Pew Charitable Trusts

Barry Beach in Montana got one. Gabrielle Cecil in Louisville got one. And actor Robert Downey Jr. in California got one.

They won the holiday-time clemency lottery and, in the past two months, had their sentences commuted or pardoned.

Beach’s 100-year sentence for murder was shortened to time served, 30 years. Cecil’s life sentence for killing her abusive partner was forgiven. And “Iron Man” actor Downey, whose felony drug conviction in the 1990s led to nearly a year in jail, got a pardon for good behavior.

They’re the lucky ones.

Only 15 states, including Arkansas and California, grant frequent and regular pardons, to more than 30 percent of applicants, according to the Collateral Consequences Resource Center, a nonprofit that promotes public discussion of the lasting effects of conviction. The largest group — 21 states, including Kansas, Kentucky and Tennessee, as well as the District of Columbia —provided few or no pardons in the past 20 years. Nine states have a regular pardon process but grant clemency to just a small percentage of those who ask for it, and five states — Louisiana, Maine, New Mexico, Ohio and Wisconsin — grant pardons only infrequently, depending on the governor.

But several governors and state legislatures have moved in recent months to make the clemency process easier and pardons more frequent, reflecting a growing consensus that harsh mandatory minimum sentences have left too many Americans behind bars.

“I do see a wave of mercy rolling across the country,” said P.S. Ruckman Jr., who teaches political science and runs a clemency blog, pardonpower.com. “Over the last 10 years, governors erred on the side of caution, and did nothing” to grant clemency or pardons, Ruckman said. “Increasingly that mindset is changing.”

There is change at the federal level, too.

President Barack Obama, who until November had been relatively stingy with clemency, gave clemency or pardons to 97 people in December before leaving for his Christmas vacation in Hawaii. And in 2014 the Justice Department announced an initiative to encourage people convicted of nonviolent federal crimes to petition to have their sentences commuted by the president. Some 4,000 private lawyers are helping.

Yet despite the flurry of activity, the use of clemency and pardons by governors to ease long sentences or restore civil rights to people who have served their time remains largely a matter of chance.

Mercy Is Random

Your odds of getting a pardon or having your sentence commuted to, for example, time served, depend completely on what state you’re convicted in and, most importantly, on who the governor is.

“It’s wholly dependent on what the governor wants to do, who the governor is, and how safe, politically, the governor feels,” said former Maryland Gov. Bob Ehrlich, a Republican who granted 228 pardons during his time in office.

Ehrlich now campaigns for regular clemency through a partnership with the law school at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., where students help inmates prepare clemency petitions to governors or the president. “It’s all subjective factors. They should not play into it, but they do,” Ehrlich said.

Clemency is the overriding term for several steps a governor or president can take, such as the commutation — or shortening — of a sentence, a reprieve or temporary suspension of a sentence, such as in a death penalty case, or a pardon, which forgives the crime and restores civil rights like voting rights. To get clemency, an inmate, former inmate or family member must petition the state or the federal government for clemency.

In the states, sporadic changes in legislation have begun to streamline the process for getting clemency, and some high-profile governors are starting to address the issue:

• New York: Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo said in October he would create a “clemency project” to identify prisoners who qualify for clemency, and he commuted sentences for two people and pardoned two others. The New York Times called it a “drastic turnaround” in a state whose governors have granted few pardons over the past four decades.
• Illinois: In November, Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner granted clemency to 10 people while denying 200 other requests. But the governor said he now is working through a backlog of 1,200 petitions from previous administrations. 
• Montana: A new law took effect Oct. 1 that lets the governor grant clemency, even if the state board of pardons and paroles denies it. That allowed Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock to cut the 100-year murder sentence of Barry Beach to time served.

Some states like Arkansas, Connecticut and Delaware have a “culture of clemency,” said Margaret Love, the U.S. pardon attorney under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. “Some states have a pretty good system, but most rely on the character of the particular governor.”

For instance, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a Southern Baptist minister and a Republican presidential candidate, granted more than 1,000 clemencies during his 10 years in office. Arkansas governors have given clemency regularly, Love said.

In contrast, some governors brag that they don’t give pardons, including former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, both Republicans who also ran for president. Walker has said he won’t grant pardons to ex-offenders because it undermines judges and juries.

Some governors do grant clemency, but in a dramatic fashion — on Christmas Eve, or during their last days on the job. These last-minute dramas hurt the image of clemency as a fair and structured process, Ruckman said.

For instance, in Kentucky, where governors often grant clemency as they leave office, outgoing Gov. Steve Beshear, a Democrat, granted 201 pardons and six commutations Dec. 7, his last day on the job.

