GEORGE FLOYD - On Anniversary of His Death

"George Floyd died last year.  Here’s what has changed since then" PBS NewsHour 5/23/2021

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SUMMARY:  This week marks one year since George Floyd, an unarmed Black man was killed by then police officer Derek Chauvin, who held his knee on Floyd for nearly nine minutes.  His death, recorded on video by a bystander, sparked widespread protests globally, and reignited the Black Lives Matter movement and conversations around race.  NewsHour Weekend Special Correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro joins to reflect on the past year.

POLICING IN AMERICA - Seattle Says NO to Attorney General

"Seattle sticks to Obama-era police reforms amid review" PBS NewsHour 7/8/2017

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SUMMARY:  Attorney General Jeff Sessions has ordered a sweeping review of police reforms initiated under the Obama administration, suggesting a potential rollback in federal oversight of police nationwide.  One city still committed to reform is Seattle.  Special Correspondent Joanne Elgart Jennings reports on how the reforms, five years in the making, have been received.

POLICING IN AMERICA - Camden Rethinking

"What happened when Camden started rethinking policing to build trust" PBS NewsHour 6/30/2017

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SUMMARY:  Historically one of the country's most impoverished and violent cities, Camden, New Jersey, has been working to rebuild its police force from the ground up, recruiting officers from its mostly Latino and African-American community.  The new procedures aim to bring police into closer face-to-face interactions with the people they serve in order to foster good relationships.  Hari Sreenivasan reports.

JUSTICE IN AMERICA - U.S. Senate's Sentencing Bill

"The Senate's Popular Sentencing Reform Bill Would Sort Prisoners By ‘Risk Score'" by Lauren Kirchner, ProPublica 6/14/2016

Federal prisoners would be scored according to their risk of recidivating.  Those who got high scores would be ineligible for treatment programs.

At a time when Democrats and Republicans in Congress can't agree on just about anything, there is one issue that unites them, the urgent need for criminal justice reform.

A Senate bill on the issue has attracted an impressive 37 co-sponsors from both sides of the aisle.  The Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act (link to bill) has gained support from figures as politically diverse as the Koch brothers and President Obama for its goals of reforming mandatory minimum sentences, reducing prison populations, and rehabilitating prisoners.

One aspect of the bill, however, has attracted much less attention: It would require the government to rate federal prisoners' risk of committing a future crime, and treat them differently according to those ratings.  The bill calls for the attorney general to develop a new formula for predicting future behavior or adopt an existing tool.  The Bureau of Prisons would then use the algorithm to score and classify inmates.

Inmates who receive “low risk” scores — and those who manage to lower their scores over time — would be allowed into rehabilitation and education programs that would shave time off of their sentences.  “High risk” inmates would not be eligible.

Such tests are increasingly popular around the country.  They are used to make decisions about everything from bail to sentencing.  The scores are meant as a counterweight to the vagaries and biases of human decisions.

“A good risk assessment acts as an anchor against our personal biases,” says David D'Amora, at the Council of State Governments Justice Center.  “God forbid we go back to what we used to do — because with the best of intentions, we used to make decisions that had no evidence behind them.”

Yet the formulas are often not transparent.  ProPublica recently investigated one popular tool sold by a for-profit company and found that it's frequently wrong and is biased against blacks.

So what's the evidence the assessments of prisoners will work in the ways the bill envisions?  Not much, according to an analysis by Federal Public & Community Defenders, a group made up of attorneys who represent federal defendants who can't afford counsel.

“The system described in the bill is novel and untested,” the group concluded in a little-noticed white paper that was presented to a federal task force last May.

The proposal to score federal inmates was first developed by Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-Rhode Island, and John Cornyn, R-Texas, in a prison reform bill last year.  The senators, who co-sponsored the bill, have said they modeled the plan after seeing successful versions of it in their home states.

But as the federal defenders' paper points out, the Rhode Island and Texas programs the senators point to work in a different way than the system the bill proposes.  Inmates in the two states can earn reduced time through their personal performance and disciplinary records, not risk assessment scores.

