Conducted approximately every 4 years since 1987, the Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) survey collects data on a range of topics from a nationally representative sample of state, county, and local law enforcement agencies. This report provides data on full-time sworn officers and civilians employed by sheriffs’ offices. It presents data on the number, sex, race or Hispanic origin, and responsibilities of full-time personnel at sheriffs’ offices. The report also provides information on the policies and procedures that sheriffs’ offices adopted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This report found that sheriffs’ offices employed 174,000 full-time sworn officers and 191,000 full-time civilian personnel in 2020. More than three-quarters (76%) of sheriffs’ offices employed fewer than 50 full-time-equivalent (FTE) sworn officers. About 14% of full-time sworn officers and 12% of first-line supervisors in sheriffs’ offices were female. About 10% of full-time sworn officers in sheriffs’ offices were black, and 14% were Hispanic.

This report presents statistics about school resource officers, based on data from the first-time U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics Survey of Law Enforcement Personnel in Schools (SLEPS) agency survey, which was developed as a part of the Comprehensive School Safety Initiative. The survey was designed to address gaps in national statistics on the characteristics of law enforcement agencies employing school resource officers and the characteristics and functions of the officers. The report provides data on the agencies that employ school resource officers and demographics of the officers. It also describes the policies related to school resource officers, including law enforcement, mentoring, and teaching duties performed; hiring processes; and required training. The report found that about 5,500 law enforcement agencies employed a total of 24,900 sworn school resource officers in 2019. About 1 in 5 sworn school resource officers were female, and about 1 in 6 sworn school resource officers were black. About 9 in 10 agencies required school resource officers to inform school executive staff of an arrest of a student (91%) or staff member (89%) during school hours. Half of all agencies allowed school resource officers to interview students without parental permission.

Plea bargaining involves negotiation between a prosecutor and, often, a defense provider on behalf of their client. Prosecutors hold a lot of discretion over how to proceed regarding plea bargains, including whether to offer a plea agreement, when to do so, and what they wish to offer. Despite the wide use of plea bargaining, little is known about the practice, largely because it happens outside of public view and little is documented by the key actors involved—prosecutors. To better understand prosecutorial discretion in plea bargaining, the authors conducted a study on plea bargaining policies, practices, and outcomes. The Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office agreed to shed light on the inner workings of plea negotiations and how they are viewed by different parties involved in the process, including attorneys and people who accept pleas. The report found that the most common sentence for people who accept pleas is probation, and average maximum probation lengths are longer than two years. Of the people in the sample of case files with negotiated pleas, those who were in pretrial detention generally received worse plea outcomes than those who were released, though this may be driven partly by other differences between cases for people who are and are not detained. The analysis of the descriptive administrative data and our review of case files found that Black people generally received worse plea outcomes—including longer sentences and more custodial sentences—than White people. However, the case file review also identified differences between White and Black defendants’ prior record scores and the severity of their charges. Recommendations include creating standards to consistently collect data on plea negotiations, create official and routine mechanisms for examining plea bargaining decisionmaking, and mitigating the perceived coercive nature of the trial penalty by capping sentence lengths relative to the most lenient plea offer.

Uncommon Schools is a non-profit charter management organization that starts and manages public charter schools, primarily in traditionally underserved communities. Uncommon opened its first school in New Jersey more than 20 years ago. As of fall 2022, it operates 53 schools serving approximately 20,000 students in 19 elementary schools, 25 middle schools, and 9 high schools. The authors examined the impacts of enrollment in Uncommon Newark middle schools, and conducted interviews with school and network leaders to examine school policies and practices in the Newark and New York City regions. Findings were mixed regarding the effect of enrollment in an Uncommon Newark middle school. For example, between 2014–2015 and 2018–2019 school years, enrollment had positive and statistically significant impacts on student achievement in math and English language arts that persisted up to four years after enrollment, when compared to similar students who attended other public schools in Newark during the same period. In New York, no discernable impact on student achievement was found.

The Biden administration is developing regulations around gainful employment (GE) that would protect students from career-oriented college programs that do not adequately serve their students. A draft GE rule released earlier this year would require that graduates of certificate programs at public and non-profit colleges and nearly all programs at for-profit colleges meet a debt-to-earnings test to be eligible for federal aid. Using debt to measure value involves major limitations, however, and programs with poor outcomes can pass a debt-to-earnings test if students finance their tuition with federal grant aid or out-of-pocket funds instead of loans. Using data to examine the effects of several thresholds, the authors analyzed a tuition-to-earnings test for the GE rule and compare it with the effects of the Biden administration’s proposed debt-to-earnings test. This test more directly measures what a program costs, is not affected by the share of students borrowing, and measures prices charged to all students regardless of the type or amount of federal aid they received. A tuition-to-earnings test can produce lower or higher fail rates than the Biden administration’s proposed debt-to-earnings test depending on where the threshold is set, and different programs are affected by the tuition-to-earnings test. At least for certificate programs, the data suggest that measuring the prices institutions charge through a tuition-to-earnings test can better identify low-value programs. The administration’s proposed debt-to-earnings test would benefit low-earning programs with high tuition where graduates had low debt, but a tuition-to-earnings test identifies programs with high tuition and poor outcomes regardless of debt burdens. Using tuition, rather than debt, as a measurement may also provide greater consumer and taxpayer protections at programs where students mainly use federal Pell grants, rather than loans, to pay for their education and protect Hispanic students who would have enrolled in these programs.