Among those receiving pardons were several women who were victims of years of domestic abuse, including Cecil, who was convicted of killing her partner in 1992 and said that domestic violence led her to do it. She served 16 years before receiving early parole and being let out of jail. Beshear then pardoned her, and said she and nine other women “deserve a second chance at life with a clean record.”

“For eight years, [Beshear] sat on 3,400 applications and did nothing, and right before he left office, he dumps a bunch of them. It casts a cloud of suspicion and makes pardons look like stunts,” Ruckman said. “When did he decide those women deserved clemency? Was it literally the last minute before he left office? Or was it a month ago, or a year ago? How did he let them sit in jail? It’s despicable.”

In California, Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown has regularly granted clemency, although earlier California governors were not so generous. Actor Downey was among 91 people granted pardons after they had been out of prison for at least 10 years and demonstrated they had rehabilitated themselves, Brown said.

Money Talks

There’s a growing bipartisan recognition that the harsh mandatory sentences of the “war on drugs” launched during the 1970s have led to mass incarceration — and mass expense.

Nearly 1.6 million Americans were in federal and state prisons as of Dec. 31, 2014, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (that figure didn’t include those held in county and local jails). While the U.S. represents just 5 percent of the world’s population, the country holds 25 percent of the world’s inmates, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

The average length of time served by federal inmates more than doubled from 1988 to 2012, up from 17.9 months to 37.5 months, and the number of federal prisoners jumped from 49,928 in 1988 to an all-time high of 217,815 in 2012, according to The Pew Charitable Trusts. (Pew also fundsStateline.) Local, state and federal governments spend from $20,000 to $50,000 a year to keep a person in jail and, according to the ACLU, the U.S. spends more than $80 billion a year to house prisoners.

That’s why high-profile conservatives such as Charles Koch, the libertarian billionaire industrialist, are in accord with Obama in supporting rare bipartisan legislation in Congress that would overhaul some federal mandatory minimum sentences, give judges more leeway in sentencing and help prisoners re-enter society.

To be eligible for the Obama administration’s clemency initiative, inmates must be nonviolent offenders who have spent 10 years in prison and would receive shorter prison terms if they were convicted under today’s laws. Some have criticized Obama and the clemency effort, which relies on private attorneys, for essentially outsourcing work that lawyers in the U.S. Justice Department would normally do.

“It’s scandalous what’s happened,” said Love, the former pardon attorney. “If this president wants to do it, and he didn’t have anyone on his staff to oversee what’s going on, that’s ridiculous.”

But Mary Price, general counsel of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, is hopeful the clemency effort will lead to more mercy. “There’s no doubt the president has breathed new life into this power that has become quite moribund in the past 20 years,” she said. “There’s definitely a great deal of hope, a great deal of interest and a great deal of prayers.

Dennis Cauchon, editor of The Clemency Report, which works to identify prisoners to be considered for clemency, said the federal initiative, and President Obama’s support for it, will have the greatest effect if it spreads to the states.

Thirty-five governors have “close to unlimited clemency power,” he said, but they don’t use it in a systematic fashion. Cauchon backs a nationwide effort to change state laws to reduce sentences and make clemency a regular duty of governors, rather than one that is subject to the whims of individuals.

The federal effort “sets the pace and frame and what can be done at state level,” Cauchon said. “Governors like to think their hands are tied, but their hands aren’t tied.

“All they need is the cost of a pen.”

Read original article – January 06, 2016
Move Is on to Make End-of-Year Pardons Less Random

Washington State Patrol Sgt. Mark Crandall half-jokingly says he can tell a driver is under the influence of marijuana during a traffic stop when the motorist becomes overly familiar and is calling him “dude.”

The truth in the joke, Crandall says, is that attitude and speech patterns can be effective markers for drugged driving. And, according to legalization advocates and some in law enforcement, they can be more reliable than blood tests that measure THC — the psychoactive compound in marijuana.

When it comes time to go to court, the testimony of an officer trained as a drug recognition expert is often more valuable than a THC test because of disparities in how the drug impacts driving ability, Crandall said.

“Here’s the really bad driving that I saw, here’s the magnified impairment that I saw on the side of the road,” he said. “It’s telling a good story and making sure that it’s backed up with facts, and evidence, and proof, and the ability of the officer to articulate it well.”

As more states make medical and recreational marijuana use legal, they increasingly are grappling with what constitutes DUID, or driving under the influence of drugs, and how to detect and prosecute it. And they’re finding it is more difficult than identifying and convicting drunken drivers.

While marijuana is the substance, other than alcohol, most frequently found in drivers involved in car accidents, the rate at which it actually causes crashes is unclear.

At least 17 states, including Washington, have “per se” laws, which make it illegal to have certain levels of THC in one’s body while operating a vehicle, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). Under these laws, no additional evidence is required to prove a driver is impaired.

