement facilities. Among all prisoners in confinement facilities at midyear 2019, about 82% were in state, 11% were in federal, and 7% were in private facilities. Among all prisoners reported in community-based facilities at midyear 2019, about 49% were in state and 51% were in private facilities.

Black youth in the U.S. experience disproportionate contact with police even when accounting for criminal or delinquent behavior. While the literature supports the link between racism and adverse health outcomes, less is known about the impact of policing on the well-being of Black youth. A total of 16 quantitative studies including 19,493 participants were included in the review and demonstrated an association between police exposure and adverse mental health, sexual risk behaviors, and substance use. A total of 13 qualitative studies including 461 participants were included in the review, which corroborated and contextualized the quantitative evidence and provided additional health outcomes, such as fear for life or hopelessness.

More than 11 million people in the United States are deaf, hard of hearing, late-deafened, or deaf-blind. Research indicates deaf people report experiencing victimization at higher rates, but a lack of accessible resources and trauma-informed services for American Sign Language (ASL) speakers makes it difficult for deaf people to report crimes and access support. In response to these issues, the District Attorney of New York County provided funding to support Barrier Free Living’s Deaf Services program, with the goal of increasing access to direct services for domestic violence survivors who are deaf and increasing local stakeholders’ awareness of deaf survivors’ needs. In this brief, the authors present interim findings on services, communication, and the perspectives of multiple local stakeholders. The authors find that Barrier Free Living requires all staff to complete an ASL course and that interpreters are regularly used in staff meetings, consumer workshops, and interactions between consumers and staff. In addition, program consumers reported positive experiences with the program. Factors that support enhanced services for deaf survivors include institutionalized and ongoing staff training around deaf communication and culture, strong collaboration and communication between staff at all levels, the consistent use of interpreters, and supportive partnerships with community organizations. Factors that impede the provision of enhanced services for deaf survivors include the lack of sufficient funding, the need to sustain programs implemented with time-restricted grant money, staff turnover, and difficulties finding qualified deaf staff.

This report is based on the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Technology survey of public schools on the use of educational technology for instruction” This report shows national data from a sample survey of public schools about their use of technology for teaching and learning during the 2019–20 school year. Questions were asked about conditions before the coronavirus pandemic started. This report presents data about public school technology resources and ways that schools use these resources to teach. The report found that 45% of schools reported having a computer for each student. An extra 37% reported having a computer for each student in some grades or classrooms. Fifteen percent let students in all grades take school-provided computers home and another 8% let students in some grades take them home. Roughly half of schools strongly agreed that teachers in their school want to use technology for teaching (49%). Schools reported on a variety of challenges for teachers in using technology for teaching and learning in the school. A little less than two-thirds said that lack of time for teachers to become familiar with new technologies and then use them for teaching was a moderate (43%) or large challenge (22%). Schools were asked about challenges their teachers face in using technology for teaching purposes. Twenty two percent said that outdated computers or software was a moderate challenge. Another 12% said that was a large challenge. Twenty six percent of schools said that lack of support on how to use technology for teaching was a moderate challenge and another 8% said it was a large challenge.

Student loans defer the cost of college until after graduation, allowing many students access to higher lifetime earnings and colleges and universities they otherwise could not afford. Even with student loans, however, the authors find that students psychologically realize the financial costs of a college education long before their loan repayments begin. This early cost realization frames financial decisions between most pairs of colleges as an intertemporal trade-off. Students choose between investments with (1) smaller short-term costs but smaller long-term returns (a lower-cost, lower-return [LC-LR] college) and (2) larger short-term costs but larger long-term returns (a higher-cost, higher-return [HC-HR] college). The authors find that early cost realization increases preferences for LC-LR colleges—preferences that could reduce lifetime earnings—in both simulations and experiments. Preferences for LC-LR colleges are pronounced among financially impatient students and in choice pairs of LC-LR and HC-HR colleges where the equilibrium is set at a low-discount-rate threshold. A return-on-investment strategy, future uncertainty, and debt aversion cannot explain these results. A decision aid synchronizing the psychological realization of costs and benefits reduced preferences for LC-LR colleges, illustrating that the preference is constructed and receptive to interventions.