Effective stewardship of taxpayer funds is a critical responsibility of the federal government. This site shows the federal agencies' progress in the prevention and recovery of improper payments while ensuring the right individuals and communities benefit from federal funds. Most improper payments are not fraudulent and not all represent a monetary loss to taxpayers. There are many scenarios that can lead to an improper payment, including overpayments, underpayments, or even payments made to the right recipient in the right amount but not in strict adherence to policies and procedures. If an agency cannot confirm whether a particular payment was made properly at the time that it is performing its improper payment review, the entire payment is determined to be unknown and counts toward the improper payment rate—even if only a fraction of the payment is ultimately found to have been made improperly. And even in cases where improper payments are subsequently recovered, they are still counted as improper. The new data shows that the improper payment rate, including unknown payments, in Fiscal Year 2022 meaningfully declined—from 7.2% to 5.1%—even as a number of new programs, including pandemic relief programs, reported for the first time.

The federal Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 provided the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) with $79.4 billion in funding over 10 years to enhance IRS resources and improve taxpayer compliance, among other purposes. This substantial amount of new funding will need effective IRS planning, prioritization, and management to help reduce the gap between taxes owed and taxes paid on time. Limitations in the systems IRS uses to account for federal taxes receivable and other unpaid assessment balances continued to exist during fiscal year 2022. In addition, continuing information system control deficiencies in areas such as encryption and configuration of security settings increase the risk of unauthorized access to, modification of, or disclosure of sensitive financial and taxpayer data and disruption of critical operations. The Government Accountability Office has made numerous recommendations to IRS that, if fully implemented, could address the enforcement of tax laws high-risk area and significantly improve IRS operations. Major findings include that the IRS lacks a subsidiary ledger for unpaid tax assessments that would allow it to produce reliable, useful, and timely information with which to manage and report externally, and that IRS control deficiencies led to errors in taxpayer records and delays in recording taxpayer information, payments, and other activities.

The sudden increase in remote work caused dramatic changes in the U.S. housing market between 2020 and 2022. Recent research has documented that remote work raised the demand for housing; flattened intra-city house price gradients; and reallocated demand across cities. During this period, real rents rose by eight percent and real house prices rose by over twenty percent. Short-run housing supply is highly inelastic, so it is natural that rapid demand increases caused rents and prices to rise; however, the long-run effects of remote work on the housing market might be quite different from those which arise during a period with little opportunity for home construction. This paper studies the long-run effects of remote work on housing affordability and inflation. The authors consider two ways that remote work might change housing demand—first, shifting demand away from the central business districts of large cities, where housing is inelastically supplied, and that remote work increases the demand for space because people use home offices and spend more time at home. This force raises the cost of housing in both the short and long run, with long-run effects depending on the average long-run housing supply elasticity. The authors conclude that though remote work has increased rents in the short-run, they are likely to decline going forward and in the long-run may end up lower than pre-pandemic. Migration to more housing elastic areas will lower average rents by 0.5 percentage points, and cause a 1.8 percentage point fall in the housing component of consumer prices index (CPI). Furthermore, the long-run effects of the increase in housing demand will be 3.7 percentage points less than the short-run effects.

This data brief presents a snapshot of selected metrics pulled from multiple data sources that, when combined, represent three key areas of Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) access: 1) Access to Medicaid and CHIP coverage, as measured by enrollment and retention, 2) Access to mental health condition and substance use disorder services; and 3) Perceived access, as measured by beneficiary experience. For example, the statistics show that retention of beneficiaries is important because moving on and off of Medicaid and CHIP coverage (sometimes called churning) can lead to higher administrative costs, less predictable state expenditures, and higher monthly health care costs due to pent-up demand for health care services. Overall, the vast majority (93.6%) of Medicaid and CHIP beneficiaries enrolled at any time in 2018 experienced uninterrupted coverage for at least 12 months. Among all beneficiaries who disenrolled in calendar year 2018, the data show a notable proportion churned back onto the Medicaid and CHIP programs within a year (17.2% re-enrolled within 3 months, and 35.9% re-enrolled within 12 months). Working to reduce this churn may reduce costs associated with Medicaid and CHIP.

Just a decade ago, Houston had the sixth largest homeless population in the country, with about 8,500 people identified as being homeless on a given night in 2011, according to its annual point-in-time count. Over the next ten years, Houston reduced its alarmingly high homeless population by 63%. Now, other major cities are reaching out for guidance. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) point-in-time data showed that no other major U.S. metro area had matched Houston’s success in addressing homelessness over the past decade. The greater Houston area saw a 53% decrease in its homeless population between 2011 and 2020. During that time, the homeless population in the city and county of Los Angeles grew by 84%, New York City by 52%, and Dallas by 26%. Houston leaders and others working to address homelessness in the city cite three factors in Houston’s success: 1) Housing comes first. The city employs a housing-first model that prioritizes providing permanent housing to people experiencing homelessness as quickly as possible with no barriers to entry. 2) The region operates as a single continuum of care with a steering committee that distributes all funding. 3) The steering committee uses data to drive its decision-making.