Of those states, Colorado, Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington allow for some amount of THC to be found in a driver’s blood, ranging from 1 to 5 nanograms per milliliter (ng/ml). Other states leave no wiggle room and consider any amount of THC to be impairing and grounds for being charged with DUID.

In Colorado, where recreational marijuana became legal in 2012, drivers are assumed to be under the influence of marijuana if they have THC levels of 5 ng/ml or higher, but the law also lets defendants produce evidence that they were not impaired.

Alaska, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Oregon and Washington allow adult recreational use of marijuana, and another 18 states permit its use for medical purposes. More states are expected to permit recreational marijuana use as advocates push to put legalization initiatives on state ballots in 2016.

At an August 2015 NCSL meeting in Seattle, nearly all policymakers who attended a session on legalizing marijuana said they expected their states would soon have to debate legalization, if they haven’t already. A study by the Pew Research Center released in April found that 53 percent of adults supported the legal use of marijuana. (Pew also funds Stateline).

How THC Works

State lawmakers, conditioned by the universal system of rating blood alcohol content to determine intoxication, have long wanted similar measurements to gauge a driver’s impairment under the influence of THC. But that has proven elusive.

Unlike alcohol consumption, which creates impairments that are measurable by blood alcohol content, the consumption of marijuana creates physical effects that vary from person to person and THC levels can depend on how cannabis is ingested and whether the person is a long-term marijuana user, said Rebecca Hartman, a researcher with the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

People’s THC levels peak quickly as they inhale marijuana smoke and then decrease rapidly in the first 30 minutes to an hour after smoking. Even though the THC levels are decreasing, users can still be impaired, Hartman said.

How the human body processes marijuana varies so much from person to person that even on different days a user might metabolize the drug at different rates, she said.

“We’ve shown that cannabis increases lane weaving and some studies have shown one of the big things that cannabis is known to impair is driver attention,” Hartman said.

A June study on drugged driving conducted by Hartman and others suggested that people driving with THC levels of 13.1 ng/ml had a tendency to weave within lanes, similar to those who had a 0.08 blood alcohol content, the point at which drivers can be prosecuted in all states.

George Bianchi, a criminal defense attorney in Seattle, said the rule in his state (5 ng/ml) is not appropriate because studies of driver impairment vary so much. He said he thinks Hartman’s study opens the door to using 13 ng/ml as a national standard for marijuana impairment.

“I think you should try to quantify it somehow,” he said. “And this recent study seems to do that.”

Controlled Drugged Driving

Some states see creating DUID laws as part of the marijuana legalization process, said Morgan Fox, a spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project.

Several states considered adding or modifying per se DUID limits in 2015. Legislation that would have elevated the Illinois per se standard from zero tolerance to 5 ng/ml, as amended (down from 15 ng/ml) by Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, died without final approval from the General Assembly. And a bill that would create a per se standard in New Jersey is before that Legislature.Alabama, Maine and New Mexico also reviewed bills adding per se DUID limits ranging from 2 ng/ml to 5 ng/ml, though none passed.

“Considering most states already have them in place, and they are already being enforced, we don’t see the need to add them,” Fox said. “But we’re not going to scuttle a bill that would legalize [marijuana] because of per se [laws].”

Because of the variation in users’ impairment levels, critics of blood testing like Paul Armentano, deputy director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, say the tests are not an appropriate measure of how well a person was driving at the time of a traffic stop or crash.

“Where is the need to go in this [direction] with cannabis when there is a consensus among experts in the field that the presence of THC in the blood in a single sample is not an accurate predictor of recent use nor is it a predictor of performance?” Armentano said.

He cites a February 2015 drug and alcohol crash risk study from the Department of Transportation that points to contradictions between previous studies about the relationship between marijuana use and motor vehicle crashes. The analysis, which looked at marijuana and other drugs, found that, when adjusted for age, gender and alcohol use, there was no significant increase in the level of crash risk associated with the use of THC.

Inappropriate Arrests

Legalization advocates said they worry that per se standards will lead to DUID convictions of people who were not impaired by marijuana when they were pulled over for a traffic violation, but might test positive for THC because they are frequent recreational users or use marijuana as medicine.

“These laws could lead to significant unintended consequences and the most significant of those is that the law prosecutes and convicts individuals of violating traffic safety laws for simply having engaged in behavior in the privacy of their own home that at no point rose to a legitimate traffic safety threat,” Armentano said. In 2014 the Arizona Supreme Court overturned a lower court ruling that allowed for the prosecution of drivers under the per se law, even if there was no evidence of impairment. The previous year, the Michigan high court ruled that police must prove driver impairment to pursue DUID charges.

States began adopting THC-specific standards in the early 1990s as a consequence of highly publicized crashes and other accidents, Armentano said, contending that the laws are largely unnecessary given established protocols for determining if a driver is under the influence of a drug.