While past empirical studies have explored associations between types of primary and secondary schools and student academic achievement, outcomes beyond academic performance remain less well-understood. Using longitudinal data from a cohort of children (N = 12,288, mean age = 14.56 years) of nurses, this study examined associations between the types of schools participants attended in adolescence and a wide range of subsequent psychological well-being, social engagement, character strengths, mental health, health behavior and physical health outcomes. Results in this sample suggested little difference between attending private independent schools and public schools across outcomes in young adulthood. There were, however, notable differences in subsequent outcomes comparing homeschooling and public schools, and possibly some evidence comparing religious schools and public schools. Specifically, there was some evidence that attending religious schools versus public schools was associated with a higher likelihood of frequent religious service attendance and becoming registered voters, a lower risk of overweight/obese, fewer lifetime sexual partners, and a higher risk of subsequently being binge drinkers; however, these associations were not robust to correction for multiple testing. Homeschooling compared with public schooling was associated with subsequently more frequent volunteering, greater forgiveness, and more frequent religious service attendance, and possibly also with greater purpose in life, less marijuana use, and fewer lifetime sexual partners, but negatively associated with college degree attainment and possibly with greater risk of posttraumatic stress disorder. These results may encourage education stakeholders to consider a wider range of outcomes beyond academic performance in decision-making.

This article proposes and evaluates four hypotheses about U.S. pollution and environmental policy over the last half century. First, air and water pollution have declined substantially, although greenhouse gas emissions have not. Second, environmental policy explains a large share of these trends. Third, much of the regulation of air and drinking water pollution has benefits that exceed costs, although the evidence for surface water pollution regulation is less clear. Fourth, while the distribution of pollution across social groups is unequal, market-based environmental policies and command-and-control policies do not appear to produce systematically different distributions of environmental outcomes. The author also discusses recent innovations in methods and data that can be used to evaluate pollution trends and policies, including the increased use of environmental administrative data, statistical cost-benefit comparisons, analysis of previously understudied policies, more sophisticated analyses of pollution transport, micro-macro frameworks, and a focus on the distribution of environmental outcomes.

Public K-12 schools are open now for the academic year, and instruction has returned to full-time in person, despite some disruptions due to outbreaks of the highly contagious COVID-19 delta variant. The anticipation has been that with schools reopening, women with young children—who have disproportionately dropped out of and remained out of the labor force since the start of the pandemic—will return to the labor force. However, the small bit of evidence provided by the labor market data in September suggests that this is not the case, as the aggregate labor force participation rate roughly moved sideways and the rate for women ticked down. In this article, the authors speak to this question by examining the extent to which the switch to all-virtual and hybrid schooling during the pandemic impacted the labor force participation of women with young children. The authors find that increases in the share of children in virtual or hybrid schooling in a given state are associated with decreases in labor force participation among women with young children in that state. However, the effects are modest. Moreover, in our data, remote schooling also depresses the participation of men with young children, all else equal, so it cannot entirely explain the relatively low participation of women with young children since the start of the pandemic. From a policy perspective these findings indicate that the reopening of schools will not be enough to return mothers’ labor force participation back to its pre-pandemic levels.

Capital has flowed inequitably to communities across the U.S. for decades, often with a racialized motivation or a racialized effect. This report analyzes investment flows in Milwaukee from 2005 to 2019, studying what kinds of money have been flowing, and for what purposes, into the city’s neighborhoods. The report builds on previous investment flow studies have conducted in other cities, such as Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, and Minneapolis and Saint Paul, as well as national studies. Analysis of investment flows in Milwaukee by neighborhood race and poverty rate reveals disparate market conditions among neighborhoods and differential levels of wealth and access to credit. In addition to capital flows inequities across neighborhoods, the data show that the city overall needs greater mainstream capital flows. In sum, high-poverty neighborhoods and neighborhoods of color are being starved of private market capital. There are many reasons for this, including that project sizes are smaller and market rents are lower in these communities. But while the city as a whole has gained some ground, white and high-income neighborhoods receive many times the investment that neighborhoods of color and low-income neighborhoods receive. Although mission-driven and public sources are directed to such neighborhoods, those investment sources cannot create a level playing field. Extensive and sustained public and private action will be required to generate financial opportunities for all Milwaukee neighborhoods.

