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At The Intersection of Probation and Jail Reduction Efforts: Findings on Probation, Jail, and Transitional Housing Trends in Pima County, Arizona

July 11, 2023

Reducing jail populations – and the collateral consequences of criminal legal system involvement – requires jurisdictions to critically examine why and how people are entering the system to begin with. Much of the research around jail reform focuses on the pretrial population; however, with rising numbers o individuals under probation supervision and jail commonly being used to detain those awaiting a hearing on a probation violation, reform efforts to understand how violations contribute to the overall jail population are essential. To learn more about the impact probation revocations have on jails and to advance promising strategies to address them, CUNY ISLG funded the Urban Institute through the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) to conduct a mixed-methods study on how people on probation end up in jail incarceration and the impact of a program aimed at improving these outcomes with transitional housing support through the Adult Probation Department (APD) in Pima County, Arizona. Using administrative data from the Pima County Jail and APD, case record reviews, and interviews with APD leadership, probation officers, judges, community-based housing providers, and people on probation, this study aimed to decipher the system-level trends in jail incarceration for probation violations and the key pathways to jail incarceration for those individuals currently on probation. It also sought to understand the impact of the transitional housing support program on short and long-term outcomes for people on probation receiving funding from APD for transitional housing.

Toward Pay Equity: A Case Study of Washington DC’s Wage Boost for Early Childhood Educators

June 8, 2023

This short report presents findings from interviews—with key informants, including DC early childhood education leaders, advocates, and implementation partners; parents and legal guardians of young children enrolled in licensed DC child care facilities; and child care center directors and home and expanded home providers—on the nation's first early childhood educator wage supplement with dedicated public funding.

Bringing Zoning into Focus: A Fine-Grained Analysis of Zoning’s Relationships to Housing Affordability, Income Distributions, and Segregation in Connecticut

June 6, 2023

For more than a century, local governments throughout the United States have used zoning to shape future growth. Through rules that regulate what sorts of housing can be built where, localities may either allow for new development or restrict construction to maintain the status quo. Using a first-of-its-kind database of zoning laws across an entire state, we provide evidence that strict zoning regulations limiting construction to single-family homes are associated with inadequate access to affordable housing and with the segregation of people by income, race, and ethnicity.We leverage the Connecticut Zoning Atlas, a unique dataset of zoning texts tied to geospatial files that allow for georeferenced comparisons between the zoning laws adopted by 180 localities. We overlay the geographies of zoning districts on spatially differentiated demographic and economic indicators at the neighborhood level. Analyzing and comparing this information allows us to provide a comprehensive view of the relationships between zoning laws, property values, and residents' demographic and economic characteristics.Our research focuses on a state with stark disparities in residential land uses: only 2 percent of Connecticut's land is zoned to allow the by-right construction of multifamily buildings with three or more units per parcel, while 91 percent of its land allows only the construction of single-family housing by right. Our analysis reveals that suburbs and towns have the most restrictive zoning rules by several measures, while the largest cities more readily permit multifamily construction. We show that the residents of neighborhoods with mostly single-family zoning, on average, have significantly higher household incomes and are much more likely to be white, much less likely to be Black or Hispanic, more likely to have a bachelor's degree, and much more likely to own their homes than residents of neighborhoods where zoning allows for multifamily building construction. These findings paint a picture of a state where localities' zoning either divides or reinforces the division of residents by income, race, ethnicity, and education levels. We also apply a segregation index to explore the associations between zoning rules and neighborhood- and locality-level segregation. After controlling for other characteristics, we find that higher concentrations of high-income and white residents are associated with lower number-of-unit zoning policies. We also find that higher concentrations of low-income, Black, Hispanic, and other residents of color are associated with zoning allowing the construction of two or more housing units per parcel and higher shares of renter-occupied housing.Together, these findings bring new insight into the relationship between zoning policy and residents' geographic distribution. Our results clearly point to the links between zoning laws, rental housing availability, and inequitable distributions of populations within and across jurisdictions. Policymakers considering how to improve access to opportunity while reducing income or racial segregation should evaluate the potential for altering local zoning codes to allow greater diversity of housing construction and tenure types in more places.

Understanding Training and Workforce Pathways to Develop and Retain Black Maternal Health Clinicians in California

May 16, 2023

Despite evidence that greater diversity in health professions increases quality of care, the maternal health field has made little progress on increasing and sustaining the number of Black maternal health care workers. In this study, Urban researchers examine opportunities for and barriers to increasing the workforce of Black obstetrician/gynecologists (OB/GYNs), labor and delivery (L&D) nurses, and midwives, especially in light of the ongoing US maternal health crisis. Through interviews with Black maternal health clinicians and training program staff, we recommend actions that federal and state policymakers, leaders at higher education and health system institutions, and philanthropies can take to address structural barriers to entering and staying within the field and to support a thriving workforce.