“The officer is collecting evidence from the minute he flashes his lights,” he said. “Based on evidence observed at the scene, he or she is going to start making some judgment about whether [the driver] might be under the influence.”

Read Original Article – December 30, 2015
As Legal Marijuana Expands, States Struggle With Drugged Driving

New College of Florida doesn’t offer pre-professional degrees, like nursing or engineering. Students choose the public liberal arts college because they want an intellectual experience. Many take a year off after graduation to pursue research or community service.

Yet last fall, New College opened a flashy new career center on its Sarasota campus. It needed to prove to the state that it was helping students find jobs and graduate on time, or risk losing $1.1 million in state aid. “That’s a big deal for us,” David Gulliver, media relations coordinator for New College, said of the money.

This fiscal year, Florida was one of 26 states to fund their two- or four-year college systems (or both) partly based on outcomes such as graduation rates, according to HCM Strategists, a consulting firm. Mississippi, Nevada, North Dakota, Ohio and Tennessee all spent over half their higher education budgets that way.

The idea of using outcomes — not enrollments — to guide public funding of higher education has so much bipartisan backing that both President Barack Obama and Florida’s Republican Gov. Rick Scott support it. In July, the Florida Board of Education approved a performance-funding system for state colleges, adding to its existing system for state universities.

It’s too early to say whether performance-based funding will drive the changes lawmakers want. But the policy so aligns with national concerns about the cost and payoff of a college education that it’s likely here to stay.

The Completion Craze

Tennessee started giving state colleges and universities bonus payments for meeting goals in certain categories, such as student performance on national exams, in 1979. In the 1990s, a handful of states set aside a small percent of funding to reward outcomes, such as degree completion. Those programs typically didn’t last long.

Then the Great Recession happened. As the economy tanked, so did state tax revenue. Almost every state cut higher education funding between 2009 and 2014, and many colleges and universities raised tuition to compensate.

College became less affordable even as Obama and governors emphasized how important it was for Americans to go. “Education is an economic issue when nearly eight in 10 new jobs will require workforce training or a higher education by the end of the decade,” Obama said in 2010.

To get the economic benefit of a college degree, the president emphasized, students have to graduate. Fifty-nine percent of first-time college students, studying full time, who started a bachelor’s degree program in 2007 graduated in six years from that institution, according to federal statistics.

The Lumina Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have added to the sense of urgency over the past few years by spending millions of dollars on developing and promoting strategies for raising graduation rates. One strategy is performance-based funding, also known as outcomes-based funding.

The men and women who oversee Florida’s 12 state universities started developing a performance funding model in 2012. “We knew we needed to come up with a different approach to get additional state support [for state universities],” said Tim Jones, chief financial officer for the State University System of Florida Board of Governors.

The Florida Legislature wanted more accountability for money spent on higher education. Both lawmakers and the board wanted to push colleges to become more efficient.

Here’s the formula they came up with: Starting in 2014, a small portion of every university’s base funding — plus any additional state money — has to be distributed according to the university’s performance on 10 metrics. Metrics include the average wages of graduates, the six-year graduation rate, the second-year retention rate and the share of undergraduates who come from families with incomes low enough to qualify for a federal Pell Grant. In 2012-13, the vast majority of Pell Grant recipients had a family income of $40,000 a year or less, according to an analysis of federal data by the nonprofit College Board.

Universities are scored between 0 and 5 points on each metric, once based on performance and again based on improvement. The board takes the higher of the two numbers for each metric and adds them up. If the university scores less than 25 points overall, it risks losing the performance portion of its base funding. If it scores above, it’s eligible to get new money. The three institutions with the highest scores get additional funds.

Other states have put much more money at stake and have built much more comprehensive formulas. While performance-based funding made up 8.8 percent of Florida’s spending on state universities this year, Tennessee allocates almost 100 percent of its higher education funding — for both community colleges and universities — through an outcomes-based formula.

“For every degree you award, it counts. For every student that accumulates 12 hours, they count. And we just simply count those up, and those are your outcomes for that funding year,” said Crystal Collins, a director at the Tennessee Higher Education Commission. “You don’t have to perform at a higher rate than you did last year; you just have to perform.”

The formula involves multiple calculations (you can check them out on the commission’s website). But basically, the state decides how much it wants to spend on higher education and parcels the money based on certain factors. A big one is whether students are progressing and graduating.

Tennessee’s model also takes into account basic operating costs and adjusts its formula based on each institution’s mission. Research universities are rewarded for spending money on research, for example, while community colleges are rewarded for connecting students with jobs.

So Far, So Good?

So is performance funding making a difference? “Yes — incredibly, actually,” said Joe DiPietro, the president of the University of Tennessee. The university system has beefed up academic advising and started stressing that students should take a full course load each semester, he said.

