Contrary to what you hear from political candidates, cap and trade isn’t just a theory anymore. Its implementation won’t cause rolling blackouts or “catastrophic” spikes on energy bills, as naysayers like Sen. Marco Rubio warn, nor will it “throw countless people out of work,” as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush predicts; in fact, it will probably lower your electric bill.
Coast to coast, from California to New England, several states have already established working cap and trade models that successfully cut pollution without stifling economic growth. As the Environmental Protection Agency rolls out its final Clean Power Plan, which requires a 30 percent reduction in a state’s carbon footprint by 2030, even more parts of the country may join.
Back in 2009, a group of 10 Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states joined together in the first regional, market-based program to reduce large power plant carbon emissions. Known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (or RGGI, pronounced “Reggie”), the states account for one-sixth of America’s population and one-fifth of its gross domestic product. The consortium sets a limit on the carbon dioxide that can be emitted into the atmosphere — the “cap” — then auctions off the rights to pollute — the “trade.” It’s the same model brokered between conservationists and fiscal conservatives to deal with acid rain under President George H. W. Bush.
How has RGGI fared? Far better than expected. Over the past six years, emissions from electricity usage are down 40 percent from 2005 levels. According a third-party report (funded by four private foundations advocating sustainable energy), RGGI created $1.3 billion in economic benefits just in the last three years, primarily from customer rebates, efficiency improvements and 14,000 new jobs.
Not everyone is sharing the wealth, however. Power plant owners are expected to lose $500 million in revenue through 2025 from lower demand and the price of buying carbon allowances. These effects are partly attributable to a nationwide pivot toward renewable energy, shale gas replacing coal and general mindfulness about waste, but RGGI’s decline in emissions far outpaces the rest of the country, says Katie Dykes, a deputy commissioner for Connecticut’s Department of Energy & Environmental Protection.
“The centerpiece of RGGI’s program design, we auction the majority of our allowances for carbon. The proceeds from those allowance auctions are distributed among all nine states” — one dropped out — “then each state can invest the proceeds in a variety of programs that benefit customers,” Dykes tells NationSwell. “It accelerates this virtuous cycle. Taking these caps, we are generating proceeds and reinvesting in projects that are going to further reduce carbon emissions.”
Historically, economic growth was tied increased emissions: smoggy skies meant wider wallets. But RGGI’s proved those don’t need to be linked. In the Nutmeg State, for example, the Calabro Cheese Corp., a family-owned mozzarella, ricotta and grated parmesan manufacturer in East Haven, got a cut of the allowance proceeds for its 74,000-square-foot facility. Retrofitted lighting, replacement refrigeration motors and evaporator fans, repairs and better insulation all led to an annual reduction of 149,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity — enough power for about 13 homes — and monetary savings of $96,000 every year.
Trading within a larger regional market increases efficiency, Dykes adds. Plus, it’s a more accurate reflection of the way climate change works. Pollution from a coal-burning plant doesn’t hover above one building’s smokestacks; it diffuses into the atmosphere and alters the temperature of the entire globe.
Politics still prove to be an obstacle. Just look at Chris Christie, the Republican governor and presidential candidate from New Jersey, who withdrew his state from the program in late 2011. “RGGI amounted to nothing more than a tax on business that failed to achieve its goals,” a spokesperson for Christie tells NJ Advance Media. Critics “may look at that failed program as a missed opportunity to tax our state’s job creators and yearn to spend more of their money, but that’s simply not acceptable to this governor.”
Christie’s opponents are still furious that the state missed out on millions in savings. But with the EPA’s rules set for implementation, the Garden State and others may have a second chance at improving the air and their economies.
Category: Making Government Work
7 States Making Bold Criminal Justice Reforms
No other sitting Commander in Chief, including Ronald Reagan, who took office in 1981 when prison populations spiked upward rapidly, or George W. Bush, the hang-’em-high leader who presided over 152 executions as Texas governor, had ever set foot inside a federal penitentiary. But last month, President Barack Obama stepped behind bars — hinting that he’s conscious of the legacy he’ll leave and is eyeing criminal justice reform as his next issue to tackle.
“When they describe their youth and their childhood, these are young people who made mistakes that aren’t that different than the mistakes I made,” Obama said after speaking to six nonviolent offenders at El Reno prison, about 30 miles west of Oklahoma City. “The difference is they did not have the kinds of support structures, the second chances, the resources that would allow them to survive those mistakes.” He added, “It’s not normal. It’s not what happens in other countries. What is normal is teenagers doing stupid things. What is normal is young people making mistakes.”
As bipartisan momentum grows in Washington, D.C., reform efforts are also sweeping the nation, many led by conservative governors. Here’s the latest innovations to come out of our country’s statehouses:
TEXAS SHUTTERS PRISONS
Everything’s bigger in Texas, including its correctional facilities. That is, until recently. Starting in 2007, Gov. Rick Perry, Bush’s successor in a “tough on crime” state and now a Republican presidential candidate, led the conservative state in reining in the size of its prison populations. Texas focused on expanding treatment programs and diverting offenders through probation and parole. In 2011, three juvenile facilities were closed, halving the number of incarcerated youth in the state. Cuts continued in 2013, when legislators reduced the corrections budget by $97 million, a clear sign they intended to scale back the system’s capacity. Two prisons near Dallas mired in scandal and operated by Corrections Corporation of America, the country’s largest for-profit prison company, looked to be on the chopping block. When Sen. John Whitimire, the longest-serving legislator, called for the closure of the prisons built during his watch, the decision seemed final. Through the budget process, both were defunded.
