The transition from prisons or jails back into the community can be challenging, and many returning citizens reengage with the criminal justice system. Preparing incarcerated individuals for successful reintegration is a critical mission of corrections agencies and their community-based partners. This report details the findings of a March 2021 virtual workshop aimed at identifying and prioritizing needs to support successful reentry. The workshop included prison, jail, and probation and parole administrators; community-based service providers; researchers; and other experts. Through the workshop 37 needs were identified and 11 needs were ranked as high priority. These high-priority needs included issues to address in five key areas: programming, transitional services, organizational issues, coordination and continuity of care, and equity issues. The report also presents related recommendations including developing and sharing case studies, best practices, and effective strategies to use technology to train individuals for high-demand jobs and developing implementation guides that highlight effective strategies for obtaining funding to establish (and incentivize participation in) model automated solutions to support coordinated reentry case management across partners.

Juvenile court judges are the most important public figures in the juvenile justice system—their decisions impact whether hundreds of thousands of youth each year become court involved and for how long, whether they are involuntarily removed from their homes and communities, and the services they receive. Despite the importance of these judges, however, states and locales have generally not assessed whether and how the structure, roles, and operations of their juvenile courts support or hinder public safety and positive youth outcomes. With support from the State Justice Institute, staff from The Council of State Governments (CSG) Justice Center and National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ) conducted an analysis in 2021 of how courts that handle juvenile delinquency cases (juvenile courts) are structured and operate in all 50 states. This report, stemming from the 2021 analysis, is structured around five key recommendations including (1) establishing specialized, dedicated juvenile and family court judges responsible for hearing delinquency cases; (2) ensuring that judges statewide have the information, tools, and data needed to make decisions based on research to improve public safety and youth outcomes; (3) requiring all judges who hear delinquency cases to receive training on adolescent development and juvenile justice research prior to taking the bench and annually thereafter; (4) establishing dedicated forums, initiatives, and supports specifically for strengthening the juvenile court, including a new federal Court Improvement Project targeting juvenile justice court improvements; (5) identifying statewide performance measures for juvenile court judges and collect and use data to strengthen decision-making transparency, research alignment, and accountability. Each recommendation section includes rationales, concrete policies, and practices for states to adopt, and related state best practices and innovations for jurisdictions to consider. States can use the report to identify gaps in their policies and practices, as well as promising practices and innovations from other states, and to advance a set of policy and practice recommendations for court improvement.

Following recommendations from the 2015 Louisiana Justice Reinvestment Task Force, the 2017 Legislature passed the state’s Justice Reinvestment Initiative (JRI), which included Act 261. The act required that 70% of any savings resulting from the implementation of JRI policies be reinvested into four areas: support for victims of crime, grants to community-based programs, internal investments in the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, and, starting in year 2, investments in the Office of Juvenile Justice. In the three years since implementation of the JRI legislation began, Louisiana saved over $35 million dollars by reducing corrections costs. The correctional savings achieved through JRI have allowed the state’s Department of Public Safety and Corrections Secretary James LeBlanc to expand educational, vocational, and pre-release programming in state prisons and local jails. Additionally, these savings enable the department to partner with local organizations to create new post-release reentry services within communities across the state. By investing locally in reentry supports, Louisiana is allowing each parish to expand programming and services that meet the specific needs of the people returning home to their community.

Elder abuse and neglect are serious yet preventable problems in the United States. Approximately five million Americans are estimated to be victims of elder abuse and neglect each year, and just one in 24 cases are reported to authorities. Stacy A. Drake, co-director of the Harris County (Texas) elder fatality review team, named EFFORT, discusses how she and other team members identify cases of possible abuse or neglect in this article from the National Institute of Justice’s Notes from the Field series. To identify an opportunity for system-level improvement, each case undergoes a deep dive review by the EFFORT members looking at the circumstances of death. The EFFORT team meets monthly and includes leaders from hospitals, clinics, emergency medical services, district attorney’s offices, adult protective services, the Texas Medicaid Fraud Control Unit, the Ombudsman Program, law enforcement, and the medical examiner’s office. At each meeting, a case is presented, and the members identify any historical touchpoints that the various agencies may have had with the person involved. The members then anonymously vote if they believe the death could have been prevented, and the group discusses avenues for improvement. To identify an opportunity for system-level improvement, each case undergoes a deep dive review by the EFFORT members looking at the circumstances of death.

This new resource hub is designed for those who are interested in the condition of education in different geographic locales in the United States, including cities, suburbs, towns, and rural areas. It includes tabulations produced by the National Center for Education Statistics that cover all locales, with indicators and summary reports that focus on specific locales forthcoming in future releases. Rural areas will be the first locale highlighted. The result of this work is 140 tables with data disaggregated by all four locales. These tables cover a wide range of topics grouped into broad themes: family characteristics, educational experiences, school resources and staffing, and educational outcomes.

