Tag: New York

A Better Way to Register New Voters, A Talking Cure for Homicide and More

Posted on by robbie

 

Here’s What Happened When Oregon Automatically Registered Its New Voters, Washington Post

When you apply for a drivers license in Oregon, you’re now automatically registered to vote. State officials say the DMV program — the nation’s first opt-out law — is the simplest way to bolster voter rolls and keep addresses up-to-date — important in a state that votes by mail. So far, in the first week, four times as many new voters signed up as the Beaver State used to register in a month. It remains to be seen whether they actually cast a ballot.

This Police Department Stops Disputes Before They Turn Deadly, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

It’s a rule of thumb for criminologists that crime spikes in the summer: not only are more people outside, but heated arguments also sometimes lead to violence. In Rochester, N.Y., beat cops now track tiffs across the city and send a summary of the dispute to a central database, where analysts can predict which are most likely to escalate. While this predictive policing may sound like a real-life “Minority Report,” law enforcement’s seven-month-old strategy appears promising and is being looked at by other departments nationally, including Milwaukee.

After Rehab, This Valuable App Keeps Drinkers and Drug Abusers Sober, New York Times

A former addict walks out of rehab and is suddenly bombarded by temptations: old drinking buddies, familiar haunts, relief from stress and anxiety. A mobile app, A-Chess, checks in throughout the day to help alcoholics avoid the bottle. It’s pre-loaded with high-risk locations like bars and liquor stores the person frequented. When nearby, the app automatically sends a message, “Are you sure you want to be here?” and alerts other contacts the patient has pre-programmed, like his sponsor or a family member. Along with virtual counseling and other smartphone apps, these modern tools are helping with the hardest part of getting clean: staying that way.

These Yoga Teachers Empower Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Survivors to Reclaim Their Lives

Posted on by robbie

Tara Tonini slept with a shotgun. After months of being in a violent relationship, she found the strength to leave and get her own apartment, but her abuser was stalking her and threatened her life.
Sadly, Tonini’s experience isn’t unique.
In the United States, about one in four women will experience domestic violence during her life, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s extremely dangerous for a battered woman to leave an abusive partner, and those who are brave enough to do so often suffer from PTSD for years.
Tonini is now the program director of Exhale to Inhale, a nonprofit that brings free yoga classes to shelters and community centers that serve domestic violence and sexual assault survivors. It also trains volunteer instructors to lead trauma-informed yoga classes. Tonini credits yoga for where she is today.
Check out the video above and witness how the regular practice of yoga can help trauma survivors in tremendous ways.
MORE: Meet the Doctors Building an Innovative, Holistic Bridge to Healthy Living

The Charismatic Gardener Whose Giving Is Inspiring Future Community Activists

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When Karen Washington, a black urban farmer in the Bronx, learned that she was the recipient of the $10,000 AllStar prize, she was dumbfounded. Her mouth hung open in shock. Oversized check in hand from NationSwell and NBCUniversal, Washington stood onstage in silence, a rare moment of speechlessness from a charismatic storyteller.
Now that a month’s passed, NationSwell caught up with Washington to discuss that emotional moment and her future plans. Washington has already doled out some of the funds in New York City’s poorest borough and hopes her giving will inspire more donors to step forward to help her match the prize and start a community foundation that will back other local activists.
Looking back to the NationSwell Summit in early November, Washington thought she had no chance of winning. “Here I am 61 years of age, and I’m with a younger generation who knew all about social media, and this competition was all about social media,” she says. Her strategy to get online votes? “The only thing I can do is tell my story,” she says, and mobilize folks with some good, old-fashioned word-of-mouth organizing.
After her name was announced, Washington was “just so overwhelmed with emotion,” she says, her voice cracking into a restrained sob. “I guess I never knew how much I was really loved. I never knew how far-reaching it was, the impact that I had on so many people across the world that took the time to vote for me. And that’s when it hit me, right then and there.”
Inspired by that outpouring of love, Washington is sending that affection back to her neighborhood. Already, she’s given money to a community garden to help build a retaining wall, funded an apprenticeship program at a farm and group for young men of color, paid the funeral expenses for a farm school student who died suddenly and contributed to a legal defense fund for black farmers threatened by foreclosure.
Her aim is not to fund big projects that other nonprofits are already working on. Instead, Washington wants to help community activists who can’t get grants elsewhere. She’s looking for the locals who don’t make the headlines — the ones whose operation is too small to have a full-time grant-writer.
Washington is keeping diligent notes about each dollar to track how her impact magnifies. She isn’t asking for anything back, but the money does come with one condition: As soon as the person has a few extra bucks, she asks that he or she pass along the surplus to another activist in need.
As soon her name was announced, Washington thought to herself, “You know what? I won for a reason.” But then she corrected herself. “No, we,” she said. Her family, her gardening friends and fellow farmers, her community. “We won for a reason.”
WATCH: See the Seeds of Change Grown by One Bronx Woman 
Homepage photo courtesy of Karen Washington.