UTAH REDEFINES A PRISON-WORTHY OFFENSE
Obama didn’t selected El Reno prison for his visit at random. He picked the institution because half of its inmates are behind bars for drug offenses — the same proportion for the country as a whole. Utah faced the same situation. While crime fell for two decades, the state’s prison population increased without bound: From 2004 to 2013, the number of inmates grew by 18 percent, six times faster than the national average. This March, Gov. Gary Herbert, a Republican, signed a comprehensive reform package (developed by a commission of state and local officials) that reclassified all first- and second-time drug possession violations as misdemeanors, instead of felonies. Along with creating new guidelines for parole violations and adding “re-entry specialists” to smooth the transition from prison, the Beehive State’s new law is expected to eliminate the 2,700 projected incarcerations and save the public $500 million over the next 20 years.
ALABAMA DOESN’T JAIL FOR PROBATION VIOLATIONS
Alabama has one of the nation’s highest incarceration rates, jailing more than 30,000 people in a system designed to hold only 12,000 prisoners — leading officials to call it a “time bomb waiting to explode.” Almost a quarter of newly admitted inmates were thrown into overcrowded cells because they violated the terms of their parole or probation. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, half of those cases were for “minor technical violations,” such as missed appointments, unpaid fines, moving to a new home without permission or losing a job, “that did not result in a new offense.” A law signed in 2010 by Gov. Robert Riley limited incarceration for those who committed an administrative error but didn’t break any laws. The alternatives saved the southern state an estimated $18 million.
INDIANA RETOOLS DRUG-FREE ZONE LAWS
The signs are so commonplace you might not notice them: “Drug-Free School Zones.” In fine print, they’ll inform you that selling drugs within 1,000 feet of school property, a public park, a housing project or a youth center in Indiana is a Class A felony, automatically upping the recommended sentence to 20 to 50 years in prison. The creation of these areas were one of the government’s first salvos in the War on Drugs, passed by Congress in 1970, more than a decade before Ronald Reagan escalated the battle. Indiana’s reform began in 2007 in an unlikely way: bills in each chamber of the legislature initially set out to expand the drug-free zone to include bus stops and churches. Kelsey Kauffman, a professor at DePauw University, tasked her students with evaluating the law’s effectiveness. Over an eight-year campaign, they presented their findings — that more than 75 percent of the defendants affected by the zones were black — to multiple Senate committees. By 2013, new legislation cut the zones in half, limiting them to a 500-foot radius. A bill last year sought to scale them back even further to 250 feet, but political maneuvering killed the attempt.
NEBRASKA OVERTURNS DEATH PENALTY
Smack in the middle of America’s heartland, the Cornhusker State became the first conservative state in four decades to repeal capital punishment this May. Nebraska’s nonpartisan, unicameral legislature defied Gov. Pete Ricketts, a fierce advocate for the death penalty, with a 30-to-19 vote, just barely enough to overturn a veto. Liberals and conservatives alike believed the death penalty was inefficient, costly and immoral. “Today we are doing something that transcends me, that transcends this Legislature, that transcends this state,” Sen. Ernie Chambers, an independent from Omaha, said before the vote. “We are talking about human dignity.” Along with Washington, D.C., Nebraska joined 17 other states in banning capital punishment.
MISSOURI REPEALS SELECT BAN ON FOOD STAMPS
The federal welfare overhaul in 1996, passed by Rep. Newt Gingrich’s Republican stronghold in Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, revoked the ability of felons convicted of drug offenses to receive welfare benefits. The lifetime disqualification from food stamps seemed so vengeful and contrary to public safety that 19 states have chosen to opt out of the provision entirely and 24 states created exceptions, according to a tally by The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Stateline blog. Barring someone from benefits “increases the odds they will commit new crimes by virtue of the fact that you’re creating a significant financial obstacle,” says Marc Mauer, the executive director of The Sentencing Project. A grassroots push, particularly by religious leaders in St. Louis and Kansas City, united lawmakers in values-based support and won the governor’s signature.
GEORGIA WIPES THE SLATE CLEAN
Once a person’s made contact with the criminal justice system, it’s hard to allude its grasp. A criminal record follows you into every job interview. It’s a red flag on every background check for a new apartment or a loan. That’s the case — even if a person isn’t a felon who spent years in the pen or if a judge dismisses the case or a jury agrees the accused is innocent. With prodding from the Georgia Justice Project and others, legislators overhauled the state’s burdensome and limited expungement law. On the day the law went into effect, one-third of Georgia’s population had a record expunged. Bolstered by the success, Georgia Justice Project convinced Gov. Nathan Deal to issue an executive order to “ban the box” asking criminal history questions on state employment applications this February — the first state in the Deep South to change its hiring policy.
The Surprising Way That States Are Getting Residents to Pay Their Taxes
They say there’s two things that are certain in this life: death and taxes. Only this year, that’s not true in 13 states. No, a quarter of America hasn’t discovered the secret to immortality. Rather, this group has offered (or is considering) amnesty for delinquent taxpayers to file their unpaid back taxes.
It may seem contradictory, but these states are demonstrating that the best way to collect taxes is to sometimes forgive those who don’t pay. Tax amnesty sacrifices some of the penalties and interest that an evader technically owes, in exchange for receipt of the outstanding balance. While state governments do forgo some funds, they gain an injection of cash that can help close budget gaps and get citizens back in the system.
“I think it’s just kind of an easy way of plugging a budget hole. You get some revenue out of it, and if you don’t do it too often, it’s pretty effective,” Mandy Rafool, a tax expert at the National Conference of State Legislatures, tells The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Stateline blog. “It doesn’t generate much money,” but “it’s pretty painless,” she adds.