Wealth Opportunities Realized Through Homeownership (WORTH): Baseline Report

May 15, 2023

This report is part of an evaluation of the Wealth Opportunities Realized through Homeownership (WORTH) initiative. Led by the Wells Fargo Foundation, WORTH supports efforts to close persistent disparities in homeownership in Atlanta, Houston, Milwaukee, New York, Philadelphia, Richmond, San Diego, and rural and tribal areas. In each market, we examine housing supply and demand, homebuying activity, homeownership trends, and preservation conditions. We found that in almost every market, white households have higher homeownership rates than every other racial or ethnic group. Moreover, macroeconomic forces driving market conditions, like higher interest rates and moderating house prices, can significantly dampen or thwart market collaboratives' efforts to boost homeownership rates for people of color. Future evaluation will examine the implementation processes used in each market. The larger body of work contributes to understanding the crucial connection between homeownership and wealth-building and the multitude of barriers that households of color face in achieving homeownership. It also supports research-backed strategies for increasing homeownership for households of color and for reducing racial disparities.

How Tulsa, Oklahoma, Responds to Survivors of Domestic Violence: Results from an Assessment of Services and System Responses for Domestic Violence Survivors and Victims

May 3, 2023

The Urban Institute received funding from the George Kaiser Family Foundation to conduct a mixed-methods assessment of adult domestic violence (DV) in Tulsa, Oklahoma.1The purpose of Urban's study was to understand major programs, policies, services, and funding sources geared toward preventing and responding to adult DV survivors and recommend ways Tulsa could improve its response to domestic violence. The first part of the mixed-method assessment focused primarily on the largest service provider in Tulsa, Domestic Violence Intervention Services, Inc. (DVIS). The second part of the assessment focused on qualitative data collection with criminal legal and human services agencies and stakeholders to provide insight into the larger domestic violence landscape in Tulsa. Based on the assessment findings, we identified seven overarching recommendations – and examples of ways to implement each recommendation – for how Tulsa could improve its response to domestic violence. This report begins with recommendations and "how to" guidance on how responders in Tulsa can improve their response to DV to prevent violence, keep victims safe, and hold people who cause harm accountable. These recommendations are based directly on what we learned during our assessment. After this guidance, we provide the assessment findings that led to the recommendations.

Closing the Coverage Gaps: Reducing Health Insurance Disparities in Massachusetts

April 27, 2023

Massachusetts has been exemplary in developing health insurance coverage policies to cover its residents. By 2019, the state's uninsurance rate was 3.0 percent, the lowest rate in the nation, representing about 204,000 uninsured residents. While the state's overall uninsured rate at a given point in time is low, more than twice as many people - 503,000, or 7.3 percent of the population - experienced a gap in coverage over the previous twelve months. And importantly, not all groups benefit equally. People who are Black or Hispanic, or who have lower incomes, experience significantly higher rates of uninsurance than the state population overall. As a result, these groups are more likely to face access barriers and financial insecurity associated with being uninsured.The purpose of this report is to begin charting a course toward closing the coverage gaps in Massachusetts, with a particular focus on creating a more racially and ethnically equitable system of coverage. The report and accompanying infographics describe the people in Massachusetts without health insurance and the barriers to coverage they face, including affordability, administrative complexity, and immigration, language, and cultural barriers. It then proposes a menu of policy options that address the specific circumstances in Massachusetts. The proposed options are meant to inform a statewide conversation about the best approaches to closing the remaining coverage gaps in Massachusetts and removing structural barriers that result in racial and ethnic disparities in health insurance coverage.

Mapping Evidence-Based Home Visiting Provided by Tribal-Led Organizations

April 19, 2023

This Data in Action Brief maps evidence-based home visiting provided by tribal-led organizations in light of recent federal efforts to expand services to more American Indian Alaska Native (AIAN) families. In 2022, Congress expanded the federal Tribal Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (Tribal MIECHV) Program to account for 6 percent of MIECHV funds, rather than the previous 3 percent set aside.Tribal nation leaders, urban Native leaders, and community members have long advocated for resources to offset the negative impacts of genocide, colonization, historical trauma, systemic racism, and broken treaties by the U.S. government. MIECHV identifies families in tribes and urban Native communities as a priority population, in part to recognize these systemic harms and to honor the cultural heritage and sovereignty of Native nations. In this brief, we consider the degree to which tribal communities have been able to access—and chosen to implement—evidence-based home visiting services.