Homeless and Jobless, This Man Found Hope Running 26.2 Miles

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Kevin Gonzalez, a 24-year-old from the South Bronx, had been training for the marathon his entire life — he just didn’t know it. Gonzalez didn’t regularly go on 18-mile training runs on the weekend nor did he spend hours on the treadmill; in fact, he wasn’t a runner at all. But his tough upbringing prepped him to endure a long haul, not just a sprint.
After a pre-dawn run, Gonzalez met with NationSwell recently in the front lobby of the Bowery Mission, a men’s residential recovery center in East Harlem, N.Y. After living at the shelter for a few months, Gonzalez signed up with Back on My Feet, a program that uses running to instill responsibility and self-sufficiency, with the ultimate goal of running the 2015 New York City Marathon. Gonzalez heard that the nonprofit’s morning runs had translated into 2,000 jobs and 1,400 housing placements for homeless participants, so he laced his running shoes to test whether he could be the organization’s next success story.
“I went from running the streets to running to save my life,” Gonzalez says. “Now I knew what I wanted to do and why it mattered. I had the dedication and a goal to achieve.”
That feeling of determination was new for Gonzalez, who was orphaned at a young age and spent his childhood in the foster care system. From age 17, he’s been on his own. With a minimum-wage job, Gonzalez was able to pay for his own apartment for a year before moving with his girlfriend’s family. Struggling with addictions — alcohol, drugs and cigarettes — he lost a job and was kicked out. Without anywhere to go, Gonzalez was living on the street.
His first run wasn’t easy. Another Back on My Feet member ran alongside Gonzalez for the whole hour to make sure he wasn’t alone. But that guy wanted to chat, something that Gonzalez, who was struggling to breathe, found impossible. Six months since he started, a morning run has become part of the routine, and Gonzalez’s lungs have greater capacity.
“Nothing is as relaxing as breaking a quick sweat,” Gonzalez says. “It helps with my stress and anxieties. I feel like I’m 18 again. I’m in the best shape of my life.”
The weekend before the Big Apple’s marathon last month, on one of his final practice workouts, Gonzalez stumbled and sprained his ankle. He had trained so hard and the injury didn’t seem that bad, so Gonzalez continued with his marathon plan. With his toe on the starting line in Staten Island, his shoulders were tense with nervousness. Using the resilience he’d built and strengthened over so many years, Gonzalez pushed his worries about the injury aside.
When he passed the 18th mile and saw the cheering supporters from the shelter at 110th Street, he knew he could make it. Four and a half hours after starting, he crossed the finish line in Central Park.
With one marathon down, Gonzalez already has his sights on his next one. He now has a job walking dogs, and he expects to enroll in school next year. He’s planning to run the marathon again in November 2016, cutting an hour off his time.
“I’d say running has saved my life,” Gonzalez says. “I found hope. Things are brighter than ever.”
MORE: The Running Program That’s Pulled 1,300 People Out of Homelessness

This Exciting Program Moves Struggling Students to the Head of the Class

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The statistics are troubling. Only about 16 percent of students in Harlem pass the New York State English Language Arts exam. And just 31 percent of children across New York City pass it. But one group is changing that.
The Reading Team, a Harlem-based literacy organization, is working to make children who are at high risk of reading failure active and excited learners. And it’s finding success: In 2015, 80 percent of Reading Team children passed the New York State English Language Arts exam.
How are they doing it? By making literacy relevant to every activity. Watch the video above to see how the organization uses computer coding, chess, and more to support the children’s success in school and in life.
 