Louisiana decided to offer a break to scofflaws when the state’s revenue wasn’t keeping up with expenditures. If the Bayou State didn’t pull in $100 million, cuts would have been made to healthcare and education. Luckily, it collected more than half a billion dollars — $551 million — most of which came from a handful of big evaders. In 2013, two participants coughed up $175 million to the state, and another 34 late-filers each forked over more than $1 million. “This is an opportunity to come clean,” says Jarrod Coniglio, deputy secretary of Louisiana’s Department of Revenue, which opened a one-month window each of the past two years to catch up on payments. A third and final phase will roll out later this year, though it’ll be far less generous than in preceding years.
Experts caution, however, that tax amnesty programs can’t become too routine. “If you do one every 20 years, you can clean up some accounts,” John Kennedy, former Louisiana Revenue Director who’s now the state treasurer, tells Governing. “But we’re doing it too often. It seems like they do one every Thursday now. It’s a disincentive to people paying their taxes.”
Amnesty supporters agree the programs should seem to be announced at random; otherwise, some will expect to be let off the hook in the future. That’s why Indiana, which estimates it will haul up to $159 million in back taxes, has prohibited those who took advantage of amnesty in 2005 from participating in this year’s event.
Most people who skip paying taxes aren’t out to game the system, argues Michael Fried, a tax lawyer in Bethesda, Md. “They do it because of real reasons — the economy, their job status, the cost of raising a family,” he tells Stateline. “People just fall behind and a solution pops up.”
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Just Because You’re a Member of the Far Right Doesn’t Mean You Can’t Believe in the Importance of Solar Energy
They’ve been called an “unholy alliance” and “strange bedfellows,” and it’s partly true: Debbie Dooley, a Tea Party firebrand, is solar power’s most unlikely ally.
A lifetime campaign operative for the Republican Party and an organizer of the first nationwide Tea Party protests in 2009, Dooley is making some very persuasive arguments for why conservatives should support renewable energy. She’s reached across the aisle to form the Green Tea Coalition, breaking with Republican candidates she says are in the energy sector’s pocket. By teaming up with progressive groups like the Sierra Club, Dooley is taking on a utility and fighting to bring solar power to the Sunshine State.
Dooley’s reasons for selecting clean energy as her pet project may sound somewhat trite — her baby grandson became an in-the-flesh reminder of the urgent necessity of conserving the planet for future generations — but her reason for supporting solar power is fresh. Unlike liberals who tout the environmental benefits of solar’s clean technology, Dooley makes her argument based on Tea Party mainstays like free market economics and self-sufficiency.
A New Orleans native and a preacher’s daughter, Dooley’s always been involved in politics, usually of the right-wing brand. Fifty miles north of The Big Easy, her grandfather ran a popular gas station and became well-known in political circles as a “power broker,” she says. “When someone ran for political office, they always paid him a visit.” Dooley spent much of her childhood at political events, accompanying him to rallies and town hall meetings.
She got involved in her first serious campaign as a high school senior in Montgomery, Ala., staffing the phone bank and canvassing door-to-door during Ronald Reagan’s first attempt at the presidency. When she moved to Georgia at the tail end of George H.W. Bush’s presidency, she became an active member of the state’s Republican party.
But it’s policy, not party, that matters to Dooley. She’s unafraid to call out politicians on both sides when they shy away from their principles. Her interest in founding the Tea Party — when the “teapot started boiling,” she says — was prompted by disappointment with President George W. Bush’s policies, particularly the Wall Street bailouts. “I began to feel like the Republican Party had lost its way. They began to be the party of big spenders,” she explains. She co-founded of the Atlanta Tea Party, and she’s still on the board of directors for the national Tea Party Patriots.
“Debbie is somebody that has a lot of integrity in the positions that she takes,” says Stephen Smith, executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE), a nonpartisan energy watchdog group, since 1993. “She will point out inconsistencies where there are conservatives that are on the financial take from utilities and fossil fuel companies. Debbie is an absolute watchdog on the political right when conservatives start taking positions that aren’t true to conservative values.”
In 2012, Dooley won her first victories for solar power before the Georgia Public Service Commission, the regulatory authority for the energy utility. Competition is virtually nonexistent in the utility business because there’s no need to construct multiple overlapping grids (a neighborhood only needs one set of power lines), and shakeups are rare. To ensure there’s no blackouts and that customers get a fair price, utilities are monitored — and often protected — by government. In Georgia, the state had a number of laws on the books that stifled better technology. Essentially, “If I purchase electricity, I must purchase it from this government-created monopoly,” Dooley explains. She promised that expanding access to solar would create “competition and choice,” two values that persuaded the commission to open the market.
In Florida, Dooley faces a similar battle, but against an even stronger opponent. Florida Power & Light has huge influence over legislators, killing some bills before they ever reach the floor for a debate and, along with three other utilities, spending $12 million on Florida’s legislative races since 2010. The Sunshine State is one of only five states that forces consumers to buy electricity from a utility, meaning a resident can’t install a solar array and sell the excess power to neighbors or lease panels from a solar company to reduce up-front costs. That power — Dooley calls it “corruption” — is why she’s asking voters to pass a constitutional amendment tearing down barriers to supplying local solar power. (NationSwell reached out to Florida Power & Light for comment, but did not receive a response.)
“It shall be the policy of the state to encourage and promote local small-scale solar-generated electricity production and to enhance the availability of solar power to customers,” the measure reads. “This section is intended to accomplish this purpose by limiting and preventing regulatory and economic barriers that discourage the supply of electricity generated from solar.”
In an early telephone poll of 600 registered voters in Florida (commissioned by SACE and executed by North Star Opinion Research), nearly three quarters of voters said they would support a proposal to amend the current law to allow solar companies to install panels at no up-front cost and sell the power to the resident. More than half — 54 percent — believed their average monthly electricity bill was too high.