Efforts to Reduce Jail Populations in Philadelphia: Implementation Lessons from the Safety and Justice Challenge

March 31, 2023

Jail incarceration continues to be a main driver of the mass incarceration crisis in the United States and to negatively affect individuals, families, and communities. Racial disparities in local jail populations are significant, particularly to the detriment of Black communities. Involvement in the criminal legal system, even when brief, can have severe consequences, including barriers to sustaining employment and securing stable housing, poor physical and mental health stemming from chronic stress and limited access to adequate health care, and disruptions to family relationships and social support networks.To address these issues, Philadelphia implemented a multipronged reform plan supported by the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) to reduce its jail population and associated racial and ethnic disparities. Since 2015, Philadelphia has significantly reduced its jail population through these SJC efforts, which included closing a jail facility, launching a strategy across decision points in the criminal legal system, strengthening collaboration and cross-agency partnerships, launching a formal committee to represent community members' perspectives, and analyzing data to identify racial and ethnic disparities across decision points.This report describes Philadelphia's major SJC strategies, documents how it navigated challenges and advanced tangible reform efforts, and explores the perceived impacts of these strategies on its efforts to engage community members, reduce local jail use, and implement system reforms that advance equity.

The Next Reconstruction: Examining the Call for a National Reparations Program

March 30, 2023

In this brief, we examine the evolution of reparations proposals in the United States, connect a national reparations program to the United Nations' international human rights standards around reparations, and discuss the potential of a national reparations program to close long-standing racial gaps in wealth, housing, education, criminal justice, and other areas. We focus in part on the reparations commission proposed by H.R. 40, the most comprehensive reparations legislation in US history. We also make recommendations for strengthening the research and policy-development infrastructure for reparations.We argue that in addition to compensation for past harms, conceptualizations of reparations should involve looking at present practices, policies, and barriers to economic security and wealth building for Black Americans. We can account for historical injustices and prioritize how they have contributed to and exacerbated present inequalities while considering how current policies continue to exacerbate and reproduce those inequalities.In addition to exploring early reparations efforts in the United States, we review selected policy proposals that have involved efforts to make progress on reparations for Black Americans, analyze the current reparations policy landscape, and recommend ways researchers can identify approaches to make reparations effective at eliminating key racial gaps for Black Americans. This research can inform policy discussions and analyses of reparations, especially as governments continue to explore them.

“It’s Not For Us”: Understanding How Meta-Oppression Influences Black Americans’ Experiences with the Credit System

March 23, 2023

For many Black Americans the doors to critical wealth-building tools that easily open for their white counterparts are locked or obstructed because of centuries-long discriminatory policies and practices. Without these same opportunities, Black Americans are often left behind, perpetually playing against a stacked deck.Structural racism not only shapes the outcomes that people experience in all sectors of life, but it also has psychological effects on what Black Americans think is possible. This psychological stress from dealing with persistent structural racism across society is called meta-oppression, a concept developed by Dr. Jacqueline Scott.Through a study of Black Chicago residents' experiences with the credit system, we found that Black Americans internalized feelings of guilt, hopelessness, and despair, all of which hindered their willingness to further engage with the credit system. By illuminating the diverse effects of structural racism on the lives of Black Americans, we hope to reveal key opportunities for policy and practice to interrupt meta-oppression and advance racial equity across society.

How Structural Racism Shapes Black Americans’ Sense of Self: Understanding Meta-Oppression and Its Effects in the Credit System

March 23, 2023

For many Black Americans the doors to critical wealth-building tools that easily open for their white counterparts are locked or obstructed because of centuries-long discriminatory policies and practices. Without these same opportunities, Black Americans are often left behind, perpetually playing against a stacked deck.Structural racism not only shapes the outcomes that people experience in all sectors of life, but it also has psychological effects on what Black Americans think is possible. This psychological stress from dealing with persistent structural racism across society is called meta-oppression, a concept developed by Dr. Jacqueline Scott.Through a study of Black Chicago residents' experiences with the credit system, we found that Black Americans internalized feelings of guilt, hopelessness, and despair, all of which hindered their willingness to further engage with the credit system. By illuminating the diverse effects of structural racism on the lives of Black Americans, we hope to reveal key opportunities for policy and practice to interrupt meta-oppression and advance racial equity across society.