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Yahoo
5 days ago
- Health
- Yahoo
Trump decried crime in America, then gutted funding for gun violence prevention
Violent crime was already trending down from a covid-era spike when President Donald Trump presented a picture of unbridled crime in America on the campaign trail in 2024. Now his administration has eliminated about $500 million in grants to organizations that buttress public safety, including many working to prevent gun violence. In Oakland, California, a hospital-based program to prevent retaliatory gun violence lost a $2 million grant just as the traditionally turbulent summer months approach. Another $2 million award was pulled from a Detroit program that offers social services and job skills to young people in violent neighborhoods. And in St. Louis, a clinic treating the physical and emotional injuries of gunshot victims also lost a $2 million award. They are among 373 grants that the U.S. Department of Justice abruptly terminated in April. The largest share of the nixed awards were designated for community-based violence intervention — programs that range from conflict mediation and de-escalation to hospital-based initiatives that seek to prevent retaliation from people who experience violent injuries. Gun violence is among America's most deadly public health crises, medical experts say. Among programs whose grants were terminated were those for protecting children, victims' assistance, hate-crime prevention, and law enforcement and prosecution, according to an analysis by the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank. The grants totaled $820 million when awarded, but some of that money has been spent. 'Not only are these funds being pulled away from worthy investments that will save lives,' said Thomas Abt, founding director of the Violence Reduction Center at the University of Maryland, 'but the way that this was done — by pulling authorized funding without warning — is going to create a lasting legacy of mistrust.' The Justice Department 'is focused on prosecuting criminals, getting illegal drugs off the streets, and protecting all Americans from violent crime,' according to a statement provided by agency spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre. 'Discretionary funds that are not aligned with the administration's priorities are subject to review and reallocation, including funding for clinics that engage in race-based selectivity.' The Council on Criminal Justice analysis of the terminated grants found that descriptions of 31% of them included references to 'diversity,' 'equity,' 'race,' 'racial,' 'racism,' or 'gender.' Baldassarre's statement said the department is committed to working with organizations 'to hear any appeal, and to restore funding as appropriate.' Indeed, it restored seven of the terminated grants for victims' services after Reuters reported on the cuts in April. But the cuts have already prompted layoffs and reductions at other organizations around the country. Five groups filed a lawsuit on May 21 to restore the grants in their entirety. Joseph Griffin, executive director of the Oakland nonprofit Youth Alive, which pioneered hospital-based violence intervention in the 1990s, said his organization had spent only about $60,000 of its $2 million grant before it was axed. The grant was primarily to support the intervention program and was awarded for a three-year period but lasted just seven months. The money would have helped pay to intervene with about 30 survivors of gun violence to prevent retaliatory violence. He's trying to find a way to continue the work, without overtaxing his team. 'We will not abandon a survivor of violence at the hospital bedside in the same way that the federal government is abandoning our field,' he said. The cuts are also hitting St. Louis, often dogged by being labeled one of the most dangerous cities in America. The city created an Office of Violence Prevention with money available under former President Joe Biden, and various groups received Justice Department grants, too. Locals say the efforts have helped: The 33% drop in the city's homicide rate from 2019 to 2024 was the second-largest decrease among 29 major cities examined by the Council on Criminal Justice. 'I don't think there's any doubt that there's some positive impact from the work that's happening,' said University of Missouri-St. Louis criminologist Chris Sullivan, who received a grant from the Justice Department to assess the work of the city's new Office of Violence Prevention. That research grant remains in place. But the Justice Department slashed two other grants in St. Louis, including $2 million for Power4STL. The nonprofit operates the Bullet Related Injury Clinic, dubbed the BRIC, which provides free treatment for physical and mental injuries caused by bullets. The BRIC had about $1.3 million left on its grant when the award was terminated in April. LJ Punch, a former trauma surgeon who founded the clinic in 2020, said it was intended to fund a mobile clinic, expand mental health services, evaluate the clinic's programs, and pay for a patient advisory board. The BRIC won't abandon those initiatives, Punch said, but will likely need to move slower. Keisha Blanchard joined the BRIC's advisory board after her experience as a patient at the clinic following a January 2024 gun injury. Someone fired a bullet into her back from the rear window of a Chevy Impala while Blanchard was out for a lunchtime stroll with a friend from her neighborhood walking group. The shooting was random, Blanchard said, but people always assume she did something to provoke it. 