Dooley’s “been a very strong voice from the beginning. She recognized the tremendous national significance of opening the Sunshine State to solar. There, the utilities have an absolute stranglehold on the market. It has enormous potential but it continues to underperform,” says Smith, who also serves on the board of Floridians for Solar Choice. “There’s a lot of issues that Debbie and I disagree on, but on opening markets for solar power, we’re in lockstep. There’s no daylight between our positions there.”
Her campaign has already collected over 100,000 signatures in the first five weeks, Dooley says, but it needs several hundred thousand more to qualify for the election and the Florida Supreme Court’s approval of the ballot text, which the utility has promised to challenge.
Dooley couldn’t have chosen a better proving ground to test her ideas. The fourth largest state, Florida has a huge energy market powering homes for 19.9 million residents. But unlike other massive states — California, New York and Texas — Florida is a swing state. Her proposition will likely appear on the November 2016 ballot, downticket from the race that will decide Obama’s successor. If she’s successful, the Sunshine State’s expansion of solar power would be a beacon of bipartisan unity, potentially igniting a movement across the nation.
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7 Environmental Disasters That Are No More
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 Father of Head Start Shares His Thoughts on Shaping the Program for the Future
Head Start, the early childhood development program, has lurched from crisis to crisis, but it’s always found a champion in Edward Zigler, who’s guided the program through every presidential administration since Lyndon Johnson.
Approaching its 50th anniversary, Head Start has been praised for lifting students out of poverty through education and wraparound services for health, nutrition, mental well-being and family cohesion. One longitudinal study of siblings, conducted by a Harvard professor in 2009, showed that enrollees benefited from improved test scores, higher high school and college graduation rates, fewer run-ins with the law and better health as an adult, compared with their brothers and sisters. Other studies, however, have found that educational advantages fade over time, as early as second or third grade, in fact.
In the second half of our interview, NationSwell spoke with Zigler about how Head Start can adapt to better serve its students for the next 50 years.
Q. So many ideas from the War on Poverty have been rolled back. Why has Head Start persisted after all this time?
A. First of all, people like the notion of Head Start. There’s no way to blame a preschool child for the poverty that he or she belongs to. Anything you can do to help that child has great appeal to the American public. Studies also show that it does indeed work. These kids are doing better. All of that kept Head Start in place, even after President Johnson left the White House. People forget that his first job was as a teacher down in the border between Mexico and the United States, so he personally loved Head Start.
The other thing that’s worth noting was that Lady Bird Johnson — LBJ’s wife — she was the honorary chair of Head Start, which gave the program visibility. I can still remember the first that anybody ever heard about Head Start, there was a meeting that Mrs. Johnson chaired in the East Room of the White House. People came to that meeting from all over the country, and she told everyone what Head Start was going to look like. These people went back to their homes, and then applications began pouring in. These people wrote to have a Head Start in their communities.
Q. Have we made progress since then?
A. Yes, I think we know more about poverty and its impact on children, and we know what works. A lot of it is common sense. These kids don’t get good healthcare or good nutrition. When Head Start was put in place, it included healthcare for children and improved nutrition component. We took all that was known by the birth of Head Start 50 years ago and incorporated it into the program. Since then, we’ve learned a lot more, and there’s been more independent money to study poor children.
Q. How do we judge if the program’s been a success?
A. One of the things that bothers me after all this time is that the Congress of the United States, in their latest reauthorization, they made the ultimate goal of Head Start school performance, which is like going back to what the pre-Head Start preschool programs were doing. I’ll probably stay alive long enough [for the next reauthorization]. I usually testify at these reauthorizations, and I will argue that they ought to have two goals for Head Start. The first goal is indeed school performance, but the second improvement is in the parents. Any improvements in the parents will boomerang in the child. That hasn’t happened yet, but Head Start spends so much money and time on parents that we ought to. We should see if they get jobs, get better education, all kinds of parent measures — whether they use corporal punishment on the child even. Are they, or do they talk to the child or explain what they’re doing wrong? There’s many measures so we should make parent performance part of Head Start’s success.
Q. How else can this program adapt for today’s students?
A. That first year, Head Start was only a summer program. Anybody that understands poverty or human development will ask you, “What can you get out of a three-month program?” After the first year, there were still some summer programs but not for very long. Most became full-year programs. Many who write about development will also ask you, “What can you get out of one year?” Many of us argue that to have a really good program for preschool children, you’d begin with Head Start as a two-year program. Then there would be a Head Start component from kindergarten to third grade, a continuation of some time and effort to spur their performance. Several of us have argued for much longer programs. It’s hard enough to keep Head Start alive, but really it should be longer.
By the way, just to show how far we’ve gone, I wrote a book called “A Vision of Universal Preschool Education.” President Barack Obama, about a year and a half ago, said that he wants to get universal preschool education in this country, and that’s a very good idea. One of the things I’d change if I could do Head Start again is that I’d put poor and middle class children together in the same classroom. I like the idea of a preschool education that’s mixed. The evidence is clear. It doesn’t do any harm to middle-class preschool children, and poor children benefit when it’s more than just poor children. That’s going to happen in this country. Obama and certain governors are moving in this direction. Thanks to Head Start, preschool is considered a success. They should be doing it with all children.
Q. Has universal preschool been proposed at the federal level before?
A. There wasn’t enough money. The argument is middle-class parents are putting their children into preschool automatically. If they can pay for it themselves, why should the government pay for it? It’s hard to make that argument we should pay for middle-class children. But we use the evidence, like putting them in can actually help poor children do better and doesn’t hurt middle class children anyway. It’s not a bad idea for middle-class children to at least rub elbows sometimes and understand what a poor child goes through.
