For the past half-century, computer processing power has doubled roughly every 24 months. As transistors — the basic elements of digital computers — become smaller, they also become faster, more efficient, and more resilient. Engineers are now at the point where they cannot make transistors any smaller without fundamentally changing the way they physically operate. As a result, the major players in digital computing are now looking toward the next big innovation that may fuel yet another new era of exponential growth in technological capabilities and opportunities: quantum computing. In this report, the authors investigate the future impacts of quantum computing on the civil justice system. The U.S. justice system has struggled to adapt to the existing reality of the digital computer age. Both national and international cyber laws are still evolving as they try to catch up with emerging cybersecurity threats while data privacy laws are continuously lagging behind big data analytics and artificial intelligence technologies. The authors conducted a comprehensive review of relevant legal and regulatory frameworks that will be affected by quantum computing, and interviewed stakeholders in the justice system, including lawyers, judges, and court technology experts. Their findings are intended to help those in the civil justice system think proactively about the potential legal, policy, and regulatory implications of quantum computing in the context of the U.S. civil justice system, specifically for cryptography, liability and insurance, and privacy.

The number of people sentenced to life in prison has drastically increased over the last five decades. Of the 194,803 people serving life sentences in 2024, nearly half of them, 97,160 people, were serving parole-eligible sentences. A parole-eligible life sentence is also referred to as life with parole or life with the possibility of parole . Parole is the conditional release of an incarcerated individual after spending a portion of their sentence in prison. Its purpose at inception was to serve as a bridge between an incarcerated person and their community, balancing the needs of the individual and the needs of the community, with the aim toward reintegration. Through in-depth profiles of five states (Colorado, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, and Minnesota) and the experiences of two individuals, this report illustrates the trend toward increasing wait times for initial parole hearings, subsequent rehearings, and sometimes the elimination of parole eligibility entirely for individuals serving parole-eligible life sentences.

Recently, juvenile justice reformers have had great success in expanding the reach of the juvenile court. Over the last two decades, many states have raised their age of majority, bringing older teens and young adults under the jurisdictional umbrella of the juvenile court. Likewise, many states have amended their transfer statutes, making transferring juveniles from juvenile court to adult criminal court more difficult. Unfortunately, these efforts fail to address an area of juvenile justice ripe for reform: the method by which states determine the jurisdiction of juvenile courts. To fall within the juvenile court’s jurisdiction, a person must be below the statutorily proscribed age of majority, often eighteen years old, at the time of the alleged offense. However, a jurisdictional issue arises when a person is below the age of majority at the time of the alleged offense but has reached or exceeded the age of majority by the time legal proceedings are instituted against them. In such a situation, some states use the age at the time of the offense, while others use the age at the time of proceedings to determine whether the juvenile falls within the jurisdiction of the juvenile court. Under the latter jurisdictional scheme, juveniles who have reached or exceeded the age of majority by the time proceedings are initiated are processed in adult criminal court. These juveniles, who are often only young adults at the time of proceedings, lose all the benefits and protections of juvenile court despite having been juveniles at the time of the alleged offense. The collateral consequences of an adult criminal court prosecution for juveniles who have aged out of juvenile court jurisdiction are severe, including increased rates of recidivism, sexual victimization and suicidal tendencies in adult correctional facilities, and long-term unemployment and poverty. This article makes several contributions to existing juvenile justice scholarship. First, it addresses an under-discussed area of the juvenile justice system in need of reform. Second, it builds upon the existing scholarly work that sets forth the collateral consequences associated with prosecuting young adults in adult criminal court and expressly articulates their broader national impact. Finally, it argues Congress can and should use its Spending Clause power to incentivize state action. Specifically, it urges Congress to attach a condition—the use of a juvenile’s age at the time of the offense to determine the juvenile court’s jurisdiction—to states’ receipt of certain federal funds.