'It's so much shame that comes behind that,' she said. The 42-year-old said the shooting and her initial medical treatment left her feeling angry and unseen. Her family wasn't allowed to be with her at the hospital since the police didn't know who shot her or why. When she asked about taking the bullet out, she was told that the common medical practice is to leave it in. 'We're not in the business of removing bullets,' she recalled being told. At a follow-up appointment, she said, she watched her primary care doctor google what to do for a gunshot wound. 'Nobody cares what's going to happen to me after this,' Blanchard recalled thinking. Before she was referred to the BRIC, she said, she was treated as though she should be happy just to be alive. But a part of her died in the shooting, she said. Her joyful, carefree attitude gave way to hypervigilance. She stopped taking walks. She uprooted herself, moving to a neighborhood 20 miles away. The bullet stayed lodged inside her, forcing her to carry a constant reminder of the violence that shattered her sense of safety, until Punch removed it from her back in November. Blanchard said the removal made her feel 'reborn.' It's a familiar experience among shooting survivors, according to Punch. 'People talk about the distress about having bullets still inside their bodies, and how every waking conscious moment brings them back to the fact that that's still inside,' Punch said. 'But they're told repeatedly inside conventional care settings that there's nothing that needs to be done.' The Justice Department grant to the BRIC had been an acknowledgment, Punch said, that healing has a role in public safety by quelling retaliatory violence. 'The unhealed trauma in the body of someone who's gotten the message that they are not safe can rapidly turn into an act of violence when that person is threatened again,' Punch said. Community gun violence, even in large cities, is concentrated among relatively small groups of people who are often both victims and perpetrators, according to researchers. Violence reduction initiatives are frequently tailored to those networks. Jennifer Lorentz heads the Diversion Unit in the office of the St. Louis Circuit Attorney, the city's chief prosecutor. The unit offers mostly young, nonviolent offenders an opportunity to avoid prosecution by completing a program to address the issues that initially led to their arrest. About 80% of the participants have experienced gun violence and are referred to the BRIC, Lorentz said, calling the clinic critical to her program's success. 'We're getting them these resources, and we're changing the trajectory of their lives,' Lorentz said. 'Helping people is part of public safety.' Punch said the BRIC staffers were encouraged during the Justice Department application process to emphasize their reach into St. Louis' Black community, which is disproportionately affected by gun violence. He suspects that emphasis is why its grant was terminated. Punch likened the grant terminations to only partially treating tuberculosis, which allows the highly infectious disease to become resistant to medicine. 'If you partially extend a helping hand to somebody, and then you rip it away right when they start to trust you, you assure they will never trust you again,' he said. 'If your intention is to prevent violence, you don't do that.' KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
CNN
5 days ago
- Health
- CNN
Trump decried crime in America, then gutted funding for gun violence prevention
Gun violence Federal agencies Donald TrumpFacebookTweetLink Follow Violent crime was already trending down from a covid-era spike when President Donald Trump presented a picture of unbridled crime in America on the campaign trail in 2024. Now his administration has eliminated about $500 million in grants to organizations that buttress public safety, including many working to prevent gun violence. In Oakland, California, a hospital-based program to prevent retaliatory gun violence lost a $2 million grant just as the traditionally turbulent summer months approach. Another $2 million award was pulled from a Detroit program that offers social services and job skills to young people in violent neighborhoods. And in St. Louis, a clinic treating the physical and emotional injuries of gunshot victims also lost a $2 million award. They are among 373 grants that the U.S. Department of Justice abruptly terminated in April. The largest share of the nixed awards were designated for community-based violence intervention — programs that range from conflict mediation and de-escalation to hospital-based initiatives that seek to prevent retaliation from people who experience violent injuries. Gun violence is among America's most deadly public health crises, medical experts say. Among programs whose grants were terminated were those for protecting children, victims' assistance, hate-crime prevention, and law enforcement and prosecution, according to an analysis by the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank. The grants totaled $820 million when awarded, but some of that money has been spent. 'Not only are these funds being pulled away from worthy investments that will save lives,' said Thomas Abt, founding director of the Violence Reduction Center at the University of Maryland, 'but the way that this was done — by pulling authorized funding without warning — is going to create a lasting legacy of mistrust.' The Justice Department 'is focused on prosecuting criminals, getting illegal drugs off the streets, and protecting all Americans from violent crime,' according to a statement provided by agency spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre. 