And by the way, there are certain things that poor children do better than middle-class kids. They seem to be more creative. If you give them colors, they rub that paint all over the page, everywhere. A middle-class child will very carefully push the paint, a little here and there. It looks like the poor children may be more creative. The most valuable thing the middle-class kids have, though, is an appreciation for education, which many poor kids don’t have. We’re going to get to that vision of universal preschool, because as I say, Obama’s talking about it. I don’t know who’s going to follow him, I don’t know if he’s got time enough to do it now. We’ll see. I’ve heard a lot of promises in my time.
I’ve had an interesting life. I’m an old man now. I started when I was 35 and now I’m 85 years old. That’s my life, and that’s been Head Start.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
READ MORE: The Life-Changing Program Head Start Turns 50: A Conversation with Its Founder
The Life-Changing Program Head Start Turns 50: A Conversation with Its Founder
Dr. Edward Zigler is often referred to as the “Father of Head Start.” For the last half-century, he’s been the driving force behind the early intervention program that aims to curb the detrimental effects of growing up in poverty. Since its inception in the summer of 1965, Head Start has served more than 30 million at-risk children and their families. The comprehensive model Zigler pioneered — focusing on every aspect of a child’s early development, not just math skills or reading ability — has been replicated by the Harlem Children’s Zone and other forward-thinking nonprofits, and it’s taking hold in school districts across the country, at all grade levels, through President Obama’s Promise Neighborhoods.
Zigler’s also contributed a dense volume of research to the field. He founded a child development and social policy center at Yale University that’s now staffed by 40 faculty and 50 fellows. Zigler himself authored or edited more than 40 books and 800 scholarly publications. For his work, he was presented with the Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to Psychology in 2008, the highest honor given by the American Psychological Association.
At age 85, Zigler is an emeritus professor of psychology at Yale, where he’s taught since 1959. Speaking to NationSwell from his home in New Haven, Conn., he reflected on his experience founding a mainstay of America’s education policy half a century ago.
Q: A White House panel was convened in 1964 to find a way to help low-income kids. How did Head Start develop out of it?
A: The War on Poverty was put in place by President Johnson and Sargent Shriver, and the Office of Economic Opportunity was in charge of that effort. That’s when we had something called Community Action, but it was very much disliked in this country, and it got a lot of critical press and a lot of opposition. People wanted to be aggressive about making things better for poor people, but everybody finds out, if you fight City Hall, City Hall fights back. Sargent Shriver was faced with what to do next, and he decided on Head Start. Nobody can be angry at little children that are three or four years old. As part of Community Action, he created Head Start and people did indeed love it since its inception. But it didn’t mean that they became kind to Community Action.
At that point, though, nobody knew what Head Start was, so we needed a planning committee to establish exactly what it would be. Most of its members were in their 50s and 60s and rather well-established psychiatrists, social workers, pediatricians and child psychologists. As it turned out, I was by far the youngest member of the planning committee, at the age of 34. At the age of 40, I took over Head Start in this country and become responsible for it, so I’ve been intimately involved with Head Start for its 50 years.
Q: What did the original eight-week summer pilot project look like?
A: Actually before Head Start, there were some preschool programs, like Citizen Grace in Nashville and a program in New York, but the problem was that they were only interested in one facet of a child’s development: intelligence or school performance, both of which are highly related. On the planning committee for Head Start, we decided on two things that were different and that are still in place after 50 years. The first is comprehensive services. You wouldn’t just give the child I.Q. raisers and school performances enhancers; instead, you give the kids health services, give the family social work and give them things the child would need to escape poverty.
A second pillar was parent involvement. Head Start doesn’t raise small kids; preschool programs don’t raise children. Parents raise their children. So if you want children to do better, you try to get parents to be better socializers. Head Start is pointed as much as the parents as at the child.
Q: During the Nixon Administration, you developed standards for the program as the first director of the Office of Child Development (now the Administration on Children, Youth and Families). Why was that early work important?
A: At that time, I was the federal official responsible for Head Start. The first thing I did was stop Community Action. They already had their own plan for Head Start, and they had absolutely no use for the planning committee. We were essentially a group of scholars from a lot of different fields, whereas they saw themselves as poverty warriors. They didn’t know a lot about child development, but they’d fight to get a better life for poor people, like building a playground in a poor neighborhood. Well, that’s fine — I wouldn’t be against that — but that’s not the solution to what children need. And that’s where the planning committee came in.
We didn’t have enough money to serve all the children trying to get into Head Start, so instead of teaching people how to mobilize, I stopped that aspect of the program, and all the money went to optimizing poor children’s development, which was the planning committee’s only goal. That didn’t meet the satisfaction of a lot of people — self-proclaimed “poverty warriors,” who were getting paid through the program. They wanted to meet with me to see if they could change my mind. As a public official, I was glad to meet with them. As the meeting went on, the guy who was really the leader of the group at the opposite end of this long conferences table from me, stood up and said, “Dr. Zigler, you just don’t understand us. We are willing to give up a generation of our children in order to do our work.” And I remember at the time, I stood up at my end of the table and said, “Well you might be willing to, but I’m trying to help this generation of your children and to help coming generations of children. And this meeting is over.” And that was that.
Q: In the late 1980s you criticized some centers for not living up to their promise, telling The New York Times in a front-page article that one-third of the centers should be shuttered. Why was that rigorous emphasis on results important for Head Start’s success?