Approximately 2.3 million children under age 18 live with a veteran who is disabled, according to analyses of data from American Community Survey for 2015–2019. Prior research suggests negative outcomes for children growing up in military caregiving homes. The return of service members who sustained or developed an illness or injury because of their military service can be disruptive for families as they learn to support them and establish new norms for operating as a family. In the midst of this disruption, families are often left wanting help. Caregiving consumes the time and energy of the adult caregiver, and children in many military caregiving homes consequently take on additional responsibilities—ranging from additional household chores to caregiving responsibilities for their injured or ill service member or veteran and responsibilities for siblings who would otherwise have been cared for by the adults in the home. Ultimately, children in military caregiving homes can get lost in their family’s response to the needs of the care recipient. National and local barriers limiting access to speedy, high quality care for care recipients and their families negatively impact the entire family’s well-being, but families have ideas about how to overcome the barriers. Navigating the federal system to access quality care is a significant source of anxiety and distress for military caregiving families. Caregivers offered solutions that they believed could help improve family functioning and support the well-being of children from military caregiving homes, like providing affordable and accessible child care and cultivating schools’ understanding of the needs and impacts of caregiving. Four recommendations in the report include (1) Develop quality programs and interventions that support children in caregiving families and focus on peer support, mental health, and age-appropriate developmental opportunities; (2) Fund, promote, and create supports for the entire family unit; (3) Amplify national campaigns and coalitions to improve understanding of care recipients’ visible and invisible wounds and the needs of caregivers and children in military caregiving homes; and (4) Partner with federal and local agencies, including private organizations, to reduce barriers to health care and provide centralized comprehensive services focused on supporting caregiving families.

The COVID-19 pandemic–related recession and resulting job loss raised significant concerns that the U.S. uninsured population could increase, perhaps by millions. However, predictions about coverage loss have not materialized. Because this recession is the first economic downturn since the federal Affordable Care Act's (ACA's) major coverage provisions took effect in 2014, a possible explanation for the lack of coverage loss is that the ACA's safety-net provisions — such as Medicaid expansion and Advance Premium Tax Credits (APTCs) for marketplace coverage — did their job. Temporary provisions played an outsized role in stabilizing coverage in 2020 and will continue to play a large role in 2021. This analysis and emerging evidence from other sources suggest that temporary policies — notably, continuous Medicaid enrollment and furlough coverage — are major contributing factors to the success of the health insurance safety net. The temporary extension and enhancement of APTCs likely contributed to enrollment stability in 2021. Workers' ability to retain job-based coverage after being laid off may have been a substantial factor in holding national insurance rates steady. On their own, the ACA's coverage provisions might not have fully prevented insurance loss during the COVID-19 pandemic. For New York state, extending and enhancing APTCs — two temporary policies that legislators have proposed making permanent through the federal Build Back Better Act — could offset most of the decline in insurance that would be expected because of elevated unemployment in 2021, even without continuous Medicaid enrollment.

The fundamental dilemma in prescription drug policy is often understood to be the tradeoff between establishing incentives for innovation that produces new cures through high product prices and the fact that high prices can and do strain the ability of consumers and taxpayers to afford the high prices to support that innovation. This is also the tradeoff posed by the Congressional Budget Office’s recent cost estimate of one of the leading proposals to control drug pricing, H.R. 3, the Elijah E. Cummings Lower Drug Costs Now Act. That bill proposes new negotiation authority be extended to the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services to establish drug prices and imposes limits on drug price inflation. The implementation of these policies is estimated to save the public sector almost half a trillion dollars a decade – yet at the same time declining pharmaceutical industry revenues are estimated to result in 30 fewer drugs over multiple decades. Thus, the dilemma facing policymakers is perceived to be that controlling drug prices now necessarily means fewer new drugs tomorrow. In this paper, the authors review evidence-based approaches to address this dilemma and show how they can improve affordability among drugs now and dramatically increase pharmaceutical innovation in the U.S. The authors find that pricing and coverage mechanisms that reward product value can work in concert with other policies aimed at improving innovation incentives. Some savings from rationalizing spending on existing drugs can be used to finance new initiatives, producing a package that both saves money on net and improves the health and well-being of us all.