'Discretionary funds that are not aligned with the administration's priorities are subject to review and reallocation, including funding for clinics that engage in race-based selectivity.' The Council on Criminal Justice analysis of the terminated grants found that descriptions of 31% of them included references to 'diversity,' 'equity,' 'race,' 'racial,' 'racism,' or 'gender.' Baldassarre's statement said the department is committed to working with organizations 'to hear any appeal, and to restore funding as appropriate.' Indeed, it restored seven of the terminated grants for victims' services after Reuters reported on the cuts in April. But the cuts have already prompted layoffs and reductions at other organizations around the country. Five groups filed a lawsuit on May 21 to restore the grants in their entirety. Joseph Griffin, executive director of the Oakland nonprofit Youth Alive, which pioneered hospital-based violence intervention in the 1990s, said his organization had spent only about $60,000 of its $2 million grant before it was axed. The grant was primarily to support the intervention program and was awarded for a three-year period but lasted just seven months. The money would have helped pay to intervene with about 30 survivors of gun violence to prevent retaliatory violence. He's trying to find a way to continue the work, without overtaxing his team. 'We will not abandon a survivor of violence at the hospital bedside in the same way that the federal government is abandoning our field,' he said. The cuts are also hitting St. Louis, often dogged by being labeled one of the most dangerous cities in America. The city created an Office of Violence Prevention with money available under former President Joe Biden, and various groups received Justice Department grants, too. Locals say the efforts have helped: The 33% drop in the city's homicide rate from 2019 to 2024 was the second-largest decrease among 29 major cities examined by the Council on Criminal Justice. 'I don't think there's any doubt that there's some positive impact from the work that's happening,' said University of Missouri-St. Louis criminologist Chris Sullivan, who received a grant from the Justice Department to assess the work of the city's new Office of Violence Prevention. That research grant remains in place. But the Justice Department slashed two other grants in St. Louis, including $2 million for Power4STL. The nonprofit operates the Bullet Related Injury Clinic, dubbed the BRIC, which provides free treatment for physical and mental injuries caused by bullets. The BRIC had about $1.3 million left on its grant when the award was terminated in April. LJ Punch, a former trauma surgeon who founded the clinic in 2020, said it was intended to fund a mobile clinic, expand mental health services, evaluate the clinic's programs, and pay for a patient advisory board. The BRIC won't abandon those initiatives, Punch said, but will likely need to move slower. Keisha Blanchard joined the BRIC's advisory board after her experience as a patient at the clinic following a January 2024 gun injury. Someone fired a bullet into her back from the rear window of a Chevy Impala while Blanchard was out for a lunchtime stroll with a friend from her neighborhood walking group. The shooting was random, Blanchard said, but people always assume she did something to provoke it. 'It's so much shame that comes behind that,' she said. The 42-year-old said the shooting and her initial medical treatment left her feeling angry and unseen. Her family wasn't allowed to be with her at the hospital since the police didn't know who shot her or why. When she asked about taking the bullet out, she was told that the common medical practice is to leave it in. 'We're not in the business of removing bullets,' she recalled being told. At a follow-up appointment, she said, she watched her primary care doctor google what to do for a gunshot wound. 'Nobody cares what's going to happen to me after this,' Blanchard recalled thinking. Before she was referred to the BRIC, she said, she was treated as though she should be happy just to be alive. But a part of her died in the shooting, she said. Her joyful, carefree attitude gave way to hypervigilance. She stopped taking walks. She uprooted herself, moving to a neighborhood 20 miles away. The bullet stayed lodged inside her, forcing her to carry a constant reminder of the violence that shattered her sense of safety, until Punch removed it from her back in November. Blanchard said the removal made her feel 'reborn.' It's a familiar experience among shooting survivors, according to Punch. 'People talk about the distress about having bullets still inside their bodies, and how every waking conscious moment brings them back to the fact that that's still inside,' Punch said. 'But they're told repeatedly inside conventional care settings that there's nothing that needs to be done.' The Justice Department grant to the BRIC had been an acknowledgment, Punch said, that healing has a role in public safety by quelling retaliatory violence. 