The report argues that the scoring of prisoners would be particularly problematic because factors that go into risk assessment calculations tend to correlate with socioeconomic class and race.  A fairer and more effective approach, the group says, would be to make recidivism-reduction programs available to all inmates equally.

The Senate reform bill does not specify the use of any particular risk assessment tool, and those who support the bill say that it has built-in protections against errors and discrimination.  The current bill would mandate regular testing and adjusting of the risk assessment tool, including analyzing the results for evidence of racial bias.  It also would require that the risk assessment tool be statistically “validated,” that is, calibrated to work specifically on the population that will be assessed with the tool.

But the bill does not specify that the validation be done independently.  (The tool that ProPublica analyzed had been validated by the company that developed it.)  Nor does the bill specify how soon such testing would have to happen before the tool gets put to use, other than “as soon as is practicable.”  The federal defenders argue that the tool should be fully tested and corrected before it gets used at all.

Cornyn has said prisoners should be separated into two groups: “hardened” criminals, who should be kept isolated from the rest of society; and “low-level” offenders who truly want to change and thus deserve help.

“I'm not naive enough to say that this is something we're going to be able to do for 100 percent of the people behind bars, that's just not true,” Cornyn said on the Senate floor in April.

Richard Davidson, a spokesman for Whitehouse, said it's important to assess prisoners on “dynamic” rather than “static” factors.  The idea is to focus on things that prisoners will be able to change while they are incarcerated, rather than things like past criminal history that can often reflect societal bias.

The federal defenders say even so-called dynamic factors are very hard to change in a prison setting.

Risk assessments often include questions about defendants' family relationships or employment status, explained David Patton, who chairs the legislative committee of the federal defenders group.  “Will it be possible to validly measure those things for somebody who is institutionalized?” he asked.  “We just don't know that such a tool can be developed, or if it can, whether it will exhibit similar racial biases of current tools.”

BROKEN JUSTICE - Reforms Falling Short

"Top civil rights lawyer says U.S. criminal justice reforms are falling short" PBS NewsHour 5/13/2016

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SUMMARY:  The Equal Justice Initiative's Bryan Stevenson has become a leading voice for criminal justice reform, and blames the U.S.'s world-leading incarceration rate on deep-seated institutional racism that goes back to slavery.  As some states move to increase probation and parole supervision, Stevenson tells Jeffrey Brown why these measures fall short of the reforms that are truly needed.

JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour):  The Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, a nonprofit founded in 1989 by lawyer and civil rights activist Bryan Stevenson to represent death row prisoners and indigent and juvenile defendants who he argues have been denied effective representation, often due to racial bias.

In recent years, which included the publication of an acclaimed memoir, “Just Mercy,” Stevenson has become a leading voice nationally for criminal justice reform.

I met him at his office in Montgomery while reporting on Alabama's overcrowded prisons and spike in prison violence.

BRYAN STEVENSON, Founder, Equal Justice Initiative:  There were less than 5,000 people in Alabama's prisons throughout most of the 1970s.

And then you had politicians like you had all over the country get captivated, I'm going to say intoxicated, by the politics of fear.

JEFFREY BROWN:  Intoxicated.

BRYAN STEVENSON:  Yes, intoxicated by the politics of fear and anger.  They began competing with each other over who could be the toughest on crime, and putting people in prison became the solution to virtually every problem.

Drug addiction and drug dependency, which could have been seen as a health issue, was seen as a crime issue.  The growing freedom that was emerging in the Deep South for African-Americans, who until just a decade earlier couldn't vote, couldn't go into schools, had to be regulated.  So we used the criminal justice system, and you saw this massive increase in the number of people sent to jails or prisons.

So, we went from about 5,000 people in the 1970s to 30,000 people today in a state with about 4.5 million people.  That's an unbelievably high rate of incarceration.