In a corequisite approach to developmental education, students enroll in a college-level course paired concurrently with a support course designed to address student learning needs in a given subject. This report, sponsored by Strong Start to Finish, a network of policy and research partners for developmental education, examines early college outcomes of students placed into corequisite reading courses at the 13 community colleges in the Tennessee Board of Regents (TBR) system. The authors investigate how outcomes changed since TBR colleges adopted a corequisite approach in reading and look at differences in outcomes by college-level course pairings and course features, including delivery format (online, hybrid, and face-to-face). Since TBR mandated corequisite approaches to serving students with developmental needs in 2015, students placed into developmental education experienced substantial improvements in gateway, or foundational, course outcomes. Drawing on these and other findings, the authors offer recommendations to institutions seeking to improve supports for students who need learning support in reading including enrolling all students deemed underprepared in reading in corequisite courses in their first term and strengthening the design and delivery of online corequisite reading models.

Staff training is a key ingredient for improving early childhood program quality. Training comes in many forms, but virtual learning opportunities are becoming increasingly common. This brief describes Washington, D.C.’s early educators’ participation in professional development planning and virtual training during the first year of the pandemic, as well as their preferred training topics and formats. Findings are based on analyses of administrative data from the Quorum e-learning system and a 2021 survey of teaching staff (N= 417) in licensed child development centers and homes that participate in D.C.’s quality rating and improvement system, Capital Quality. Participation in online training was high and peaked during the height of the pandemic as training topics focused on child health and safety and COVID-19 protocols. Most, 75%, of early educators reported benefiting a lot from virtual training, and most would like to continue receiving training through recorded videos or live webinars rather than in-person formats. Assessing young children, curriculum planning, and supporting children’s mental health and teachers’ own self-care were rated highly for future training topics. Findings can inform future planning and delivery of early educator professional development.

Recent technological progress is fundamentally changing working environments by connecting physical and digital spheres. Connecting both spheres is enabled by augmenting automation with digitalization such that technology conducts work processes in a self-contained and automatic manner. Examples of such technologies include cyber-physical and embedded systems, smart factories, big data analytical tools, artificial intelligence (AI), and augmented reality. Such cutting-edge technologies can perform work automatically and autonomously without human intervention, prompting fears of massive employment losses. Theoretically, the link between new technologies and employment is ambiguous. While most theories suggest that employment will grow on net, there is likely heterogeneity across workers, firms, and sectors of the economy. A growing literature has empirically investigated these issues mainly based on aggregate data for the economy and in specific industry sectors, but analyses at the level of firms and individual workers are rare. One likely reason for this gap in the literature is the scarcity of datasets that provide measures of the usage of advanced technologies at the firm level and accompanying workers’ outcomes. Such data are important to understand how these new technologies affect workers and firms. The relationship between new technologies and jobs is complex, as rapidly spreading, cutting-edge technologies such as AI and augmented reality lead to uneven impacts across workers. Recent research suggests that career changes, switching occupations, and moving across multiple employers and even across industries will increasingly become important for workers to remain employed. Policymakers should invest in measuring how these new technologies are adopted and used in firms to facilitate future research on the drivers of nuanced adjustments across different workers. It is equally important for policymakers to invest in labor market policies that help individuals prepare for the changing demands of work environments of the future.

Recognizing the need to enhance the effectiveness of its recruiting efforts across the force, the U.S. Department of the Air Force is determined to integrate its recruiting activities, which are currently distributed across six accession sources — the U.S. Air Force Recruiting Service (Regular Air Force), U.S. Air Force Reserve, Air National Guard, U.S. Air Force Academy, U.S. Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps, and U.S. Air Force Civilian Service — into a more unified approach. Total Force Recruiting (TFR) aims to unite the previously siloed entities, standardize processes, and optimize technologies. However, in the absence of a systematic evaluation, it is difficult to identify the nuances of this progress. To support the continued development and sustainment of TFR, the authors designed and deployed a measurement tool, Total Force Recruiting Panel–Technology and Integration Survey. In this report, the authors discuss the results of the survey to provide baseline data about the state of TFR in the U.S. Department of the Air Force from late 2019 that can inform leaders of the Total Force Recruiting Council leaders to guide TFR initiatives. Survey results indicated that over 90% of recruiters know what TFR means, but a sizeable minority of Regular Air Force and Air National Guard respondents doubted the benefits of TF and cited competition as a barrier to recruitment. The report also provides recommendations to address findings such as further defining and disseminating concrete and detailed definitions for the TFR and enhancing engagement with recruiters.