'The unhealed trauma in the body of someone who's gotten the message that they are not safe can rapidly turn into an act of violence when that person is threatened again,' Punch said. Community gun violence, even in large cities, is concentrated among relatively small groups of people who are often both victims and perpetrators, according to researchers. Violence reduction initiatives are frequently tailored to those networks. Jennifer Lorentz heads the Diversion Unit in the office of the St. Louis Circuit Attorney, the city's chief prosecutor. The unit offers mostly young, nonviolent offenders an opportunity to avoid prosecution by completing a program to address the issues that initially led to their arrest. About 80% of the participants have experienced gun violence and are referred to the BRIC, Lorentz said, calling the clinic critical to her program's success. 'We're getting them these resources, and we're changing the trajectory of their lives,' Lorentz said. 'Helping people is part of public safety.' Punch said the BRIC staffers were encouraged during the Justice Department application process to emphasize their reach into St. Louis' Black community, which is disproportionately affected by gun violence. He suspects that emphasis is why its grant was terminated. Punch likened the grant terminations to only partially treating tuberculosis, which allows the highly infectious disease to become resistant to medicine. 'If you partially extend a helping hand to somebody, and then you rip it away right when they start to trust you, you assure they will never trust you again,' he said. 'If your intention is to prevent violence, you don't do that.' KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Good News About Crime
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. You don't hear a lot of good news these days, and you hear even less good news about crime. In fact, this is a consistent structural problem with crime reporting. When crime is rising, it gets a great deal of attention—following the old newsroom adage that 'if it bleeds, it leads.' Most news consumers are probably aware that starting in 2020, the United States witnessed one of the most remarkable increases in crime in its history. Murder rose by the highest annual rate recorded (going back to the start of reliable records, in 1960) from 2019 to 2020. Some criminal-justice-reform advocates, concerned that the increase would doom nascent progress, tried to play it down. They were right to point out that violent crime was still well below the worst peaks of the 1980s and '90s, but wrong to dismiss the increase entirely. Such a steep, consistent, and national rise is scary, and each data point represents a horror for real people. What happened after that is less heralded: Crime is down since then. Although final statistics are not yet available, some experts think that 2024 likely set the record for the steepest fall in the murder rate. And 2025 is off to an even better start. The year is not yet half over, and a lot can still change—just consider 2020, when murder really took off in the second half—but the Real-Time Crime Index, which draws on a national sample, finds that through March, murder is down 21.6 percent, violent crime is down 11 percent, and property crime is down 13.8 percent. In April, Chicago had 20 murders. That's not just lower than in any April of the past few years—that's the best April since 1962, early in Richard J. Daley's mayorship. One of the great challenges of reporting on crime is the lack and lateness of good statistics. The best numbers come from the FBI, but they aren't released until the fall of the following year. Still, we can get a pretty good idea of the trends from the data that are available. The Council on Criminal Justice analyzed 2024 data from 40 cities on 13 categories of crime, and found that all but one (shoplifting) dropped from 2023. Homicide was down 16 percent among cities in the sample that reported data, and in cities with especially high numbers of murders, such as St. Louis, Baltimore, and Detroit, they fell to 2014 levels. Even carjacking, which suddenly had become more common in recent years, was down to below 2020 levels—though motor-vehicle theft was higher. A separate report from the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which gathers leaders of police departments in the biggest cities, found similar trends: a 16 percent drop in homicide from 2023, and smaller reductions in rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Another great challenge of reporting on crime is how vague our understanding is of what drives changes in crime. Even now, scholars disagree about what led to the long decline in crime from the 1990s until the 2010s. One popular theory for the 2020 rise has been that it was connected to the murder of George Floyd and the resulting protests, though that allows for several possible pathways: Were police too occupied with protests to deal with ordinary crime? Were they de-policing as a sort of protest (the 'blue flu')—or were they pulling back because that was the message the protests were sending them and their leaders? Did the attention to brutal law enforcement delegitimize police in the eyes of citizens, encouraging a rise in criminal behavior? Any or all of these are possible, in various proportions. A Brookings Institution report published in December contends that the pandemic itself was the prime culprit. The authors argue that murder was already rising when Floyd was killed. 'The spike in murders during 2020 was directly connected to local unemployment and school closures in low-income areas,' they write. 