A: Head Start probably started too big. Instead of getting the 35,000 kids that Shriver and Johnson wanted, we put 266,000 into Head Start that first summer. The way it was being funded, we were running a lot of very poor, mediocre programs and hadn’t close any that were poorly functioning. When I came in, I emphasized only two things that would determine the effectiveness of Head Start. One is the quality of the program — are there good teachers in the classroom teaching these children? — and second was its length. The longer the program, the more impact it’s going to have.
Another good thing happened recently. See, for years and years, you didn’t have to reapply. Every five years, you automatically got a new grant. This practice has ended. What is in place now is a monitoring system in which Head Start is evaluated, and if the program is poor, its funding is taken away and somebody else gets it. The improvement in Head Start has taken way too long, but it’s in progress in a pretty satisfactory way now.
Q: You’ve worked with nearly every administration from Johnson through Clinton. Did you have a favorite one to work with?
A: I worked with all of them. After a new administration would come in, I was asked to be a consultant for Head Start. [long pause] Let me tell you a story about President Johnson and what Head Start meant to him. When he left the White House and went back to his ranch in Texas, he discovered a Head Start center nearby. His daughters worked in Head Start, and every day he would go to the center. Now, Johnson was a great, big tall man, and he would fill his side pockets with jelly beans. All the kids got to know him. They’d reach into his pocket and get the jelly beans. After a while, all the kids in the Head Start program were calling him Mr. Jelly Beans. He was so obviously in love with education.
Q: Have there been disappointments along the way?
A: Head Start has gone from crisis to crisis. The worst one happened about one week after I got to Washington, D.C. If you know Washington, you know the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) really runs the place. So during the first week, I was called to this meeting and a guy from OMB was there and he puts a piece of white paper on the table and said, “Here’s the plan. In the first year of Head Start, you will close one-third of the Head Start centers. The second year, you will close another third of the Head Start centers, and the third year you will close the remaining ones.” I was one of the founders of Head Start, but it was going to be gone in three years.
So the same day, I went to the head of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare [now the Department of Health and Human Services], Eliot Richardson’s office, and told his secretary, “I must see the Secretary immediately.” Nobody says that unless they’re pretty damn serious, so she went in and of course he saw me immediately. He and I had hit it off. He was a great boss, a very smart guy. I told him what had just happened at this meeting run by OMB, and he looked at me in amazement. He didn’t know anything about it either — a Cabinet member in the Nixon administration and he didn’t know about it. He told me to go back to my office, do my work and forget that the meeting ever happened. He also said that he’d go to the White House and clear it up, which he did.
One of the things that always helps is that every time the reauthorization comes up, the parents with children in Head Start march in support of it. It’s been a very important factor in keeping the program alive. I don’t know of another children’s program that’s been alive for 50 years. On the adult side, we’ve got Social Security. But a program for kids? Kids don’t vote, but the parental participation helps keep it alive.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
While Roads and Rails Crumble, These 3 Projects Are Rebuilding America’s Infrastructure
After decades of neglect, America’s infrastructure is in shambles. To get back on track, we need to invest at least $3.6 trillion in the next five years, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. Coming up with all that cash will be a herculean task, especially since the Highway Trust Fund, which pays to build and repave our roads, is at its lowest balance since 1969 and is set to run out of funds this summer.
While Congress works to find a way to rebuild America, here are three innovative methods already underway.
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California Jailed a Man for Life for Stealing Beer Mugs. Meet the Woman Who Fought for His Freedom
Susan Champion found her first client in 2009. She was an enthusiastic student at Stanford Law School, and he was serving a life sentence in a California state prison. The crime that put him away for life? Three relatively minor thefts.
High on meth, he used a key hidden under a mat to sneak into his mother’s house and steal her VCR player, wanting to sell it for more drugs. Strike one.
He did his time. Got sober. But soon after he got out of the pen, he relapsed. On the waiting list for a bed at a rehab facility, he was homeless, sleeping outside in the bushes. One day, the police picked him up at a bus stop and found items in his backpack that had been reported missing in a daytime break-in. Strike two.
After being released from prison a second time, he committed a third burglary, stealing beer steins from someone’s commercial storage unit and trying to sell them at a flea market. Strike three.
Under California’s Three Strikes sentencing law, “persistent offenders” at the time had to be incarcerated for 25 years to life if a third felony was preceded by two crimes that were “serious or violent,” even if the last felony didn’t meet those criteria. Because of the stringent rule, this man was sentenced to life in prison without parole, simply for swiping a few mugs.
Champion submitted a habeas corpus petition (a motion asking the courts to review his detention) on her client’s behalf to determine if life for stealing beer glasses counted as cruel and unusual punishment. She won the case, convincing the judge that his sentence had been disproportional to the crime. Since then, she’s stayed on at Stanford to help many more like him through the law school’s Three Strikes Project.
The Three Strikes Project is currently the only legal organization in California working to reverse excessive sentences for minor crimes. Michael Romano, a law school professor and the program’s director, realized the need for services like it while clerking for the Ninth Circuit Court: Since there’s no right to legal counsel for habeas corpus petitions, convicts were sending in handwritten documents to his court, pleading with justices to take another look at their case. Since the project was institutionalized as one of Stanford’s 11 legal clinics in 2006, more than 1,000 inmates have sent letters to the school asking for pro bono assistance. The clinic currently represents 25 individuals and has already freed or reduced prison sentences for dozens more. So far, Champion, Romano and their students haven’t lost a case. Each time, they’ve convinced a judge to immediately release the prisoner or commute the lengthy sentence.
