There are more than 180,000 people working in more than 1,500 state prisons across the United States, and for years these staff have been working in environments defined by chronic understaffing, high turnover, and increasingly complex responsibilities. One largely overlooked dimension of the staffing crisis is the looming cliff of retirements as older staff, who make up a substantial share of corrections staff, age out of the workforce. This research highlights several differences in how corrections staff of different generations approach corrections work and understand the prison system as a whole, with additional differences by demographic and other job-related factors. Job satisfaction declines with each successive generation. Compared with baby boomers, Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z all report significantly lower job satisfaction, even after accounting for demographic differences and facility effects. All generations of staff express strong pride in their work and confidence that they have the skills necessary to do their jobs effectively. Despite this, all generations of staff are less likely to look forward to coming to work than they are to take pride in their work, suggesting that staff would want to stay in their work if they were better supported in doing so. Views on the purpose of prison differ modestly across generations. Gen Z places the highest importance on rehabilitation, and baby boomers and Gen Z express the strongest support for punishment. Among all generations, Gen X ascribes less importance to both suggested purposes.

This article examines the phenomenon of the “dark plea.” A dark plea is a post-conviction guilty plea extracted from defendants who maintain their innocence but accept freedom over exoneration. The article focuses on State of Florida v. Lawrence K. Johnson, in which after eighteen years of incarceration, compelling DNA recantation evidence, and an appellate mandate for an evidentiary hearing, the State offered immediate release conditioned on a plea that preserved the conviction and foreclosed judicial scrutiny. The article argues that dark pleas are not merely individual compromises but systemic failures that distort truth-seeking, shield prosecutorial error, and suppress evidence with consequences far beyond a single defendant. In Johnson’s case, acceptance of a dark plea in exchange for his freedom foreclosed any judicial examination of a private forensic laboratory’s use of an unreliable and scientifically unverified DNA testing procedure. In other words, a full examination of this lab’s practices could have uncovered that this faulty procedure may have contributed to wrongful convictions in numerous other cases. The article concludes that even when a dark plea secures liberty, it exacts a profound institutional cost: the loss of truth, accountability, and the law’s capacity to correct its own errors.

The number and percentage of students receiving special education services in schools has increased since 2000, and this trend has continued in recent years even as overall student enrollment has declined. Common explanations for the increasing enrollment point to improvements in identifying students, such as better diagnostic tools, improved recognition of common conditions and decreased stigma against disability. Accurate identification can improve student outcomes. However, many schools now face a challenging dynamic where they are simultaneously experiencing fewer students, less overall state aid and more students receiving high-cost services. This policy guide highlights trends in special education enrollment across the country and state strategies that can more equitably fund and support high-quality services for students. States trying to improve special education services can consider the following four approaches: (1) Identify special education costs in the state; (2) Differentiate funding based on need; (3) Develop recruitment and retention initiatives; and (4) Strengthen regional support for districts. Florida is among 25 states and the District of Columbia who provide multiple weights of funding per student to fund special education.

The Federal Work-Study (FWS) program, created in 1964 as part of the Economic Opportunity Act, provides more than $1 billion in support annually to more than 450,000 college students with financial need at roughly 3,000 institutions nationwide. The program subsidizes up to 75% of the wages of students working up to 20 hours per week in on-campus jobs or in off-campus community service jobs. Despite its scale and longevity, systematic evidence on the program’s implementation and impact remains limited. This implementation study makes use of several sources of data. Using several sources of data including 50 interviews with students, work-study coordinators, and other administrators involved with FWS at six campuses in a single system (three primarily associate-degree-granting community colleges and three primarily bachelor’s-degree-granting senior colleges) surveys, and employments records from the City University of New York, the researchers found that managing FWS requires more active institutional management than other forms of student aid, and how this is done varies across campuses even within a single system.. Further, information constraints and administrative burdens may hinder access to FWS participation and the types of jobs available through the FWS program vary across campuses and years.

There is a long-running debate over using standardized test scores to inform college and graduate admissions decisions, with some arguing that test scores are an important signal of academic strength and others arguing that they are biased and exclusionary. This research revisits this issue by analyzing a novel dataset of more than 13,000 applications over roughly a decade to a large public policy master’s program in the United States. Consistent with past work, the research team find that GRE scores substantially improve predictions of first-year grades relative to predictions based on GPA alone. However, when these predictions are used to inform admissions decisions, the research team find that test scores only modestly improve the expected academic quality of admitted students. The gap shrinks further when the research team augment the test-aware and test-blind predictive models with more fine-grained information available in student transcripts and other application materials. Specifically, the research team estimate that incorporating standardized test scores in the research team’s setting would result in admitting students who perform, on average, only 0.03 grade points better. The research team shows both empirically and theoretically—that this pattern stems from a subtle distinction between predictions and decisions. Even with improved predictions, the downstream admissions decisions are often the same; and where there are differences, they often involve selecting between similarly qualified applicants. The research team’s results indicate that standardized test scores may be less important for university admissions than previously suggested.