'Cities with larger numbers of young men forced out of work and teen boys pushed out of school in low-income neighborhoods during March and early April, had greater increases in homicide from May to December that year, on average.' Because many of these unemployment and school-closure-related trends continued for years, they believe this explains why high murder rates persisted in 2021 and 2022 before falling. The journalist Alec MacGillis has also done powerful reporting that makes a similar argument. Recognizing the real trends in crime rates is important in part because disorder, real or perceived, creates openings for demagoguery. Throughout his time in politics, President Donald Trump has exaggerated or outright misrepresented the state of crime in the United States, and has used it to push for both stricter and more brutal policing. He has also argued that deportations will reduce crime—with his administration going so far as to delete a Justice Department webpage with a report noting that undocumented immigrants commit crime at lower rates than native citizens in Texas. The irony is that Trump's policy choices could slow or even reverse the positive trends currently occurring. Reuters reports that the Justice Department has eliminated more than $800 million in grants through the Office of Justice Programs. Giffords, a gun-control group founded by former U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords, warns that this includes important aid to local police departments for preventing gun violence and other forms of crime: 'Trump is destabilizing the very foundations of violence prevention programs across the country.' The administration's economic policies also threaten to drive the U.S. into recession, which tends to cause increases in crime, as it may have done in 2020. Upticks in crime driven by misguided policy choices would be tragic, especially coming just as the shock of 2020 is fading. Good news isn't just hard to find—it can also be fleeting. Related: What's really going on with the crime rate? (From 2022) The many causes of America's decline in crime (From 2015) Here are three new stories from The Atlantic: The mother who never stopped believing her son was still there The visionary of Trump 2.0 An autopsy report on Biden's in-office decline Today's News Some Republicans in the House Budget Committee, demanding deeper spending cuts, voted against President Donald Trump's tax bill. The Supreme Court temporarily blocked the Trump administration from using a wartime law to deport a group of Venezuelan immigrants. Israel's air strikes killed roughly 100 people in north Gaza, according to local health officials. Evening Read 'We're Definitely Going to Build a Bunker Before We Release AGI' By Karen Hao In the summer of 2023, Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder and the chief scientist of OpenAI, was meeting with a group of new researchers at the company. By all traditional metrics, Sutskever should have felt invincible: He was the brain behind the large language models that helped build ChatGPT, then the fastest-growing app in history; his company's valuation had skyrocketed; and OpenAI was the unrivaled leader of the industry believed to power the future of Silicon Valley. But the chief scientist seemed to be at war with himself. Read the full article. More From The Atlantic The question the Trump administration couldn't answer about birthright citizenship The birthright-citizenship case isn't really about birthright citizenship. The new MAGA world order A different way to think about medicine's most stubborn enigma Culture Break Take charge. You may be fine with becoming more like your parents or hate the idea. Either way, it's something you can control, the happiness expert Arthur C. Brooks writes. Read. Amanda Hess's new book examines a surplus of experts and gadgets promising to perfect the experience of raising children, Hillary Kelly writes. Play our daily crossword. Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter. Explore all of our newsletters here. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
16-05-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
The Good News About Crime
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. You don't hear a lot of good news these days, and you hear even less good news about crime. In fact, this is a consistent structural problem with crime reporting. When crime is rising, it gets a great deal of attention—following the old newsroom adage that ' if it bleeds, it leads.' Most news consumers are probably aware that starting in 2020, the United States witnessed one of the most remarkable increases in crime in its history. Murder rose by the highest annual rate recorded (going back to the start of reliable records, in 1960) from 2019 to 2020. Some criminal-justice-reform advocates, concerned that the increase would doom nascent progress, tried to play it down. They were right to point out that violent crime was still well below the worst peaks of the 1980s and '90s, but wrong to dismiss the increase entirely. Such a steep, consistent, and national rise is scary, and each data point represents a horror for real people. What happened after that is less heralded: Crime is down since then. Although final statistics are not yet available, some experts think that 2024 likely set the record for the steepest fall in the murder rate. And 2025 is off to an even better start. The year is not yet half over, and a lot can still change—just consider 2020, when murder really took off in the second half—but the Real-Time Crime Index, which draws on a national sample, finds that through March, murder is down 21.6 percent, violent crime is down 11 percent, and property crime is down 13.8 percent. In April, Chicago had 20 murders. That's not just lower than in any April of the past few years—that's the best April since 1962, early in Richard J. Daley's