Do perceptions about how the government spends tax dollars affect the willingness to pay taxes? The authors designed a field experiment to test this hypothesis in a natural, high-stakes context and via revealed preferences. The authors measure perceptions about the share of property tax revenues that fund public schools and the share of property taxes that are redistributed to disadvantaged districts. The authors find that even though information on where tax dollars go is publicly available and easily accessible, taxpayers still have significant misperceptions. The authors use an information-provision experiment to induce exogenous shocks to these perceptions. Using administrative data on tax appeals, the authors measure the causal effect of perceived government spending on the willingness to pay taxes. The results indicate that some perceptions about government spending have a significant effect on the probability of filing a tax appeal and in a manner that is consistent with the classical theory of benefit-based taxation. The authors also discuss implications for researchers and policy makers, noting that governments may leverage transparency and accountability to improve perceptions about how tax dollars benefit taxpayers, which could boost tax compliance and increase taxpayer support of new taxes.

This report presents estimates of health insurance coverage for the civilian non-institutionalized U.S. population based on data from the 2021 National Health Interview Survey. These estimates are being published before final editing and final weighting to provide access to the most recent information from the survey. Estimates are disaggregated by age group, sex, family income (as a percentage of the federal poverty level), race and ethnicity, and state Medicaid expansion status. Detailed appendix tables contain all estimates presented in the figures and additional estimates for selected population characteristics. With 3 years of comparable data available starting with the redesigned survey in 2019, this report is now able to provide data on trends, similar to reports using 2018 and earlier data. In 2021, 30.0 million people of all ages (9.2%) were uninsured at the time of interview. This was lower than, but not significantly different from 2020, when 31.6 million people of all ages (9.7%) were uninsured. In 2021, among adults aged 18– 64, 13.5% were uninsured at the time of interview, 21.7% had public coverage, and 66.6% had private health insurance coverage. Among children aged 0–17 years, 4.1% were uninsured, 44.3% had public coverage, and 53.8% had private health insurance coverage. Among non-Hispanic White adults aged 18–64, the percentage who were uninsured decreased from 10.5% in 2019 to 8.7% in 2021. The percentage of people under age 65 with exchange-based coverage increased from 3.7% in 2019 to 4.3% in 2021.

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to impact families and children, understanding parental attitudes and likely acceptance of the COVID-19 vaccine is essential. The authors conducted a statewide survey with a representative sample of parents in Tennessee focused on COVID-19 and influenza vaccine acceptance and perspectives. Data from 1,066 parents were analyzed using weighted survey methods to generalize results to the state of Tennessee. About 53% of parents reported a likelihood to vaccinate their children against COVID-19, and 45% were likely to vaccinate their child against COVID-19 and influenza. Female parents were less likely to vaccinate their children against COVID-19, but the strongest predictor of likely COVID-19 vaccine acceptance was influenza vaccine acceptance (adjusted odds ratio = 5.46; 95% confidence interval: 3.20-9.30). Parental acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines for children is closely tied to influenza vaccine acceptance. Public health approaches to maximize vaccine uptake could focus on children who have not been receiving influenza vaccines.

Implemented in 2012, the federal Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 (HHFKA) increased nutritional requirements of the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) to reverse the potential role of the program in childhood obesity. This study evaluates whether associations between the free or reduced-price school lunch program and body mass growth differed after implementation of the HHFKA. The authors use data from 2 nationally representative cohorts of U.S. kindergarteners sampled in 1998 to 1999 and 2010 to 2011 and followed up for 6 years, through grade 5, in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999 (ECLS-K:1999, in 2003-2004) and Kindergarten Class of 2010-2011 (ECLS-K:2011, in 2015-2016). In total, 5,958 children were selected for analysis from low-income families eligible for the free or reduced-price NSLP (household income less than 185% of the federal poverty level) who attended public schools and had no missing data on free or reduced-price NSLP participation or on body mass index (BMI; calculated as weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared) at kindergarten or grades 1 and 5. The authors used body mass index difference from the obesity threshold before and after implementation of the HHFKA for free or reduced-price NSLP participation at kindergarten and grades 1 and 5. The results indicate that before HHFKA implementation, grade 5 free or reduced-price NSLP participants had higher BMID, adjusted for their prior BMID trajectory, than nonparticipants. After HHFKA implementation, this association was attenuated, and grade 5 associations were different across cohorts.

The temporary expansion of the child tax credit (CTC) in the federal American Rescue Plan delivered monthly payments to most families with children from July through December 2021. Using data from the Urban Institute’s Well-Being and Basic Needs Survey to compare adults ages 18 to 64 that received the payments with those that did not, the authors found the share of adults who received the payments reporting food insecurity declined more than the share of adults who did not receive the payments. They also found no significant differences in the changes in employment between December 2020 and December 2021 for adults who received the payments and adults who did not receive the payments.