All age groups in the South grew faster than in any other region from 2020 to 2025, primarily fueled by outlying metro counties. Many counties across the country saw slower growth in the past year, but those in the South were less affected. In fact, the region has had most of the nation’s fastest‑growing counties every year since 2020. Between April 1, 2020, and July 1, 2025, the South grew by 6.0%, nearly double the nation’s 3.1% population growth. It was the only region to see population growth in all five age groups, outpacing the other regions within each age group. Notably, the South was the only region whose population under 18 grew from 2020 to 2025; its growth of 1.1% contrasted with declines for the Northeast (-4.1%), Midwest (-3.9%), and West (-5.7%). Similarly, it was the only region whose 45-64 population grew over the five-year period, although just barely; its growth of 0.1% (about 19,000) stood apart from the modest declines of the Northeast (-7.1%), Midwest (-6.2%), and West (-2.7%). In contrast, the West had the largest percentage decrease in the population under 18 (-5.7%), and the Northeast was the only region to lose young adult (18-24) population (-2.1%). The Northeast also had the fastest decline among ages 45-64 (-7.1%) and the slowest growth among those age 65 and older (14.6%).

After natural disasters, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration (EDA) helps communities recover by coordinating federal agencies and funding projects. In Fiscal Years 2014–2024, the agency awarded $2.1 billion for economic recovery projects. Projects included flood mitigation at ports, and programs like business incubators—which provide entrepreneurship support. But it's unclear how these efforts affect local economies because the agency doesn't have a process or effective measures to assess them. For example, it measures job gains, but doesn't capture the agency's contributions to disaster recovery. EDA has incorporated several leading practices for interagency collaboration to coordinate the economic recovery support functions (RSF), including having clear roles and responsibilities. Stakeholders in disaster-affected communities highlighted the value and recent performance of the economic RSF but noted challenges in its capacity to provide assistance. EDA is implementing a required disaster recovery office and team that can help address this challenge. However, EDA has not developed a way for the RSF to ensure accountability by monitoring and communicating progress toward its strategic outcomes, such as increasing the capacity of local stakeholders to implement economic recovery strategies. Fully adopting the leading practices would enhance accountability and help demonstrate progress. EDA’s 26 performance measures incorporated several key attributes of successful measures but could not be used to assess whether its disaster recovery work accomplished its intended outcomes. Using measures that better assess the performance of its disaster recovery work would help EDA determine if it has achieved the outcomes Congress intended, such as mitigating flood risk. In addition, the reliability of the measures is unknown because EDA suspended the steps it previously took to validate grantee-reported data on job creation or retention. By resuming procedures to validate these data, EDA would improve confidence that its reported outcomes accurately reflect progress toward agency goals and provide useful information for decision-making.

In 2011, the Electric Program Investment Charge (EPIC) was established by the California Public Utilities Commission to fund public investments in research to create and advance new energy solutions, foster regional innovation, and bring ideas from the lab to the marketplace. This report is the final product of the EPIC grant agreement which included “an assessment of the potential role of hydrogen production from renewable electricity and end-use conversion technologies for electric sector applications in California’s decarbonizing electric system.” One of the primary objectives of the assessment was to inform how future EPIC program investments in hydrogen can best coordinate with and complement other hydrogen development and deployment programs. The research team conducted a techno-economic analysis to assess the cost and readiness of a range of technologies associated with a Senate Bill 100-compliant (zero greenhouse gas emissions) electricity grid in California. These technologies include hydrogen production, storage, and conversion, other types of energy storage, and solar and wind generation. The team then modeled the cost of serving load in a grid using hydrogen storage for two operational configurations: a daily cycle and a seasonal cycle. Results show that the seasonal cycle configuration reduces costs when compared with a grid without hydrogen. The findings were used to make recommendations related to hydrogen technology development and policy for the EPIC program. These included not investing in blended hydrogen fossil gas fuel systems, funding research on underground hydrogen storage in depleted hydrocarbon reservoirs and saline aquifers, and deferring major hydrogen infrastructure to allow insights and learnings from ongoing studies and research to guide investments.

Mental health is a key component for overall well-being. In 2023, an estimated 58.7 million adults age 18 and older had any mental, behavioral, or emotional disorder in the past year. About one-half of them received mental health treatment, most often counseling or medication. Mental health treatment may vary by subpopulation due to differences in the prevalence of mental health conditions and the need for and access to treatment. This report uses data from the 2024 National Health Interview Survey to examine the use of prescription medication for mental health and the receipt of counseling or therapy from a mental health professional in the past 12 months among U.S. adults, by selected characteristics. Key findings in the report include that in 2024, 19.3% of adults took medication for their mental health and 14.0% received counseling or therapy from a mental health professional in the past 12 months. Women were more likely than men to have received either treatment. Adults ages 30–44 were more likely to have taken medication than those ages 65–74 and 75 and older. Adults 75 and older were least likely to have received counseling or therapy. Adults with incomes less than 100% of the federal poverty level were more likely to have taken medication and as likely to have received counseling or therapy as adults with incomes greater than 400% of the federal poverty level. Adults living in nonmetropolitan areas were most likely to have taken medication and least likely to have received counseling or therapy from a mental health professional.

Risk and protective factors for suicide mortality in youths remain poorly synthesized, as prior reviews have focused on all ages or nonfatal outcomes. In this systematic review and meta-analysis of 90 reports (68 reports), mental disorders—particularly acute conditions such as schizophrenia and mood disorders—and prior self-harm were associated with suicide mortality. Prior health care contact (eg, psychiatric admission) and a range of social determinants (eg, maltreatment, out-of-home placement, and social disadvantage) were also associated with higher risk, whereas family stability (eg, living with both parents) was associated with lower risk. Suicide mortality in youths reflects both psychiatric vulnerability and social adversity, supporting the need for integrated prevention strategies combining early intervention with population-level prevention approaches targeting social determinants. In this systematic review and meta-analysis, suicide mortality in youths was associated with mental disorders, health care contact, and adversity, supporting both clinical care and population-level prevention, with future research needed in underrepresented populations.