mayorship. One of the great challenges of reporting on crime is the lack and lateness of good statistics. The best numbers come from the FBI, but they aren't released until the fall of the following year. Still, we can get a pretty good idea of the trends from the data that are available. The Council on Criminal Justice analyzed 2024 data from 40 cities on 13 categories of crime, and found that all but one (shoplifting) dropped from 2023. Homicide was down 16 percent among cities in the sample that reported data, and in cities with especially high numbers of murders, such as St. Louis, Baltimore, and Detroit, they fell to 2014 levels. Even carjacking, which suddenly had become more common in recent years, was down to below 2020 levels—though motor-vehicle theft was higher. A separate report from the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which gathers leaders of police departments in the biggest cities, found similar trends: a 16 percent drop in homicide from 2023, and smaller reductions in rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Another great challenge of reporting on crime is how vague our understanding is of what drives changes in crime. Even now, scholars disagree about what led to the long decline in crime from the 1990s until the 2010s. One popular theory for the 2020 rise has been that it was connected to the murder of George Floyd and the resulting protests, though that allows for several possible pathways: Were police too occupied with protests to deal with ordinary crime? Were they de-policing as a sort of protest (the ' blue flu ')—or were they pulling back because that was the message the protests were sending them and their leaders? Did the attention to brutal law enforcement delegitimize police in the eyes of citizens, encouraging a rise in criminal behavior? Any or all of these are possible, in various proportions. A Brookings Institution report published in December contends that the pandemic itself was the prime culprit. The authors argue that murder was already rising when Floyd was killed. 'The spike in murders during 2020 was directly connected to local unemployment and school closures in low-income areas,' they write. 'Cities with larger numbers of young men forced out of work and teen boys pushed out of school in low-income neighborhoods during March and early April, had greater increases in homicide from May to December that year, on average.' Because many of these unemployment and school-closure-related trends continued for years, they believe this explains why high murder rates persisted in 2021 and 2022 before falling. The journalist Alec MacGillis has also done powerful reporting that makes a similar argument. Recognizing the real trends in crime rates is important in part because disorder, real or perceived, creates openings for demagoguery. Throughout his time in politics, President Donald Trump has exaggerated or outright misrepresented the state of crime in the United States, and has used it to push for both stricter and more brutal policing. He has also argued that deportations will reduce crime—with his administration going so far as to delete a Justice Department webpage with a report noting that undocumented immigrants commit crime at lower rates than native citizens in Texas. The irony is that Trump's policy choices could slow or even reverse the positive trends currently occurring. Reuters reports that the Justice Department has eliminated more than $800 million in grants through the Office of Justice Programs. Giffords, a gun-control group founded by former U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords, warns that this includes important aid to local police departments for preventing gun violence and other forms of crime: 'Trump is destabilizing the very foundations of violence prevention programs across the country.' The administration's economic policies also threaten to drive the U.S. into recession, which tends to cause increases in crime, as it may have done in 2020. Upticks in crime driven by misguided policy choices would be tragic, especially coming just as the shock of 2020 is fading. Good news isn't just hard to find—it can also be fleeting. Here are three new stories from The Atlantic: Today's News Some Republicans in the House Budget Committee, demanding deeper spending cuts, voted against President Donald Trump's tax bill. The Supreme Court temporarily blocked the Trump administration from using a wartime law to deport a group of Venezuelan immigrants. Israel's air strikes killed roughly 100 people in north Gaza, according to local health officials. Evening Read 'We're Definitely Going to Build a Bunker Before We Release AGI' By Karen Hao In the summer of 2023, Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder and the chief scientist of OpenAI, was meeting with a group of new researchers at the company. By all traditional metrics, Sutskever should have felt invincible: He was the brain behind the large language models that helped build ChatGPT, then the fastest-growing app in history; his company's valuation had skyrocketed; and OpenAI was the unrivaled leader of the industry believed to power the future of Silicon Valley. But the chief scientist seemed to be at war with himself. More From The Atlantic Take charge. You may be fine with becoming more like your parents or hate the idea. Either way, it's something you can control, the happiness expert Arthur C. Brooks writes. Read. Amanda Hess's new book examines a surplus of experts and gadgets promising to perfect the experience of raising children, Hillary Kelly writes.