JUSTICE IN AMERICA - Reform

"Criminal justice reform gains bipartisan momentum" PBS NewsHour 7/16/2015

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SUMMARY:  On Thursday, President Obama became the first sitting president to visit a federal prison, part of his larger campaign to encourage reform of the American criminal justice system.  Political director Lisa Desjardins reports he’s not the only politician pushing for reform, both Republican and Democratic lawmakers are speaking out and offering proposals on Capitol Hill and the campaign trail.

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  This week, the issue of criminal justice reform, who goes to prison in America, hit a kind of critical mass, with action from President Obama, in Congress and on presidential campaigns.

As part of our Broken Justice series, our Lisa Desjardins lays out the reform movement that both Republicans and Democrats are pushing, and which some in law enforcement want to push back.

LISA DESJARDINS (NewsHour):  It was a symbol intended to spark sweeping change, the first visit ever by a sitting U.S. president to a federal prison.  President Obama’s walk today through the El Reno facility outside Oklahoma City capped off his weeklong push on what he calls a broken criminal justice system.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA:  These are young people who made mistakes that aren’t that different than the mistakes I made and the mistakes that a lot of you guys made.

LISA DESJARDINS:  Monday, the President commutes sentences for 46 drug offenders.  Tuesday, at the NAACP National Convention in Philadelphia, the president speaks to the racial disparity within the prison population.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA:  African-Americans and Latinos make up 30 percent of our population.  They make up 60 percent of our inmates.  About one in every 35 African-American men, one in every 88 Latino men is serving time right now.  Among white men, that number is one in 214.

LISA DESJARDINS:  President Obama is adding his voice to a bipartisan call for reform of the criminal justice system.

Today, Republican presidential hopeful and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie released his plan to educate prisoners.

GOV. CHRIS CHRISTIE, Republican Presidential Candidate:  If we’re going to incarcerate people, then we should make them do something productive, not just sit around watching TV all day.  One solution is to require inmates to try and get their GED before release, so they have some minimum qualifications.

LISA DESJARDINS:  Reforming criminal justice is on the radar of nearly all those who would be President.  In the past few months, 18 of the current 20 presidential candidates have argued for some kind of change.

Up on Capitol Hill, ideas have made it into a group of bills that are moving toward floor votes.  A House Oversight Committee hearing this week reviewed a number of reform proposals, including a bill sponsored by Senate Republican John Cornyn.

VATICAN - Child Abuse Tribunal (Updated)

"Pope Creates Tribunal for Bishop Negligence in Child Sexual Abuse Cases" By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO and LAURIE GOODSTEIN, New York Times 6/10/2015

Pope Francis has approved the creation of a Vatican tribunal for judging bishops accused of covering up or failing to act in cases of child sexual abuse by priests, an unprecedented step long demanded by victims in the more than three decades that the Roman Catholic Church has publicly dealt with the abuse scandal.

Bishops, regarded as “princes of the church” and sovereign in their dioceses, until now could be disciplined only directly by the pope, but until Francis, no pope had publicly confronted or demoted even those bishops accused of gross negligence.  Under Francis’ predecessors — Pope Benedict XVI and, before him, John Paul II — the Vatican defrocked about 850 priests for sexual abuse and penalized about 2,500 more, but there was no similar judicial mechanism for bishops.

Advocates for abuse victims had a range of reactions, from skepticism to watchful optimism.

Francis’ move could affect bishops around the world as awareness of sexual abuse and calls for accountability spread, even to the church in Latin America, Asia and Africa, where the topic is still largely taboo.

It will also bring new scrutiny to a number of bishops currently under investigation over accusations that they covered up abuse by priests.  They include Archbishop John C. Nienstedt of Minneapolis and St. Paul, whose archdiocese was indicted last week; Cardinal George Pell of Australia, the head of the Vatican’s finances, who was recently called to testify by a government commission in Australia; and Bishop Robert W. Finn of the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph in Missouri, who was convicted on a misdemeanor charge for negligently handling a case involving a pedophile priest.  He resigned his post recently but remains a bishop.