Champion became a lawyer late in life — at age 40 — to fight systemic injustice, like the Three Strikes Law’s misguided “one-size-fits-all” approach or jailing of the mentally ill. After working for years in a hospital that catered to the formerly incarcerated, non-English speakers, mentally ill and others “dealing with incredibly challenging circumstances,” Champion planned to study the intersection of mental health and criminal justice. But after her first year of law school was spent in required classes that focused on contracts and civil procedure, “stuff that doesn’t seem relevant to anything, let alone social justice issues,” Champion wondered if she’d made the right choice.
A job at the San Francisco district attorney’s office while still in school led her to focus directly on sentencing. In preliminary hearings — an early part of a case during which the judge decides if there’s enough evidence for a trial — Champion “saw a parade of poor black people. They were the only people coming in and out. It was just so stark and heartbreaking to see that’s what we’re doing with people who could be leading productive lives.” When California’s Three Strikes law appeared on the ballot, it promised “to keep murderers, rapists and child molesters behind bars, where they belong,” but those were not the people that Champion saw filling the courtroom.
In the early 1990s, the bill that initially proposed Three Strikes languished in Sacramento — until a horrific murder spurred a frantic campaign to crack down on crime. In October 1993, Polly Klaas, a 12-year-old with dimpled cheeks and a fondness for floral-print dresses, was abducted from her home in Petaluma, a small farm town in Sonoma County. Richard Allen Davis, a career criminal whose rap sheet included kidnapping and assault, broke into the three-bedroom home during a slumber party, bound and gagged two other girls and kidnapped Klaas while her mother slept nearby. Two months later, police found Klaas’s body on a trash pile adjacent to a freeway off-ramp, badly decomposed. Before Davis was convicted, legislators passed a slew of tough reforms, including Three Strikes. The measure was approved by a ballot initiative, winning approval from 72 percent of voters.
Since then, California’s Three Strikes Law — the first and harshest mandatory sentencing guideline of its kind — has been responsible for sending 46,000 inmates to prison for 25 years to life within the first decade since it passed in 1994, a government analysis found. Together, these “strikers” made up roughly one-quarter of California’s already overcrowded prison population.
Twenty years later, the need for change was also voiced through popular approval. In collaboration with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Romano and Champion helped draft the text of a statewide ballot measure (Proposition 36) to modify the law. The Three Strikes Reform Act captured more than two-thirds of the vote. Surprisingly, voters weren’t persuaded by arguments about the cost of prison as much as the law’s inherent unfairness, Champion says, referencing internal polls. As written, the original law could assign the same harsh penalty to the psychotic kidnapper whose crimes escalated to murders as the guy who faltered by stealing golf clubs, a disparity that seemed particularly unfair to voters, especially when it meant the difference between life in notorious San Quentin versus a few months at the local jail. “They thought an injustice had been done. What they thought they’d voted for in 1994 was not what they’d seen result. In fact, quite a few of our clients’ families voted for Three Strikes and would tell me after they never would have voted for it if they knew it would put someone like their loved one away when they might have just had a drug problem.”
Adding to the law’s insults was the fact that within California’s penal code, certain crimes are classified as “wobblers” meaning that people who commit them can either be charged with a misdemeanor or a felony, depending on the district attorney’s judgment. Because the third of the three strikes could have been applied to any felony — not merely a serious or violent one — a prosecutor could jail someone for life for a crime that might have been charged as a misdemeanor elsewhere in the state. With the passage of Prop 36, judges regained discretion over sentencing, so that the punishment would fit the crime, not public hysteria or prosecutors’ ambitions. It’s part of the reason why after the reform passed, hundreds of prisoners from “tough-on-crime” strongholds like Orange, San Bernardino and Kern Counties were eligible to have their cases reviewed, while only three from liberal San Francisco qualified.
The spike in crime that opponents of Prop 36 predicted never came to pass. Of 2,000 former lifers released under the reform, only 4.7 percent have re-offended (over an 18-month period, on average) — far below California’s usual recidivism rate of 45.2 percent over a one-year period and 56.9 percent over two years. Additionally, the change in the law made 3,000 second-strikers who’d been incarcerated for a third non-violent, non-serious offense eligible to appeal their sentence to a judge. There are still 700 cases pending (mostly in Los Angeles), Champion says, but those who have been released have largely kept out of trouble. Only one in 20 reoffended, and those were largely for theft or drug charges.
“I hope the enduring lesson is that people are not hopeless recidivists,” Romano tells the New York Times. “Those who remain dangerous should be kept behind bars. But there are many people in prison who are no threat to public safety.”
Champion will tell you her clients are no angels. Unlike the famed Innocence Project, which uses DNA testing to exonerate the wrongfully convicted, Champion says her colleague “Mike [Romano] calls us the Guilty Project. It’s true, we never claim that our clients are innocent, that’s never the basis of our argument,” she says. The prisoners broke the law — three times, at least — but her work is proving that slamming the convicts behind bars isn’t the solution.
They may not be saints, but they’re not monsters either.
All It Took Was One Judge and Two Veterans to Provide Another Chance to Countless Soldiers
In 1986, one in every five inmates in state prison was a former member of the military.
Today, many post-9/11 veterans are still running into trouble with the law. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) affects at least 167,500 veterans (that’s just the number diagnosed by VA doctors) who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan — and it could afflict as many as 620,000. The disorder has given soldiers their toughest mission yet: successfully reintegrating into civilian life. The nightmares and flashbacks, anxiety, hyper-vigilance and other unresolved mental health issues caused by PTSD often translate into drug and alcohol abuse, homelessness, domestic violence and lawbreaking.