Graduation rates have risen across the university system since the outcomes-based formula was implemented in 2010. And they’re improving across the state, Collins said.

Yet researchers say it’s unclear whether performance funding is pushing up graduation rates. “We do not have as yet conclusive evidence that performance funding does indeed improve student outcomes in any significant way,” Columbia University researchers wrote in a 2014 working paper that reviewed models in Indiana, Ohio and Tennessee.

More statistical analysis needs to be done before researchers can disentangle performance funding from everything else that affects colleges. Decisions made by presidents and faculty, requests by accrediting agencies, grants from foundations or the federal government and public pressure can all push colleges to change. Other factors affect whether students graduate in two or four years, such as the availability of financial aid.

So far, studies haven’t found a strong link between performance funding and graduation rates. A recent analysis of Washington state’s model for community colleges found that it hadn’t much affected retention or the number of associate’s degrees awarded. Institutions were awarding more short-term certificates, credentials that don’t always have much labor market value.

The results suggest, the researchers wrote, that it may be more difficult for institutions to retain students from year to year than the designers of Washington’s formula thought.

Kevin Dougherty, the lead author of the Columbia working paper, thinks states should pay more attention to what he calls “the issue of creaming.” An easy way for colleges to improve their metrics is to raise admissions standards, potentially pushing out disadvantaged students.

About 30 percent of administrators interviewed by Dougherty and his fellow researchers for the study said restricting admissions was already happening or could happen. Colleges can also game performance-funding systems by shifting recruitment to better-prepared students, including from out of state, or by making it easier to pass classes, the administrators said.

States such as Tennessee try to address this concern by weighting the success of low-income students and other subpopulations more heavily in their formulas. But it’s not clear how well that works, or what the right weight should be. This year, in response to campus officials’ concerns, Tennessee raised the premium it places on low-income and adult students’ progress.

Performance-based funding has caught on at a moment when colleges are less reliant on state money than they used to be. State funding now makes up just 29 percent of revenue for Tennessee’s universities and about 41 percent of revenue for its community college system, according to Collins.

Sean Tierney, a strategy officer for the Lumina Foundation, says the states’ growing shift to tuition to fund higher education — which rises with enrollment — strengthens the case for rewarding outcomes. “It makes more and more sense for the state to fund on a different variable, in order to help these students,” he said.

In a different world, you might imagine policymakers figuring out how much it would cost to raise graduation rates by a certain amount and funding institutions that way, says Robert Bradley, a professor at the Institute for Academic Leadership hosted by Florida State University.

Instead, performance-funding formulas take the money states want to spend and divvy it up based on productivity. And that’s exactly how lawmakers like it.

Gov. Scott wants to spend $500 million on performance funding for the State University System, half of which would come from universities’ base budget.

“The fact that we’ve gotten $220 million over the past two years, three years, shows the belief that our policymakers and the Legislature and the governor’s office have in what the board is doing,” Jones, the State University System’s CFO, said of Florida’s formula. “It’s very likely that we wouldn’t have gotten the money without this model. So I think folks are happy, because they are getting funding for this.”

Read Original Article – December 31, 2015
States to Colleges: Prove You’re Worth It

The smell of coffee filled the air on a recent Thursday morning in Carpenter’s Shelter, a homeless shelter here, as about a dozen people milled about.

Two U.S. Army veterans were among them: a middle-aged man and woman who aren’t looking for a permanent place to live. They said the food, showers and services at the shelter are enough, for now.

The Obama administration, in June 2014, challenged local governments to find a home for all veterans who want one by the end of this month. At least nine states and 850 municipalities tried to meet the goal, but Virginia and 15 municipalities were the only ones that succeeded.

But even there, hundreds of veterans remain homeless, most often because they have mental health or substance abuse problems, or just want to live on the street. In Virginia, the two at Carpenter’s Shelter are among about 600 homeless veterans. There are hundreds more in the municipalities that met the goal — in Alabama, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, North Carolina, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Pennsylvania and Texas.

The goal did not require municipalities to show that all veterans had been housed — just to prove they could quickly provide shelter, if needed. And even in places that did find a home for most veterans, some of them found themselves on the street again.

Challenges
The fact that so few cities, and just one state, have met the challenge points to just how complex the issue is.

At Carpenter’s Shelter, staff comes at it with “a heavy dose of optimism, with some pragmatism, as well,” said Shannon Steene, the shelter’s director.

“They didn’t get here overnight,” he said, “and they probably aren’t going to get out of it overnight.”

In many of the states that still have thousands of homeless veterans on the streets — the largest populations are in California, Florida, New York and Texas — the biggest challenge is there simply isn’t enough affordable and suitable housing, people who work with homeless populations say. That’s a problem not just for the homeless, but for many middle-class families, and it’s one homeless advocates cannot solve on their own.