A mechanism for holding bishops accountable has been a high priority of the 17-member papal commission on abuse that was also created by Francis.  That commission includes two abuse survivors and many laypeople, and it is headed by Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley, the archbishop of Boston, who was sent to Boston at the height of the abuse scandal there, and to two other dioceses before that, to clean up scandals left behind by previous bishops.

There are many unanswered questions as to how the tribunal will conduct its inquiries and proceedings, including what punishments it would impose on bishops found guilty.

Peter Saunders, one of the two abuse survivors on the commission, said he was pleased that Francis seemed to be listening to their recommendations but said, “When allegations against senior clergy are brought to the tribunal, we’ll see whether it’s working.”

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, in St. Louis for their semiannual meeting, said they had no advance knowledge of the creation of a new tribunal.  (Among those attending the meeting was Archbishop Nienstedt.)  In interviews, bishops said that they welcomed the step as a move toward transparency and would cooperate fully.

“It’s something new and necessary in the church because it does provide a standard and a policy that holds bishops accountable in the way we’ve held our clergy accountable,” said Bishop Christopher J. Coyne of Burlington, Vt., who was a spokesman in the archdiocese of Boston at the height of the scandals there in the early to mid-2000s.

The five-point plan announced on Wednesday says the tribunal will be housed in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican office that polices adherence to church doctrine and that already handles the cases of priests accused of abuse.

Francis will choose a secretary, and additional permanent staff members will be hired for the tribunal, said the Vatican’s chief spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi.  The procedures will be re-evaluated in five years, he said.

Father Lombardi said the tribunal would also examine some of the abuse cases perpetrated by clergy members that were “still pending” at the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith.  “They are still very numerous and have accumulated,” he said.  The tribunal will “accelerate” matters, he said, noting that money had been set aside to bolster the new section.

Father Lombardi said that the tribunal’s responsibility for judging bishops would include questions of omission:  “what one should have done and didn’t do,” he said.  “This is another kind of responsibility and shortcoming, and has to be judged in an appropriate way with appropriate rules.”

Barbara Blaine, president of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, a support and advocacy group for victims, said in a statement that she suspected that the new panel “won’t make a difference” because it relies on church officials to judge other church officials.  She said that a more effective move would be for the church to support the reform of secular laws to strengthen the prosecution of those responsible for abuse.

Voice of the Faithful, a church reform movement first created to respond to the abuse scandal, said, “These steps are the most promising the Vatican has yet taken.”  Terence McKiernan, president of BishopAccountability.org, a Boston-based group that documents cases of sexual abuse by priests, called the development encouraging because it “provides a structure, personnel, a budget and a brief for actually acting.”

In the United States, where the church has been struggling with the question of sexual abuse by members of the clergy since the first case of serial abuse became public in Louisiana in the 1980s, the problem remains far from resolved.

Last year, there were 37 allegations of sexual abuse made to the church by those who were currently minors, and another 600 “historical allegations” made by those who are older, said Francesco C. Cesareo, chairman of the United States bishops conference’s National Review Board on sexual abuse, in his report to the bishops on Wednesday.  Six of the current allegations made last year were substantiated, and other cases were still open, he said.

Given that, he said, “it should not be concluded that the sexual abuse of minors is a problem of the past that has already been addressed.”

“This is the missing link in the church’s response to the abuse crisis,” said the Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and editor at large of the Jesuit weekly magazine America.  “It is a long overdue and delayed response to this problem, but it’s an absolutely indispensable step.  This is what everyone was waiting for and all were calling for in all quarters of the church.”

Father Martin suggested that action had been slow to come because there was a “lingering reluctance to hold bishops accountable if they themselves had not committed the abuse” and because, after the Second Vatican Council shifted greater power from Rome to the bishops, of “the traditional authority of bishops over their dioceses.”

