When a person facing criminal charges fails to appear for a court hearing, no one benefits. Courts must reschedule hearings and often issue warrants, consuming time and resources. Meanwhile, people who miss court may face additional charges, fees, and even jail time. Jurisdictions across the country have explored interventions such as court date notifications to improve appearance rates, but failures to appear continue to present a challenge. Part of the problem is that the underlying causes are unclear. Research suggests that people miss court for reasons such as forgetting the date, not receiving notice, a lack of transportation, or conflicts with life responsibilities, including employment or providing dependent care. This review surveyed people who were arrested on a failure to appear warrant to assess why people fail to appear. It found that the two most common reasons for failures to appear were forgetting the court date, followed by unawareness of the court appearance. A lack of transportation was also a common reason given for missing court. Most people cited more than one reason for their most recent failure to appear. Of all the survey respondents, 49% at least somewhat agreed that it was difficult for them to find transportation.

The right to a jury trial has long been heralded as a fundamental pillar of the American justice system. Despite their time-honored importance, juries and jury trials are facing unprecedented challenges. Attacks on juries and jury trials over the past half century, especially in response to unpopular jury verdicts in both civil and criminal cases, have eroded public trust in the institution. Perhaps as a result, fewer people are willing or able to serve as jurors, partly due to the inconvenience and financial hardship it can impose, and partly due to a decline in civic education and engagement. This has resulted in jury pools that are less representative of the communities from which they are selected, further diminishing public confidence in the system. This report provides an overview of the key issues facing the jury system today, followed by detailed strategies to address each of these challenges. Some key issues include a lack of public education and engagement regarding the jury system or service, negative jurors' experiences deterring participation in the jury system, a declining number of cases that go to trial, and the disparity between the values that the system is supposed to uphold and the actual practices that take place in court. The report offers several strategies to address these issues, including cultivating modern civic engagement, implementing remote jury selection, adopting best practices, and identifying relevant performance measures.

Research demonstrates strong relationships between education and positive post-prison outcomes. Recognizing that educational trajectories can be disrupted early on, this review investigates the impact of juvenile justice contact on educational attainment and aspirations, and recidivism. Researchers examine relationships in data from two connected prison-based data collection projects both quantitatively (n = 174) and qualitatively (n = 88). Researchers utilize Cox models to assess the impact of education on recidivism among a sample of incarcerated men with substance use disorders. Longitudinal in-depth semi-structured interviews reveal patterns of juvenile justice contact, perceptions of school, educational aspirations, and post-release outcomes. Quantitative analyses demonstrate that formal education attainment, but not intelligence, is significantly related to recidivism. The qualitative transcripts illustrate that juvenile justice contact can impede educational aspirations and achievement.

The Lumina Foundation, an independent, private foundation focused on higher education, has set a national goal that by 2040, 75% of working adults (between the ages of 25 and 64) will have college degrees or other credentials of value, leading to economic prosperity. This data tool provides graphics that show the existing educational attainment statistics at the national and state level. For 2023, 44.1% of adults between the ages of 25 and 64 have credentials of value (which include college degrees and valuable short-term workforce credentials); Florida has 41% of adults with credentials of value. In 2023, 80.7% of the labor force with graduate degrees earn at least 15% more than the national median annual salary of a high school graduate; 70.4% of the labor force with a bachelor’s degree and 54.7% of the labor force with an associate’s degree earn at least 15% more than the national median annual salary of a high school graduate.

In the United States, many community college students (68%) enroll part-time. Unfortunately, graduation rates for part-time students are low. Only 19% of individuals who begin attending community college as part-time students graduate within six years, compared with 36% of people who start community college enrolled full-time. Yet there is little information on how to help part-time students stay in college and ultimately graduate. To address this knowledge gap, researchers conducted a multifaceted study to identify practices likely to support part-time student success. Key findings include that students often switch between part-time and full-time attendance over the course of their studies; effective initiatives often incorporate multiple kinds of student support services that address various needs, such as financial limitations, work schedules, and caregiving responsibilities; and part-time students often juggle multiple responsibilities such as caregiving for a family member and working a full-time job. Seven initiative practices that may increase outcomes for part-time students, including tailoring initiatives for a specific student demographic, developing and sustaining collaboration across campus departments, and partnering with employers.

Tribal lands in the U.S. have historically experienced some of the worst economic conditions in the nation. This research reviewed some existing research on the effect of American Indian tribal casinos on various measures of local economic development. This is an industry that began in the early 1990s and currently generates more than $40 billion annually. The research team also reviewed the state of the literature on the effects of casino operations on communities in or adjacent to tribal areas. Using a new dataset linking individual and enterprise-level data longitudinally, this study examines the industry- and location-specific impacts of tribal casino operations. The research team focuses in particular on the employment of American Indians. The research team documents positive flows from unemployment and non-casino geographies to work in sectors related to casino operations. Tribal casinos differ from other standard place-based economic development projects in that they are focused on a single industry; the research team discusses these differences and note that some of the positive spillover effects may be similar to other, more standard place-based policies. Finally, the research team discusses additional and open-ended questions for future research on this topic.