In San Diego, California, for instance, at least 200 veterans who have housing vouchers that would pay some of their rent aren’t able to find apartments because the vacancy rate is so low, said Phil Landis, president and CEO of Veterans Village of San Diego. The nonprofit has been helping homeless veterans since the 1980s.

“The greatest hurdle here isn’t the outreach and the motivation, it’s in finding suitable housing,” Landis said.

Success Stories
Cities large and small met the federal milestone this year. Philadelphia, with a population of about 1.6 million, announced Friday that it met the goal. Troy, New York, a city of about 50,000, met the goal in September.

Virginia, the first and only state to reach the goal, and New Orleans, the first city to do it, used similar tactics to attack the problem. They employed a “housing first” strategy of getting veterans off the streets, out of shelters, and into stable housing as the first step in trying to bring stability to their lives.

Local governments joined with advocacy groups to enlist a swarm of volunteers who walked the streets and visited shelters, handing out fliers and encouraging veterans to take advantage of the programs.

They made lists of the names of each veteran living on the street or in a shelter, and tried to help them one by one. And they checked back often.

Organizers convinced landlords to house the veterans, and gave the veterans vouchers to use to pay rent for as long as they need. Some nonprofits even signed their leases for them.

That’s known as “master leasing,” and Pamela Michell, director of New Hope Housing, an Alexandria nonprofit that uses the approach, said it provides residents and landlords with a go-between, should any problems arise.

The work is ongoing. Shelter workers continue to try to build relationships with veterans who still don’t have a roof over their heads, urging them to get off the streets and to get help with the problems that keep them from being permanently housed.

“I try to encourage them,” said Sharon Addison, coordinator of the day program at Carpenter’s Shelter in Alexandria. “I say, ‘The new year is coming up. The shelter’s next door, whose gonna go next year?’ Sometimes they go, sometimes they don’t.”

Addison gave both of the veterans who were in the shelter on that Thursday morning information about services weeks ago.

One of them, Aaron McCullough, 55, stays at the shelter some nights despite the fact he is paying $90 a week to rent a small room in a house in Fairfax, Virginia, a 20-minute bus ride away.

The shelter is closer to where he works. He said he would try to find a more permanent place, but he “doesn’t think it will work. It’s too complicated, or something. I’m saving money.”

The federal push to house homeless veterans also encourages the housing first approach of first providing shelter, before the underlying reasons for their homelessness — such as mental illness or drug addiction — can be addressed. Seventy percent of homeless veterans have substance abuse problems and half have a serious mental illness, according to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans.

Virginia and Louisiana had both signed on to this strategy before the national effort to focus on homeless veterans. The model has often demonstrated that people are more likely to succeed when given a stable place to call home, according to a joint study by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the National Center on Homelessness Among Veterans.

Much of New Orleans’ progress was a result of the rapid re-housing system it put in place after Hurricane Katrina, in 2005, said Martha Kegel, director of Unity of Greater New Orleans, the nonprofit that has led homelessness efforts in the city since then. Rapid re-housing, like housing first, focuses on quick housing as the first step of intervention, but it focuses on homeless people with moderate needs only, not the chronically homeless.

What New Orleans did became a model for other municipalities across the state, and it was largely successful. In Louisiana, the number of homeless veterans fell more than in any other state from 2011 to 2015, by 58.7 percent, to 392.

In Virginia, the number fell by 35.1 percent, to 604.

National Progress
This kind of progress has been seen nationwide. The number of homeless veterans living on the streets or in shelters fell by 27 percent, to 47,504, according to the annual count by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development released last month.

Colorado, Louisiana, New York and Texas made the most headway, all cutting their numbers by more than half. Even in California, where the average cost of monthly rent is 50 percent higher than in the rest of the country, the number of homeless veterans fell by 32.6 percent, to 11,311. Local groups say the decline came as federal funding funneled into their communities. In 2009, the VA made ending veteran homelessness a priority, and in 2014, the VA joined with HUD on new initiatives: the Mayors Challenge to End Veteran Homelessness and the 25 Cities Effort. Federal funding for programs that serve the population more than tripled from fiscal 2009 to 2014, from about $399 million to $1.37 billion, according to the 2015 Congressional Research Service. That included new veteran housing vouchers each year from fiscal 2009 to 2014, totaling $425 million. Appropriations for government-contracted nonprofits that work on housing for veterans totaled about $764 million nationwide from fiscal 2011 to 2014.

States and municipalities that have met the federal goal have proven that they have identified and reached out to all homeless veterans, and have the resources and systems in place to house any homeless veteran who wants to be housed, said Beverley Ebersold, regional coordinator at the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness.

The times veterans do face homelessness should be “rare, brief and nonrecurring,” Ebersold said.