"For the first time, Vatican will judge bishops for sex abuse" PBS NewsHour 6/11/2015

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SUMMARY:  More than 800 priests have been defrocked over the years in connection to sexual abuse scandals, and 2,500 have been penalized.  Now a Vatican tribunal is being established to publicly judge and discipline bishops accused of covering up or failing to act on reports of child sex abuse.  John Allen of The Boston Globe joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss the historic move.

POLITICS - NSA Reform Bill Fails

"As bill to rein in phone data collection fails, what’s next for NSA reform?" PBS NewsHour 11/19/2014

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GWEN IFILL (NewsHour):  In a vote on the Senate floor last night, lawmakers blocked a bill that would have drastically changed the way the National Security Agency currently monitors American citizens.

MAN:  On this vote, the yeas are 58, the nays are 42.

GWEN IFILL:  With that, the USA Freedom Act effectively died on the Senate floor last night, failing to garner the 60 votes needed to move to full debate.

The legislation would have ended the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of domestic phone call records, so-called metadata.

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY, (D) Vermont, Chair, Judiciary Committee:  Our bill protects Americans.

GWEN IFILL:  The lead sponsor, Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, spoke for most of his fellow Democrats.

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY:  The USA Freedom Act provides for commonsense reforms to government surveillance.  It promotes greater accountability and transparency of the government’s surveillance programs.

GWEN IFILL:  Former NSA employee Edward Snowden revealed the secret bulk collection program last year.  It was authorized under Section 215 of the Patriot Act.  This new bill would have forced the agency to get court orders for specific data from telecom companies.  Most Republicans opposed the measure.

Georgia’s Saxby Chambliss, ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, called it totally flawed.

SEN. SAXBY CHAMBLISS, (R) Georgia:  But the fact is, there cannot be one single case pointed to by anybody who can show that as a result of the collection of metadata under 215, any American has had their privacy rights breached.  It simply has not happened.  It will not happen if we keep this program in place.

GWEN IFILL:  President Obama had proposed curbing the NSA’s data gathering, and the House approved its own weaker version of the bill in may.  The White House supported the Senate version, in part because the law authorizing the entire program expires next June.

AMERICA - Reforming the Justice System

"Rand Paul, Cory Booker team up for bipartisan reform of criminal justice system" PBS NewsHour 7/29/2014

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JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  Now to a bipartisan effort on Capitol Hill to try to reform the nation’s criminal justice system.

Two freshman senators, a political odd couple, Democrat Cory Booker of New Jersey and Republican Rand Paul of Kentucky, have introduced legislation called the REDEEM Act that would make it easier for juveniles who commit nonviolent crimes to expunge or seal those convictions from their records, lift the federal ban on food stamps and welfare benefits for low-level drug offenders, offer incentives to states that currently try juveniles as adults to encourage them to raise the age to 18, and ban solitary confinement for children, except in the most dangerous cases.

Senators Paul and Booker join me now.

MILITARY - VA Reform Announced

"Lawmakers announce bipartisan breakthrough on VA health care reform" PBS NewsHour 7/28/2014

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JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  Lawmakers did something today that has become rare in this Congress, reach a compromise.  House and Senate negotiators found that common ground over reforming the Department of Veterans Affairs.  The bipartisan breakthrough to try and improve patient care at the VA came after weeks of tough talks to merge competing proposals passed by the two chambers last month.

The chairs of the Senate and House Veterans Affairs Committees announced the deal at a joint news conference this afternoon on Capitol Hill.

Independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont:

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS, I, Vt.:  Rather than go through why we didn’t do this a month ago and get it done, the important point is we are here together having done something that happens quite rarely in the United States Congress.  So, I’m proud of what we accomplished.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  Their total $17 billion proposal would provide $10 billion for veterans to seek out private doctors if they are unable to get an appointment within 30 days or if they live more than 40 miles from a VA facility, provide $5 billion to hire additional doctors and nurses, and another $1.5 billion to lease 27 new clinics around the country.