The Florida Department of the Lottery’s mission is to maximize revenues for the benefit of education in a manner consistent with the dignity of the State of Florida and the welfare of its citizens. The Lottery offers its players a full range of Scratch-Off and Draw products. The Lottery has sustained ticket sales over $2 billion for the thirty-fifth consecutive fiscal year, with the past twelve fiscal years exceeding $5 billion. The Florida Auditor General is responsible for the preparation and fair presentation of the financial statements in accordance with accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America, and for the design, implementation, and maintenance of internal control relevant to the preparation and fair presentation of financial statements that are free from material misstatement, whether due to fraud or error. This report provides an analytical overview of the Lottery’s financial activities and performance for the fiscal years ended June 30, 2024, and 2023. Key findings include transfers to the Educational Enhancement Trust Fund were approximately $2.4 billion in Fiscal Year 2023-24, compared to $2.5 billion in the prior fiscal year; the Lottery’s ticket sales decreased by 3.9% from approximately $9.8 billion to $9.4 billion; and approximately 70% of total sales were provided by the Scratch-Off product line, a 6% decrease from the prior fiscal year.

Postsecondary education access has expanded across the nation, but many states still struggle to understand how credentials and degrees translate to meaningful employment outcomes. Nationally, only half of bachelor’s degree graduates work in roles aligned with their level of education. Fragmented data systems, limited access to wage records and restrictions on cross-agency data sharing make it challenging to evaluate the economic value of postsecondary education. The Postsecondary Employment Outcomes Coalition, in partnership with the U.S. Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics program, addresses this gap by linking graduate-level records from more than 900 institutions across 36 states (not including Florida) and the District of Columbia with anonymized federal wage data. By linking postsecondary education data with workforce wage records, states can better assess graduates’ earnings, their workplaces and how well programs match current employer needs. Coalition members submit graduate records to the U.S. Census Bureau including a student’s birth date, graduation year, degree or credential earned, major and Social Security number. A key technical requirement is that these records must also include federal Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) codes to identify fields of study. This linkage allows states to track student: (1) earnings 1, 5 and 10 years after graduation; (2) earnings for the 25th, 50th and 75th percentiles; (3) industry of employment; and (4) geographic locations where students work.

More than a million U.S. students now participate in private school choice programs because of recent growth in vouchers, tax credit scholarships, education savings accounts, and tax credits. Ohio’s Educational Choice Scholarship program (EdChoice) has more than doubled in size in the past year since all students in the state, regardless of income or public school performance, became eligible. This report assesses the effect of Ohio’s Educational Choice Scholarship program on College Enrollment and Graduation. The Urban Institute found that EdChoice students (64%) were substantially more likely to enroll in college than students who remained in public schools (48%). In addition, the Urban Institute found that differences in college enrollment were especially large at four-year colleges (45% compared to 30%) and selective colleges (29% compared to 19%). Lastly, the enrollment impacts were strongest among male students, Black students, students with below-median test scores before leaving public school, and students from the lowest-income families.

Mobility hubs, physical locations where travelers can seamlessly switch between various transportation modes, including public transit, micromobility options like bikes and scooters, and ride-hailing services, have emerged as a novel concept to enhance multimodal travel. While many cities have planned to develop mobility hubs, an established analytical framework for selecting candidate sites for implementation is still lacking. Consequently, there is a growing need for effective planning and development of mobility hubs in Florida to increase transportation options. This project aims to develop a data-driven, GIS-based tool to assist Florida cities in identifying optimal locations for mobility hubs. Researchers found that the GIS-based tool can be an effective method for identifying mobility hub sites that align with community needs and development goals. Researchers also found that well-planned mobility hubs can improve transportation connectivity, increase traveler satisfaction, offer transportation options, and enhance currently available transportation resources. In addition, the tool could help Florida cities and communities save capital investment costs by providing data-informed solutions for mobility hub site selection and design.

Increasingly, veterans seeking health care have been referred by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) medical centers to community providers outside the VA. Veterans used over 350,000 referrals to receive behavioral health services (e.g., psychotherapy for depression) from community providers in Fiscal Years 2021 through 2023. Many veterans who were cared for by community providers later returned to VA medical centers for further care. The quality of the care veterans receive can be affected by how successfully community and VA providers exchange medical records, as well as community providers’ ability to understand the unique needs of veterans. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the VA does not monitor whether these medical record exchanges are completed across all medical centers. The GAO also found that 33% of these referrals were missing records for initial visits. Further, the GAO found that no such data are available for final visits, so the extent to which those exchanges are completed is unknown. The GAO provides five recommendations to VA, including establishing goals and performance measures and monitoring the extent to which medical documentation exchanges and core community provider trainings have been completed.