Removing Children from Abusive Situations at Home Isn’t Always the Answer. This Is

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Elisa Izquierdo was conceived in a Brooklyn, N.Y., homeless shelter and born with cocaine in her bloodstream in late 1980s. Her mother, Awilda Lopez, went on week-long drug binges and cashed welfare checks to feed her crack addiction. Two of Lopez’s other children lived with relatives, removed from the home by the court system.
Social workers placed Izquierdo in the custody of her father, where she remained until his death in 1994. After returning to live with her mother, school officials noticed that Izquierdo was withdrawn, walked as if recovering from an injury and had a large bruise marking her head, prompting them to call child welfare. Lopez responded by pulling her daughter out of the school. “When I asked her if she was hitting Elisa,” Izquierdo’s aunt recalls of a conversation with her sister, “she told me no, that she just punished her.”
In November 1995, three days before Thanksgiving, Lopez beat her daughter to death by throwing her against their housing project’s concrete wall, the impact causing the six-year-old’s brain to hemorrhage. After seeing the body, one police lieutenant told reporters that it was the worst case of child abuse he had seen in his 22 years on the force. Authorities had been notified of Izquierdo’s case at least eight times, but failed to respond despite plangent cries for help ringing out repeatedly.
The shocking murder, for which then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said the entire city was “accountable,” led to the creation of the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), a governmental body with a $2.9 billion budget charged to protect the well-being of New York City’s children. During its overzealous beginnings, the agency took things too far. In 1993, more than 45,000 kids resided in foster care. This year, in an equally stunning turn, those in the system numbered just 10,400, less than a quarter of its prior size. But with a spate of deaths in 2014, is the reduction in foster care population endangering children?

*****

At the time of Izquierdo’s murder, budget cuts placed heavy caseloads — allegedly as high as 25 families per employee in Queens — on child protection workers, who had little access to data collected by other city agencies. The entire child welfare system was based on “paper case files and folders,” some stacked five feet high along the office walls, says Andrew White, ACS’s deputy commissioner for policy, planning and measurement. A month after Izquierdo’s death, Mayor Giuliani contemplated an additional $18 million cut, largely from the team of field investigators. By the time the budget was drafted, however, he decided to take more decisive action by creating ACS to manage child welfare cases.
By setting up ACS to operate outside the larger social service bureaucracy and appointing a former federal prosecutor to head the agency, Giuliani set a presumption of action. “The philosophy of child welfare has been too rigidly focused on holding families together, sometimes at the cost of protecting babies and children,” Giuliani said in his 1996 address to the city council, according to The New York Times. “When a child is abused, when child safety is in question, then government must act.” Almost overnight, ineffective investigations were replaced by punitive interventions.
But soon, mismanagement crept back in: One contractor faked records, while another misspent thousands of dollars at Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration vetted long-standing partnerships with group homes and residential rehab facilities, ending those that weren’t up to snuff. ACS’s professional staff began integrating a more rigorous understanding of mental health, domestic violence and substance abuse into their work, a move that would culminate in the next administration’s integration of research on trauma.

“Foster care is expensive, not only in financial terms but in human psychological development.”

—Andrew White

In the last year and a half under Bill de Blasio’s mayorship, ACS pioneered new tactics to keep families united, shifting its emphasis to 11 evidence-based preventative services, which officials believe is the largest and most diverse continuum of child-centered programs anywhere in the world. Serving 19,962 families last year, the agency now asks, why take a child away from a bad parent if the city could help that parent do a better job of parenting in the first place?
“Since the late Nineties, there’s been a recognition that foster care is not a panacea. Foster care is very valuable in certain situations and very necessary in certain situations,” explains White, before adding that it’s also a traumatic experience for children that often doesn’t lead to positive results.
A growing body of work by sociologists and neuroscientists points to the negative effects of distressing, adverse experiences in childhood as the root for many developmental problems. Parents who were physically abused or neglected as kids are more likely to treat the next generation in a similar fashion, according to Cathy Spatz Widom, psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. That logic drove Giuliani to aggressively remove kids from dangerous upbringings, but advocates wondered if being separated from parents traumatized foster children?
By examining foster care records, Spatz Widom found little difference in arrest rates during adulthood between kids abused or neglected at home and those placed in foster care or with a guardian — proving that the instability of being removed from the home does not cause a child future harm. That being said, Spatz Widom did discover that children who were moved three times or more developed significant behavior problems — “chronic fighting, fire setting, destructiveness, uncontrollable anger, sadistic tendencies, and extreme defiance of authority” — and, in adulthood, had arrest rates that were nearly twice as high. Stability, she concluded, was hugely important for a child’s development.
“Foster care is expensive, not only in financial terms but in human psychological development. The breakup of a family causes all kinds of trauma, and sometimes that’s necessary. But a lot of times — and we know from looking at cases now — many of the parents we work with today went into foster care during the crack years,” White says. “It’s devastating to see they don’t have stability in their lives, and they don’t have the parenting skills. You can see the history in what’s happening now. We don’t want to repeat that. We want to ensure families get what they need now.”