In a society that’s appears increasingly disconnected from the experience of war, there’s one civic institution that’s taking strides to accommodate veterans’ unique situation. Courtrooms across the country are now adopting veterans treatment courts — at least 180 established locations and many more are in development, according to the nonprofit Justice for Vets. It’s a model that tailors the criminal justice system’s response to the circumstances: Similar to drug and mental health treatment courts, judges are less inclined to mete out punishment to troubled vets, connecting them with help, particularly from the VA and local military members. If a former warrior successfully completes the program (which can include counseling, substance abuse treatment and job training), all the charges against him are dropped; if he fails to finish, the original jail sentence goes into effect.
“Many veterans will say, ‘I’m okay, I don’t need any help,’ but sometimes it takes another veteran to say, ‘You know, things are starting to spiral out of control,’” says Judge Robert Russell, who convened the first court in Buffalo in early 2008. “It could be traumatic brain injury. It could be PTSD. It could be any number of things that are left untreated. They’re not only debilitating, they’re what’s placing the person in the criminal court system and will continue to keep them in the criminal justice system.”
Russell says the “impetus of the court” began with a single case that came before him in 2006. A former Vietnam vet who’d appeared in his drug treatment court didn’t seem to be responding to the program. Group sessions didn’t work; neither did one-on-ones. “He wasn’t really engaged,” Russell recalls. “When he appeared in court, his posture was slumped. When I asked him what was going on with counseling, I didn’t get much of a response, just sort of like, ‘Huh?’” Russell pointed to two men in the room — Hank Pirowski, a former Marine, and Jack O’Connor, an Army vet — and asked them to talk to the downcast man out in the hallway.
Twenty minutes later, the three reentered. The defendant strutted to the front of the room and stretched to his full height, a tall 6’4”. He stood with his legs slightly apart and held his hands clasped behind his back — a military posture known as “parade rest.”
“He looked directly at me and said, ‘Judge, I’m going to try harder,’” Russell says. Afterwards, Russell met with Pirowski and O’Connor to find out what they said to the guy and how they got a response from him.
The two veterans had discussed their service, and after they’d established a common background, they told the man they cared about him and explained how important counseling would be for him to move forward. As simple as it sounds, the man needed to hear it from someone who’d struggled like he had, someone who could reassure him a future existed.
From that day forward, the trio collaborated on setting up a treatment court for veterans. Their goal? To “afford the best opportunities for the men and women who have served,” Russell says, setting aside one day each week to dedicate entirely to members of the military. The time was used to assemble a team of outside services, so referrals could begin immediately. If a vet hadn’t signed up for VA care, for example, a health official could immediately engage him that day, scheduling appointments and enrolling him for benefits right there in court.
An essential aspect of the treatment court is the volunteer veteran mentors, who function as a coach, sponsor and supporter, providing help with bus passes, rent, furniture or just talking through any crisis. “If they need something, Marines talk to Marines more than they do their own lawyer,” O’Connor says. Many are Vietnam vets who want soldiers just returning home from the Middle East to receive a different welcome than they did. “We never tell anyone about stuff we dealt with because no one liked us. People really hated our guts. Now a lot of Vietnam vets are in positions of authority. They’re in their 60s, they’re on boards of corporations, they own their own companies,” O’Connor adds.
As so many restorative justice programs have shown, rehabilitation like veteran courts reduces crime over the long haul by addressing the problems that initially led to criminal behavior. As O’Connor, who now coordinates the volunteer mentors, says, “You treat the illness, you stop the addiction.”
There’s stories like Gary Pettengill, a 23-year-old Buffalo resident arrested in a drug sweep. In 2006, while serving in the Army in Iraq, he injured his back and was forced to take a medical discharge. Nights were intolerable, alternating between sleepless pain and nightmares, so Pettengill began smoking marijuana to cope. Unemployed (in part because of his injury), he began selling weed to make ends meet and was eventually diagnosed with PTSD. Pettengill never did any jail time, and he credits the program with saving him from suicide, an option that had once looked inevitable.
Pettengill’s just one of the program’s 150 graduates in Buffalo. Another is the man whose appearance before Russell sparked the court’s conception. The man’s case manager at the local VA hospital said he had never seen the man smile before, but after the court was established, he became one of the cheeriest men at the facility.
O’Connor gives each of these men a special coin at graduation. It harkens back to “challenge coins,” small medallions that are unique to each unit of the military, only these have the scales of justice on one side and the phrase “Leave no veteran behind” on the other. He tells the grads to carry it with them, so if they ever run into trouble, they’ll remember how far they’ve come.
Data coming in from across the country backs up these stories. A three-year pilot in San Diego (home to multiple Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard facilities) found that recidivism dropped for those in the program, most of whom had been booked on DUIs or domestic violence charges. Of the 74 enrolled, only three reoffended — a rate of 4.1 percent, far below the 65 percent figure for state prisons. Even better, among the 27 who graduated the program, not a single person committed another crime. The county estimated the program’s savings at $3.985 million in jail and treatment costs.
“Once you’re seen the success rate, you can’t hide it,” O’Connor says. “Something’s working, and it’s working all over the country.”
That’s not to say there’s not criticisms of the concept. Although most are quick to thank veterans for their service, some wonder if the military is receiving special treatment that should be more widely available. After all, why do former service members receive a get-out-of-jail-free card while others are locked up? Russell says this is partly a matter of logistics. Veterans need specialized care, so scheduling their cases on the same day creates an easy one-stop shop for both client and service provider. The alternative sentencing is not a free pass, either. Former soldiers are expected to make regular court appearances and are subject to randomized drug testing.
Russell says he can’t believe how quickly the courts have taken off. “When we started it, we thought it was the right thing to do for the community in which we were serving,” he says. “But it was something that touched the heart and spirit of many around the country. They’ve embraced the concept. They’re affording veterans some of opportunities inside their justice system to help them get back on track in their own community.”
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