If you lived in the District of Columbia, North Dakota, Alaska, Idaho, or Vermont in 2023, chances are relatively high you or your neighbor had moved there from another state within the prior year. But if you lived in California, a much larger state that attracted many more movers from other states over the same period, the likelihood of being in proximity with a recent in-mover, or someone who arrived in that state from another state within the prior year, was slimmer. How can that be? Part of it has to do with the size of a state’s population. Two states can have the exact same number of movers from other states but their presence in a smaller state will be proportionately higher than in a more populous state. The share of recent movers to a state is calculated by taking the number of in-movers in the past year and dividing it by the population 1 year and over. Although more populous states tend to draw more people numerically from other states, the chances a given resident moved there within the prior year can still be relatively low. The Census Bureau regularly publishes estimates of state-to-state migration based on 1-year American Community Survey data, and the latest show that, of the 331 million people 1 year and over in the United States in 2023, approximately 40 million – or roughly 1 in 8 people (12.1%) – had moved to a new residence within the prior year. Over 7.5 million of those movers made interstate moves. Overall, they made up 2.3% of the U.S. population (approximately 1 in 44 people) and 18.9% of movers currently residing in the United States (about 1 in 5 movers). In 2023, Florida is in the top quartile of states with movers from a different state within the last year, but those movers to the state only represented between 2.0% to 2.9% of the state’s population.

In 2023, about 53,000 Medicare Part D enrollees experienced an opioid-related overdose, a slight increase (3%) from 2022. Overdoses occur when high doses of opioids—alone or in combination with other substances—cause breathing to slow to dangerous levels or to stop altogether. Most fatal opioid-related overdoses nationwide involve synthetic opioids, such as illicit fentanyl. This report provides data on opioid overdoses among Medicare enrollees in the nation. Key findings include, more providers ordered buprenorphine for Medicare enrollees in 2023 than in 2022 since the buprenorphine waiver repeal; fewer than one in five Medicare enrollees received any medication to treat their opioid use disorder despite the increase in the number of providers ordering buprenorphine; and three states, including Florida had particularly low percentages (less than 10%) of enrollees receiving medication for opioid overdoses.

The Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) is a public health surveillance system that monitors alcohol- and drug-related emergency department visits. DAWN collects detailed drug names, slang terms, and drug combinations reported during an emergency department visit. This information is stored in a classification system to help researchers identify patterns. In addition to reporting slang terms for drugs, this report notes that the increasing availability of counterfeit (fake) pills is a key factor in the overdose crisis. Although these drugs are designed to look like commonly misused prescription opioids or other commonly misused prescription medications, people using these pills may not know they contain fentanyl or other highly potent synthetic opioids, methamphetamine, or other substances. Using counterfeit pills dramatically raises the risk for health harms and overdose death. Between January 2020 and January 2025, slang terms for counterfeit oxycodone were reported in more than 1,700 ED visits. “M30” (referencing a common form of prescription oxycodone 30mg tablets) and “Blues” were the most common slang terms reported. The monthly rate of emergency department visits involving counterfeit pills remained stable between January 2020 and March 2021, with an average rate of 19 counterfeit pill visits per 10,000 DAWN visits. This was followed by an increase by an average 9% a month between April 2021 and July 2022. The rate remained stable between August 2022 and July 2024, with an average rate of 67 counterfeit pill visits per 10,000 DAWN visits. And then the rate decreased by an average 19% a month between August 2024 and January 2025, reaching a low of 19 per 10,000 DAWN visits.

The mental health of children and adolescents in the United States has worsened over the past decade, with rates of suicide, diagnosed mental health disorders, and self-reported feelings that reflect poor mental health on the rise. This report provides ideas on addressing child and adolescent mental health, and background papers on various topics, such as understanding and improving mental health in adolescence and youth, paying for child and adolescent mental health care, and adolescent mental health equity. Key findings include prioritizing prevention with measures to reduce the incidence of poor mental health, identify people at risk, and deliver services before conditions worsen; improving access to care by redesigning the youth mental health care delivery system and developing payment and licensing policies that support that redesign; supporting local institutions; improving the caliber of mental health care services by examining existing quality measures, developing new ones as needed, and adopting those measures in payment and licensing policies; and embracing the potential of technology, such as by broadening the use of telehealth, streamlining regulations for licensing technology-based interventions, expanding randomized controlled trials of digital therapeutics, and developing strategies to ensure the optimal use of social media.