Housing First Has its Critics
Housing first, the chief tactic used in the national battle, isn’t without its critics.

Landis, of Veterans Village of San Diego, said that while rapid re-housing is effective overall, it sometimes leaves veterans without the case management and mental health services they need.

His group runs a Veterans Treatment Center for those with substance abuse and mental health issues that provides case management and individual counseling. The organization receives about $2.4 million from the VA for the program, which funds 165 beds in the center. Those beds are always full, Landis said. But with the focus on housing first, he has heard that the money will soon dry up.

He and others in the city were upset to see the number of homeless veterans in San Diego rise from 2014 to 2015, from 1,307 to 1,381, despite their focused effort and increased funding.

He suspects the increase may be due, in part, to people who have been rapidly re-housed, without receiving the services they need to succeed.

“We don’t disagree that housing first has enormous positive impact,” Landis said. “But for those vets seeking treatment there should be at least one place in America where they can get it.”

Read Original Article – December 21, 2015
Cities, States Fight Veteran Homelessness

Anne Stauffer, a director at The Pew Charitable Trusts, leads Pew’s research on fiscal federalism.

Mark Robyn, a senior associate at The Pew Charitable Trusts, researches and analyzes fiscal federalism.

States are waiting for Congress to act on an income tax provision that affects many of their residents – the deduction for state and local sales taxes. This federal deduction expired at the end of 2014, and if it is not extended, people in states with no or limited income tax would be most affected. In recent years, policymakers have approved one- or two-year extensions of the sales tax deduction as part of a broad package of temporary tax laws known as the “tax extenders.” But as of now the deduction is expired and will not be available for people to claim on their 2015 tax returns unless Congress passes the tax extenders bill.

What is the state and local sales tax deduction?

Tax filers who itemize deductions on their federal returns may deduct certain taxes paid to state and local governments, such as real estate, personal property, and income taxes. Under this provision, filers could choose to deduct state and local sales taxes instead of income taxes, but that option expired at the end of 2014. About 10 million filers claimed a total of $17 billion in state and local sales tax deductions in 2013, the most recent year for which data is available.

Nationwide, about 7 percent of all filers claimed the sales tax deduction in 2013 and the average deduction per tax filer was $113. However, because filers must choose between deducting income or sales taxes, the claim rate and average amount were significantly higher in eight states with no or limited income tax. In Washington state, for example, which has a sales tax and no income tax, nearly 26 percent of federal filers claimed the deduction in 2013 and the average deduction per filer was $610 (see table showing the top 10 states). States that have income taxes tend to have lower claim rates because many filers deduct income instead of sales taxes.

How do the deductions for state and local taxes affect states?

Federal deductions for state and local taxes—including real estate, personal property, and income or sales taxes—lower the taxes paid by individuals who claim them and so reduce the overall cost to taxpayers of state and local spending. Effectively, the federal government covers a share of the cost of state and local services. The Congressional Budget Office and the Congressional Research Service have suggested that state and local governments may be more likely to impose higher taxes that are deductible at the federal level and to provide more services because of this deduction. Changes to these deductions, such as the expiration of the sales tax deduction, could affect states’ decisions about their own tax policies, including the level and mix of taxes. If these deductions were reduced or eliminated, states with the highest claim rates and average per-filer deductions would be most affected.

Read Original Article – December 1, 2015
Expired Federal Deduction for Sales Taxes Matters Most for States With No Income Tax

For Tuscaloosa, Alabama, there are lessons to be learned from the terror that gripped Paris just over a week ago.

After the Islamic State attacks, Democratic Mayor Walter Maddox took note of the Parisian security staff that prevented a suicide bomber from entering the French national soccer stadium. His thoughts turned to Bryant-Denny Stadium—where more than 100,000 people gather for University of Alabama football games.

Maddox said he considered what could happen in his 95,000-person city. But he and some terrorism and security specialists say many chief executives and police departments in midsize U.S. cities may not realize that terrorism could put their people and infrastructure at just as much risk as high-profile targets like New York City and Washington, D.C.

“The larger cities understand and grasp this,” Maddox said. “I’m not sure that at the midlevel cities the awareness is that high.”

But terrorism can and does happen in those places. This year, two men suspected of communicating with overseas terrorists were killed when they attempted to attack a free-speech event in Texas, a gunman killed four people at a military recruiting center in Tennessee, though it was unclear if he had worked with known terrorist organizations, and security was heightenedacross the country during Fourth of July weekend.

In the days following the Paris attacks New York City deployed the first 100 officers in the city’s new Critical Response Command. The 500-officer program will be dedicated to counterterrorism in the city, which spent $170 million this year to bring 1,300 new police officers to its 34,500-officer force.