“When a child is abused, when child safety is in question, then government must act.”

—Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani

During an intervention today, ACS first tries to repair a family with intensive therapy and developmental workshops. If that fails, it looks to non-custodial parents or other family members to act as caretakers, keeping the family as intact as possible. “This is not a cookie-cutter approach. It’s individualized service to address their unique concerns,” White says.
Many of ACS’s 11 models were adapted from other realms of social work, particularly criminal justice, and cover every imaginable scenario. Brief Strategic Family Therapy, for example, is targeted at reasserting parental leadership when minors develop drug addictions and other behavior problems. Child-Parent Psychotherapy, meanwhile, helps mothers strengthen attachments with children under five who experienced a traumatic event, ensuring the youngster feels a sense of safety. There’s also various levels of monitoring. Family Treatment and Rehabilitation, which is on the high-risk end, helps participants achieve a baseline of sobriety (for instance) with three visits a week, while a low- to moderate-risk family struggling with poverty may partake in Family Connections, where plans are reevaluated every 90 days. A team of six improves program development, and other staff continuously monitor contractors to ensure correct procedures are followed.
Many are still critical of ACS, particularly when it comes to the length of time children stay in foster care — a median of 53 months in 2014 — waiting to be adopted. The city’s public advocate, Letitia James, filed a class action lawsuit in July on behalf of 10 foster children, which pointed out that New York City’s wait times are twice as long as the rest of the country and that children suffer higher rates of maltreatment while in foster care. In a press release, James claims that, “ACS has delegated foster care to 29 contract agencies, but has consistently failed to monitor these contract agencies — leaving thousands of children languishing in the system with no permanent home.” ACS attributes much of the adoption delay to bureaucratic systems outside their control and says their new programs are making headway. A settlement with Gov. Andrew Cuomo was reached in October, and a state-appointed monitor was assigned to ensure the city takes corrective action; ACS is still contesting the legal challenge in court.
Despite the suit, White looks at ACS’s progress today and believes that “we are far and away the leader in the country doing this work on the preventive side,” he says. “A small foster care system is a reflection of a healthy city. We have a city now that is more stable for families than back in the Nineties.”
The hope is that today, child protective workers would visit an Elisa Izquierdo earlier and regularly. They could provide treatment for her mother’s drug addiction and diagnose any mental illness. The innocent girl could be placed with another family member and would have the opportunity to grow up. Because of Izquierdo’s death, a system changed. Now it is ACS’s responsibility to ensure that she didn’t die in vain.
Homepage photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images

The Future of Housing Is Now. What Sustainable Homes Look Like

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Every time your air conditioner or furnace rumbles on, greenhouses gases spew into the air. All those volts —about 10,900 kilowatt-hours per person — used to charge laptops and phones, light rooms, and keep the refrigerator running don’t come without an environmental cost. American electricity generation contributed 2.04 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2014, clouding the earth’s atmosphere with emissions and worsening climate change.
A hot new trend in architecture may offer one of our best hopes for significantly diminishing that pollution. “Passive house” construction — usually built without central heating or cooling systems — can reduce energy usage to net-zero or even net-positive, meaning a building generates more energy than it consumes. Applicable to both commercial and residential properties, passive construction centers on five key design elements: heavily insulated walls (sometimes up to 15 inches thick), an extremely tight envelope, triple-paned windows and doors that are outfitted with high-performance locks, high-tech ventilation and moisture-recovery systems filter the air and solar panels on rooftops.
“There are no drafts in the winter. And in the summer, it stays cool without strong air conditioning blowing on you,” Jane Sanders, a Brooklyn architect, tells the New York Post about her home. “This morning, there was jackhammering two doors down from me, but I could barely hear it. It’s so quiet that I feel like I live in the country.”
Some homeowners will take objection with the boxy design; others will balk at the price tag. But as more passive homes are built, architects are experimenting with chic design and developing cheaper construction methods. NationSwell looked into five of the most interesting passive houses in America today.

Cheap land helped determine the location of the Smith House.