Newsweek
21-04-2025
- Politics
- Newsweek
Second Chance Month Must Be a Gateway to Enduring Justice
Every April since President Donald Trump signed the first proclamation in 2018, Second Chance Month serves as a national call to recognize the dignity and potential success of people with criminal records. It highlights the need for policy changes that remove barriers to reentry and amplifies the voices of those who have overcome the experience and stigma of incarceration. While commemorating Second Chance Month is laudable, committing to action on making the goal of redemption a reality is the next step. Tens of millions of Americans, including half of those who are unemployed, have a criminal record. Too often, it functions as a life sentence long after their official punishment ends. Barriers to employment, housing, education, and civic engagement, among others, persist, preventing millions from fully reintegrating and engaging in society. Inmates exercise in the maximum security yard of the Lansing Correctional Facility on April 18, 2023, in Lansing, Kan. Inmates exercise in the maximum security yard of the Lansing Correctional Facility on April 18, 2023, in Lansing, can rein in excessive barriers in these areas while also holding people accountable for their mistakes, as we owe it to victims and the public to ensure there are consequences for causing harm. Fortunately, when we make the path of a law-abiding life more attainable for those who have demonstrated their commitment to rehabilitation, we can create a society that is safer and more prosperous for all of us. Employment is one of the biggest challenges for those reentering society. Workforce training programs tailored for those returning from incarceration should be expanded and funded year-round, not just highlighted in April. Such an initiative in Arizona is providing a strong return on investment. Technology offers many exciting opportunities, with one study finding that the use of a virtual reality interface to train people in prison on job interviewing contributed to more job offers and lower recidivism upon release. Another way of promoting stable employment is institutionalizing automatic record-clearing for eligible individuals through "Clean Slate" laws, which automatically expunge or seal low-level records after a certain period for those who have remained crime-free. While a dozen states—such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Utah—have enacted this policy, nationwide adoption would eliminate bureaucratic obstacles preventing people from moving past their records and contributing more to society. Accordingly, the Council on Criminal Justice's Veterans Justice Commission recommended that Clean Slate be expanded. To be sure, Clean Slate is not a panacea. A broad body of research demonstrates that a criminal record significantly reduces future lifetime earnings, but one recent study found that workers in most professions did not see an increased income following their record being sealed. However just 6 percent of beneficiaries of automatic sealing knew that they had received this relief. This suggests that they may not have adjusted their expectations accordingly when it comes to applying for the higher-paying jobs that tend to have the most rigorous background requirements. That illustrates the importance of adding a provision to Clean Slate laws whereby those who benefit receive notification. In addition to implementing job training programs and Clean Slate, states can remove unnecessary occupational licensing restrictions that prevent people with unrelated records from entering certain professions, a policy endorsed by leading conservative organizations such as the America First Policy Institute and American Legislative Exchange Council. Conversely, the growing "abundance movement" through which many on the left are now embracing deregulation that has long been a priority on the free-market right is also relevant here. We should remove excessive barriers to housing for people with criminal records, both through local public housing providers eliminating blanket exclusions and through broader efforts to rein in excessive zoning and permitting requirements that drive up the cost of housing. Additionally, city governments and local law enforcement agencies should embrace diversion programs that offer treatment instead of incarceration for many of those struggling with substance use or mental health challenges. Programs like Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) and crisis intervention teams have shown success in keeping people out of jail while connecting them with needed services. Second chances must also include restoring full civic participation, particularly voting rights. In some states like Mississippi and Tennessee, people with a felony record face lifetime exclusion from voting unless their application for a pardon or petition is granted. A system that permanently excludes people from civic participation is inconsistent with promoting reintegration. Research shows that people who vote are more likely to engage positively in their communities, reinforcing the connection between civic participation, trust in institutions, and public safety. Finally, we must shift the narrative about what it means to truly embrace second chances. Too often, discussions focus only on people who have become model citizens post-incarceration, reinforcing the idea that only a select few deserve a shot at redemption. Instead, we should recognize that, just as we must hold all people accountable for their actions, all people—regardless of their past—deserve dignity, opportunity, and a fair chance at rebuilding their lives as they emerge from the criminal justice system. Second Chance Month is a useful tool to raise awareness, but it should be the foundation not the ceiling of our ambitions. By implementing policies that support record-clearing, employment, civic engagement, and local reforms, we can make second chances more than just a feel-good moment of reflection. We can make them a lasting reality. Marc A. Levin, Esq. and Khalil Cumberbatch co-lead the Centering Justice Initiative at the Council on Criminal Justice where Levin is chief policy counsel and Cumberbatch is director of engagement and partnerships. They can be reached at mlevin@ and khalil@ The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.