CALIFORNIA - Health Benefit Exchange

"California Health Insurance Premiums Under Obamacare Revealed" by Jeffrey Young, Huffington Post 5/23/2013

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A 40-year-old Californian with a moderate income will pay between nothing and $219 a month for a basic health insurance plan next year under President Barack Obama's health care reform law, a state agency announced Thursday.

Covered California, the authority in charge of the state's health insurance exchange, has released details about what the health insurance market for individuals who don't get coverage at work will look like next year.  In all, 13 health insurance companies will sell products on the exchange, and premiums will range from 2 percent more to 29 percent less than what comparable plans cost this year, the agency said.

California is not only the most populous state in the U.S., but it also has the highest number of uninsured residents, 7.3 million in 2011.  The state is tied for the fourth-highest percentage of residents without health insurance at 20 percent, census data show.  The state embraced health care reform soon after Obama signed the law in 2010 and is seen as a bellwether for whether the initiative can succeed.

The results of Covered California's negotiations with health insurance companies belie predictions of massive premium increases under the law, at least for products that offer a range of benefits similar to those currently sold to small businesses.

The average cost of a standard health insurance plan sold on the health insurance exchange will range from $304 to $321 a month in the Golden State next year, Covered California announced.  Compared to existing plans with comparable benefits and factoring in available subsidies for low- and moderate-income people, prices like these represent either a small increase or a significant decrease in the monthly costs, the agency said.

"This is a home run for consumers in every region of California," Peter Lee, the executive director of Covered California, said in a press release.  'Our active negotiating will not only benefit potential enrollees to Covered California, but will benefit all Californians by making health care affordable.' California is one of just six states that will use their negotiating leverage to force lower premiums under Obamacare.

Health insurance companies and political opponents of the health care reform law repeatedly have cautioned that its benefit mandates and limitations on industry practices like excluding sick people and charging higher rates to women and older people would dramatically raise premiums.

The evidence to date is mixed.  In Maryland, CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield requested that the state approve a 25 percent hike in premiums for individuals for next year.  In contrast, two health insurers in Oregon actually scaled back their proposed increases after seeing what their competitors planned.

California Health Exchange

POLITICS - Call For Talking About Entitlement Reform

"Pelosi:  For Budget Deal, 'Let's Talk' About Ensuring Strength of Entitlements" PBS Newshour 3/7/2013

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SUMMARY:  Congressional correspondent Kwame Holman reports on President Obama's new round of negotiations with Republicans on a long term deficit deal.  Judy Woodruff talks with House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi about the prospects of a bipartisan budget deal, the sequester cuts and the confirmation of CIA director John Brennan.

POLITICS - A Better Solution, Medical Liability Reform

"Making Patient Safety the Centerpiece of Medical Liability Reform" by Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Barack Obama, New England Journal of Medicine

We have visited doctors and hospitals throughout the country and heard firsthand from those who face ever-escalating insurance costs. Indeed, in some specialties, high premiums are forcing physicians to give up performing certain high-risk procedures, leaving patients without access to a full range of medical services. But we have also talked with families who have experienced errors in their care, and it has become clear to us that if we are to find a fair and equitable solution to this complex problem, all parties — physicians, hospitals, insurers, and patients — must work together. Instead of focusing on the few areas of intense disagreement, such as the possibility of mandating caps on the financial damages awarded to patients, we believe that the discussion should center on a more fundamental issue: the need to improve patient safety.

We all know the statistic from the landmark 1999 Institute of Medicine (IOM) report that as many as 98,000 deaths in the United States each year result from medical errors.1 But the IOM also found that more than 90 percent of these deaths are the result of failed systems and procedures, not the negligence of physicians. Given this finding, we need to shift our response from placing blame on individual providers or health care organizations to developing systems for improving the quality of our patient-safety practices.2

These are just the opening paragraphs of the article. It includes provisions from the "National Medical Error Disclosure and Compensation (MEDiC) Bill" proposal.

I highly suggest reading the full article. This is a better solution than the GOP's cap-the-money proposals.

The GOP's problem, since they worship money (aka Greed), they are incapable of coming up with any solutions outside the context of money.