The Smith House, Urbana, Ill.

American designers first pioneered passive construction — then known as “superinsulation” in the early 1970s — after the oil embargo caused wild swings in energy prices. When conservation fell out of fashion during the Reagan years, the idea caught on among Germans in 1988, but it took until 2002, for the idea to return across the Atlantic. Katrin Klingenberg, a young German architect, and her now-deceased husband Nic Smith broke ground on the first American passive house prototype in Urbana, in part, because they could test the house against the harsh Midwestern climate. “I believe that climate crisis is real and that buildings need to do their part of reducing carbon emissions. The good news is that buildings have a lot of potential to do just that,” Klingenberg tells the Chicago Tribune. “We have to work a bit harder to get those reductions and invest a bit more upfront. But the reward is huge with long-lasting payback.”

Window detail, Kiln Apartments.

Kiln Apartments, Portland, Ore.

Portland is undeniably at the center of the American passive house movement, with more than 100 certified buildings in its metro area, according to some counts. The Kiln Apartments, in North Portland, are one of the largest mixed-use buildings — 19 apartments above ground-floor retail — to meet passive house standards.
The Oregon city already has one of the strictest building codes in the nation, but these units save up to 75 percent more energy than equivalent ones. With many south-facing windows, the buildings is heated largely by the sun during the winter. Thick metal sunshades that look like modernist awnings block the sunlight during hotter months, when the summer sun rises higher in the sky. The four-story building does have an elevator, but because everything is about energy efficiency, residents are encouraged to take the stairs.

Dedication ceremony for the Empowerment House, a 2-unit townhouse.

Habitat for Humanity Townhomes, Washington, D.C.

Demonstrating that passive house principles can be readily implemented, volunteers in the nation’s capital are building six townhouses for poor homeowners. Located in Ivy City, a portion of the structure was originally designed for the U.S. Solar Decathlon, a competition for college students to build the most energy-efficient home. Students from The New School and Stevens Institute of Technology put the one-bedroom together on the National Mall for under $230,000. After being moved northeast in 2012, a second story was added and Habitat for Humanity built a copy next door. Now, as the neighborhood gentrifies, the families in the six brick rowhouses have affordable rent and a a minimal utility bill. “I just remember thinking, we did it: a non-profit, affordable house developer can do this, even using volunteers with no construction experience,” Orlando Velez, manager of housing services at Habitat for Humanity’s D.C. chapter, tells ThinkProgress. “I started thinking, what’s everyone else waiting for?”

The north building of the Uptown Lofts.

Uptown Lofts, Pittsburgh, Penn.

This 47-unit housing affordable project, provides greener living spaces to those who can’t afford a market-rate home. Split into two buildings across the street from each other, 18- to 23-year-olds who aged out of the foster care system live in the northern building’s 24 one-bedroom apartments; to the south, 23 affordable units go to people who make less than 60 percent of Pittsburgh’s median income. The $12 million project was also notable for being the first time any state subsidized a passive house with tax benefits.
At the ribbon-cutting ceremony this February, the project was praised for realizing its ambitious goals with limited dollars. “How proud we are to help bring these buildings to reality,” said Stan Salwocki, manager at the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “This project shows how cutting-edge, state-of-the-art, energy-efficient affordable housing can be done.”

The central utility plant at Cornell Tech is currently under construction.

Cornell Tech, Roosevelt Island, N.Y.

Still in the works, the world’s tallest and largest passive house began construction this June. Rising 26 stories above Roosevelt Island, a sliver of land between the boroughs of Manhattan and Queens, the apartment tower will house about 530 grad students, professors and staff for Cornell University’s new 12-acre applied sciences campus. Since nearly three quarters of the carbon emissions in New York City’s come from heating and cooling its skyscrapers, school administrators hope this project will set a new standard for energy efficiency and gain the attention of engineers and designers across the Queensboro Bridge in midtown.
The construction “is a clear signal that in today’s era of climate change, it’s not enough to simply build tallest. To lead the market, your tall building will need to be a passive house,” Ken Levenson, president of NY Passive House, an advocacy group, tells The New York Times. The $115 million project is expected to open in 2017 and will save 882 tons of carbon dioxide annually — the equivalent of planting 5,300 trees, according to the university.

Each Day, 731,000 People Are in Jail. How Many Are There Simply Because They Can’t Afford to Make Bail?