The global population has been increasing for the past century, but global food production has been able to keep up with the growing population because of fertilizer use, which has increased by 21% in the last two decades. Nevertheless, the nutrient use efficiency (NUE) or a measure of the ability of plants to use fertilizer efficiently for growth and development, is low, ranging from 10% to 55% across different crops for macronutrients, with overfertilization of nutrients imposing environmental risks. There is a pressing need for better NUE for sustainable food production to meet the growing population's demand without impacting the environment. Enhanced efficiency fertilizers (EEFs) can potentially increase NUE and mitigate environmental risks by coupling their nutrient release with crop nutrient uptake. EEFs have gained significant recognition in agricultural research. This detailed review discusses the basics, classification, and benefits of EEFs worldwide in various crops, and the coating material and release mechanism of EEFs, along with the application of EEFs and other best management practices. Additionally, the review outlines the challenges and considerations regarding EEFs that impact its adoption at a global scale and emphasizes the significance of investigating future strategies and directions, stressing the importance of a comprehensive approach to address research gaps and ways to unlock the full potential of EEFs for sustainable agriculture.

The rapid advancement of generative AI (genAI) technology has spurred considerable enthusiasm and uncertainty across local governments. GenAI’s user-friendliness and broad applicability could offer an unprecedented boost to local government productivity in the face of significant capacity constraints and help solve complex government problems to improve residents’ quality of life. Despite this optimism, genAI adoption in local governments remains primarily exploratory and focused on internal-facing digital assistant applications due to lower barriers to adoption and oversight. Our research identifies recommendations for ways in which technology companies and philanthropies can help remove barriers to adoption of higher-tier—and higher-impact—genAI. Tech companies and philanthropies can provide critical financial and in-kind (technology and expert staff) support for higher-tier genAI use by local governments in various ways. Corporate technology leaders and philanthropies can complement ongoing broad training efforts by making their own expert staff available to governments as advisors providing the deep capacity support required for higher-tier applications. Tech companies and philanthropic leaders can enable local governments to partner with subject matter experts in civil society to design and implement policy context-relevant testing of higher-tier genAI use cases and disseminate successful use cases and lessons learned across the local government ecosystem. Technology organizations can invest in developing genAI tools that facilitate deployment within government computing environments and generate trust because they are tailored to government security, privacy, and compliance requirements.

This data spotlight report explores ways that adults with serious mental illness received help with their mental health, emotions, or behavior in the past year. Serious mental illness among adults refers to the presence of a mental, behavioral, or emotional disorder that substantially interfered with or limited one or more major life activities. Estimates are annual averages based on pooled data from the 2022 and 2023 National Surveys on Drug Use and Health. Among the 15.0 million adults aged 18 or older who had serious mental illnesses in the past year, 68.8% (or 10.3 million adults) received some type of mental health treatment in the past year, including 56.7% who took prescription medication. These estimates are not mutually exclusive because adults could have received more than one type of treatment. According to the survey data, most adults with serious mental illnesses who used other services for their mental health, emotions, or behavior also accessed some form of mental health treatment within the same year. However, about 3 in 10 adults with serious mental illnesses (29.8% or 4.5 million adults) did not receive any help with their mental health, emotions, or behavior in the past year. This gap highlights the need for educational initiatives to strengthen awareness of and access to mental health resources for adults with serious mental illnesses living in the United States.

Each year, an estimated 4.2 million youth, young adults, and teens experience homelessness in the United States, 700,000 of whom are unaccompanied minors—meaning they are not part of a family or accompanied by a parent or guardian. These estimates indicate that approximately one in 10 adults ages 18 to 25 and one in 30 youth ages 13 to 17 will experience homelessness each year. This report offers an understanding of the risk factors, adverse impacts, and policies related to youth homelessness. Key findings include that many youth experiencing homelessness who have been in foster care consider their experience in the foster system as the beginning of their homelessness; one in three teens on the street will be lured into prostitution within 48 hours of leaving home; and states have addressed the intersection between youth homelessness and juvenile justice involvement in many ways, including redefining status offenses, decriminalizing the survival aspects of being homeless (e.g., sleeping in public) and regulating how youth are discharged from the juvenile justice system.

Over the past two decades, the United States has experienced a public health crisis related to substance use disorders (SUDs), spurred in part by the ongoing opioid epidemic. This crisis affects individuals from all walks of life, including pregnant and postpartum individuals. During 1999 and 2014, the national prevalence of opioid use disorders among women hospitalized for childbirth more than quadrupled. The project aimed to describe existing models of integrated SUD and OB-GYN care, the effectiveness of these models, opportunities and challenges faced by OB-GYN providers to integrate SUD services in their practices, and policies that could support scaling up of these models. Researchers found promising emerging models of integrated care along the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration continuum of levels of integrated care, including the Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment model, the Centering Pregnancy group model, the Maternal/Pregnancy Health Home model, and the Integrated Care model. Researchers also identified common themes in establishing integrated care for pregnant and postpartum (or parenting) women with SUD, including that treatment models must allow for flexibility, treatment should include both clinical and non-clinical supports, services should be available for up to one year postpartum, and limited reimbursement is a key barrier to implementing and expanding integrated models of SUD and OB/GYN care.