Conversely, in Wichita, Kansas, where an airport worker was arrested after he tried to execute a suicide attack at the local airport in 2013, the 437-officer police force was struggling to stay fully staffed this summer.

While it’s difficult to tell just how prepared every state and municipality is for a potential terrorist attack, security specialists say the ability to prevent and react well depends on a communication system and local counterterrorism efforts that are still underdeveloped, even 14 years after 9/11.

Chet Lunner, a security consultant and former senior official at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), said the FBI has counterterrorism investigations in every state, but most places probably lack the resources to prevent or respond to an attack.

“You might think that all 50 states are responding to that kind of warning, but I’m not sure that they are at the appropriate level,” Lunner said.

The Paris attacks on “soft” targets like the restaurant and the concert hall—places with minimal security—should signal to local governments in the U.S. that they, too, could be at risk.

Lunner and Michael Balboni, a security consultant and former New York state senator who wrote homeland security laws for his state, say even if smaller cities and towns aren’t at high risk for violence and are short on the financial resources that big cities have, they should still plan and practice for terrorist attacks.

“State and local personnel are literally the tip of the spear,” Lunner said. “They owe it to themselves as well as the communities they serve” to be as prepared as possible.

Communication Is Key

Despite repeated efforts and hundreds of millions of dollars spent on collecting and sharing information nationwide about potential terrorist threats, questions remain about how much filters down to local officials, especially in smaller municipalities.

In 2003, DHS and the U.S. Department of Justice began creating fusion centers to encourage and ease the sharing of information between federal law-enforcement and counterterrorism officials in states and major urban areas. But a 2012 U.S. Senate subcommittee report found the centers yielded little counterterrorism intelligence.

In 2011, the White House released the first national strategy and plan to empower local governments to prevent domestic violent extremism and homegrown terrorism. The plan advocates enhancing federal engagement with local communities that may be breeding grounds or targets for violence, though it has been criticized for disproportionately focusing on and alienating Muslims.

Until there is centralized information-sharing between the national and local governments, it will be difficult to get localities invested in sustained antiterrorism work, Balboni said.

Balboni, who also served as a New York state homeland security adviser, said the fusion centers need to morph into what he calls “command and control centers” that gather intelligence and work in places where a potential threat or terrorist activity surfaces.

Outside Big Cities

People who don’t live in big cities typically viewed as likely terrorist targets may not think about terrorism affecting their communities or about devoting the resources to countering the possibility they could be hit. But they ought to.

Less-populated locales are where terrorists may settle in to plan or practice attacks, Lunner said. It is up to local police to get to know people and seek out information about potential threats.

“In this country, if you dial 911, the CIA does not show up at the end of your driveway,” Lunner said.

In Minot, a North Dakota city of less than 50,000, dealing with terrorist threats became a reality in the wake of the Paris attacks as the names of six people stationed at the Minot Air Force Baseappeared on an Islamic State hit list.

The biggest challenge in responding to such a threat, Police Chief Jason Olson said, is the limited amount of resources his department has to focus on gathering intelligence and analyzing data.

Minot is a good example of a place that many would not typically consider to be at risk for terrorism. And all Olson and local officials can do is push for relevant and timely information from the federal government. But, Lunner said, they are probably not as informed as their counterparts in places like New York City.

Although states were quick to spend billions of federal dollars funneled to them after 9/11, they couldn’t sustain salaries needed to run long-term local surveillance programs with that one-time infusion of money. Since then, local spending on antiterrorism has been reduced, said Doug Farquhar, a program director with the National Conference of State Legislatures.

“The problem is that they knew this was one-time dollars,” Farquhar said. “You can buy a firetruck or build a building, but you can’t hire employees.”

Localities have also been unlikely to pay more attention to antiterrorism because of the infrequency of attacks, he said.

Maddox said Tuscaloosa is unique in its willingness to dedicate money and resources to prepare for terrorism and disaster. He credits much of that willingness to training that he and his staff received from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, in 2009.

“It’s getting your team to believe that we need to prepare for a moment that may or may not ever come,” he said.

Disaster Prep Equals Terror Prep

For many states and municipalities, counterterrorism has become just a part of general disaster preparation, Farquhar said.

Maddox, who has been credited with an exemplary response to a 2011 tornado that destroyed 12 percent of the city, said the same elements of responding to a natural disaster or a major violent crime—providing emergency medical care, shelter and food, and good law-enforcement—extend to counterterrorism.

“Whether we have a natural disaster or an active shooter situation, my protocols are going to be nearly identical in how we approach that situation,” he said.

And in Minot, which has suffered a number of disasters in recent years—including a train derailment and subsequent ammonia spill, a chemical warehouse fire and historic flooding—Olson said responding to terrorism has become just a part of the disaster preparedness plan.

Read original article – Published November 23, 2015
In Wake of Paris, How Prepared Are US States, Cities?