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Kalief Browder spent three years in jail despite never being convicted of a crime.
He was arrested for a stealing a backpack in the Bronx — a crime the then 16-year-old maintained he didn’t commit. His mother was unable to put up the $3,000 bail, so he was locked in solitary confinement on Rikers Island, New York City’s central jail, for roughly two years as he awaited trial. Browder tried to commit suicide several times — once with shredded bed sheets hung from a light fixture — and suffered physical abuse from guards and inmates alike, as detailed in The New Yorker.
In 2013, prosecutors dismissed the charges, and he was released. Last month, Browder committed suicide, sparking a wave outrage against the system that had imprisoned a young man for years only on the basis of an accusation. With its “unfortunately-long history of horrible abuses,” Rikers Island became an “example of failing to save jail for people who are convicted, as opposed to people who have just been accused,” Karin Martin, professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, tells NPR. “We’re realizing that we can’t afford, both financially and kind of morally, the horrible impacts of mass incarceration.”
In New York City, the emotional outpouring that resulted from Browder’s premature death recently crystallized into real reform as Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a sweeping, $18 million overhaul of the city’s bail system. Since 2009, the Big Apple had tested alternatives to monetary bail at a jail in Queens, offering “supervised release” through a nonprofit to low-level or nonviolent offenders. The only requirement? That a person had to do was check in regularly. Nearly nine out of 10 defendants — 87 percent — still showed up to court. Similar to programs in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Charlotte and Phoenix and states like Kentucky, Arizona and New Jersey, nonprofits in the Big Apple will be following up with text messages reminders, visits with case managers and other check-ins to ensure that people keep their date with the judge.
“We know that there are thousands of people who are now being held pre-trial in the city’s jails simply because they cannot afford to pay a few hundred dollars in bail. Instead, they are held at great expense in jail and frequently lose their jobs, have to drop out of school and lose daily contact with their children and families,” Michael Jacobson, executive director of the CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance, says in a statement. “Using risk as a standard for pre-trial detention as opposed to how much money someone has will increase public safety, reduce unnecessary and costly detention and make our pre-trial system more fair and just.”
Jails don’t get the same attention as their larger counterparts, state and federal prisons, but the average American is 19 times more likely to be locked up locally than thrown in the slammer. On any given day, 731,000 people are in jail; about 12 million people are admitted in the course of a typical year, according to research by the Vera Institute of Justice. Some are serving out a sentence, but most are simply waiting for their case to be resolved, either through a trial or a plea.
Though the cash bail system is intended to ensure that a person shows up for trial, it’s the most significant reason why some remain locked up and others are released. Put simply, if the accused or his family can’t find the cash for baile fast enough (or at all), he or she will remain behind bars. Most of the time, bail isn’t astronomically expensive. In New York, more than half — 54 percent — of inmates held through the end of their case were behind bars because they couldn’t post bail of $2,500 or less, mostly for misdemeanors.
“There’s no reason to keep people in jail at great costs, when they are no threat to anybody,” says Jonathan Lippman, chief judge of New York State. It “strips our justice system of its credibility and distorts its operation.”
To aid cities and states in determining whether a person is likely to reoffend, the John and Laura Arnold Foundation developed risk assessment tools. Among the key factors that are considered are the person’s age and criminal history, including any prior incarcerations and failures to appear in court, as well as whether the current offense is violent, Anne Milgram, the foundation’s vice president of criminal justice, tells NationSwell. Drug use, employment and other criteria traditionally weighed at arraignment hearings are almost meaningless, she adds.
The judges who used the Arnold Foundation’s criteria have seen notable drops in the jail population and correlated drops in crime. In Charlotte, for example, the number of inmates dropped 20 percent.
“The central challenge of our work has been getting people on board thinking a little differently about how these decisions are made,” says Milgram, a former criminal prosecutor. “There’s a lot of individual discretion for police, prosecutors and courts, but we haven’t used objective data to inform those decisions. We’re not taking away any decision making; we’re providing information that you both need and should want.”
New York will likely develop their own “updated science-driven risk assessment tool” in the near future (Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance called for one), pending an update to state law in Albany.
There’s been some criticism leveled at the latest changes in Gotham by some of bail reform’s biggest promoters. Robin Steinberg, executive director of The Bronx Defenders, a legal aid service, and David Feige, board chair of The Bronx Freedom Fund, which assists those charged with a misdemeanor make bail for $2,000 or less, both called the reforms “long overdue” but stressed that the city must not intrude too far into the lives of defendants. There’s no benefit in being released from jail, they say, if an organization can impose even stricter pretrial requirements, the violation of which could result in reincarceration or other penalties.
“Here’s how it works: A young man arrested for shoplifting might plead guilty and be sentenced to perform one day of community service. But that same defendant who is innocent of the charge might, as a condition of his release, be ordered to attend a one-day drug education program, report to a pretrial-services officer every week, and undergo drug treatment or testing — all because he claimed to be innocent and sought to challenge his arrest,” Steinberg and Feige write in an op-ed for The Marshall Project. “The problem with the pretrial-services model is that these ‘services’ … are often identical to, and sometimes far more onerous than the sentence one would receive for actually being guilty of the crime.”
Natalie Grybauskas, assistant press secretary for the city, tells NationSwell that the only conditions for release will be “whatever check-ins are deemed appropriate by the provider.” Any added services, like a referral to drug education, will be voluntary.
The city expects to select providers from a group of applicants in the fall, she adds.
 

7 Environmental Disasters That Are No More

Posted on by robbie

On the eastern edge of Niagara Falls, N.Y., 100 homes and a public school stood on Love Canal — an unfitting name for a ditch filled with industrial waste that had been covered over with earth and sold for $1. The three blocks of working-class households looked like any other community, but in basements and backyards, residents found carcinogenic compounds seeping through the soil, leached out of the rotting drum containers buried underneath.
“Trees and gardens were turning black and dying. One entire swimming pool had been popped up from its foundation, afloat now on a small sea of chemicals,” recounts Eckardt Beck, an EPA administrator in the 1970s. “Everywhere the air had a faint, choking smell. Children returned from play[ing] with burns on their hands and faces.”
The environmental calamity at Love Canal prompted officials to launch a national cleanup of the country’s most toxic wastelands. The program — the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund, named for a trust fund bolstered by taxes on petroleum and chemical products — promised long-term remediation for dangerous sites and gave the agency power to bill offending companies for the costs. Since its inception in 1981, 387 sites have been officially cleared. But chronic underfunding — the petro-chemical taxes expired in 1995 — has weakened the EPA’s efforts. Most funding goes to less than a dozen major projects, even though there’s still 1,322 sites in need of further detox, according to an EPA spokesperson.
Despite the odds, here are seven projects that prove a cleaner future is possible and that the residents of Love Canal didn’t suffer for naught.
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The Reformed Prisoner That’s Paying It Forward to Current Inmates

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We all struggle to find purpose and meaning in life. But few of us struggle for as long or as painfully as Raul Baez, the founder of WITO, Inc.
Baez founded the nonprofit, which is named after his late son, to teach inmates financial literacy and character development. The unique acronym stands for “We Innovatively Transform Ourselves.”
The idea came to Baez while he was in prison serving 12 years for a failed armed robbery. Before being imprisoned, he fell into a life of crime while heavily abusing drugs and reeling from the loss of his son, who was killed in the Bronx in 1993, the victim of drug violence.
About halfway through his sentence, Baez experienced a transformation. Walking through the prison yard with a fellow inmate, they heard a service going on in the nearby chapel and decided to go in for no other reason than to procure donuts and coffee. But upon entering, Baez had an experience that ultimately changed his life.
“I heard Matthew 11:28,” says Baez, “‘Come to me, all of you who are heavy at heart for I will give you rest. My burden is easy and my yoke is light.’ And the words just penetrated my heart.”
Baez found faith and slowly began to turn his life around. Over the course of two years, he quit abusing drugs — choosing instead to spend all of his free time reading, taking courses and learning everything he could about finance, real estate, personal budgeting and healthy habits. Eventually, he felt that God was asking him to assist others, so he began sharing his knowledge with his fellow inmates. In 2010, he was released from prison, and three years later, he officially launched WITO Inc. as a nonprofit, teaching inmates about the various subject matters he studied so intently while behind bars himself.
WITO is now present in six New York City correctional facilities. Since its conception, 140 inmates have graduated from the six-month program. So far, 43 percent of those have found jobs post-incarceration. But perhaps the biggest measure of WITO’s success is the recidivism rate for its graduates, which stands at 23 percent — compared to 67 percent for New York State as the whole.
Baez shows no plans of slowing down, describing his mentoring work as his calling.
“These men and women will never break out of this cycle,” says Baez, “if somebody didn’t take the initiative.”