Susan Pendergrass speaks with Andy Smarick, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, about Missouri’s education leadership shake-up and what comes next. They discuss how to find the right commissioner of education, why outside reformers tend to succeed where insiders struggle, what the dismantling of the US Department of Education means for state accountability systems, why public complacency about poor academic outcomes persists, and more.

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Episode Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00):
Thank you so much, Andy Smarick, for joining once again on the Show-Me Institute Podcast. We love having you on and I appreciate you taking the time. You’re a busy man, so it’s really wonderful to have you back.

Andy Smarick (00:06):
I love being here. It’s a treat. Thank you for having me. I always like talking to you, but also anytime I get to talk about state-level education policy, it’s a treat.

Susan Pendergrass (00:19):
Well, I know that you have experience serving on a couple of state boards, both K-12 and higher ed. Just to bring you up to speed on what’s happening in Missouri: we have a relatively new governor, about a year in, and we had a state board of education where people stayed in expired seats, rubber-stamped decisions, and were very complacent, I feel comfortable saying. Our governor shook up that group and appointed new people who came in and said, what do you mean we don’t have bylaws? It was like, this is bananas. At the same time, the governor issued an executive order requiring letter grades on schools and districts, new school report cards. I don’t know exactly how everything went down, but our Commissioner of Education resigned, our Deputy Commissioner resigned, and our president of the state board of education resigned, all in about one week. So we are now straightening things out and there is a new board president. But this new, relatively new board now has the task of finding a commissioner. The way things have happened in Missouri is we always get a new commissioner from the ranks of the state education agency, maybe from the legislature, always from Missouri. Just a real this-is-how-we’ve-done-it mentality. And we have not been big reformers. No Chiefs for Change in Missouri. Like a lot of states, our reading scores for young kids are tanking, forty percent below basic for third and fourth graders. We have a state accountability system called the Missouri School Improvement Plan in which 516 of our 520 districts are fully accredited and about four are provisionally accredited, none unaccredited. So we have this meaningless accountability system where every district is fully accredited, even St. Louis, which I can’t even go into. So here we are, and I want to know a few things from you. Number one, if you were on the Board of Education in Missouri, how would you go about finding a new commissioner? What would you look for? And then later I want to get into what’s happening at the national level. We are not doing well academically, we have never had a bold reformer in charge, we keep doing the same thing and getting the same result. What would you do if you were in their spot?

Andy Smarick (02:59):
So in education, I’m going to wind up to this answer, so just bear with me for a second. Conservative can mean two different things. One is the traditional conservative view, which is to preserve, to stand athwart big, swift, dramatic, perpetual change. You’re trying to keep things the way they are because there’s a lot of wisdom that has gone into it and people are accustomed to it. In education, there’s also this other right-of-center conservative view, which is we have to be much more open to choice, competition, accountability metrics, and so on. And it seems that Missouri has been one of those very red states that has tended to believe in the first kind of conservatism: protect our traditional school districts, protect the hierarchies we have, protect the tradition of you grow up as a professional, as a teacher, then a superintendent, then maybe go to the state education agency. A lot of people believe that’s the way to do it.

There probably is an ethic among a lot of people to keep it that way. The only way you get out of that is if there’s a recognition among leadership that we can’t continue to preserve the status quo, that we have to change some things. That is a big step for a place that has elevated the idea of preserving for a very long time. If they get to that step, then they have to do the very tough things, which is start to pull out the Jenga pieces of that conservatism. The most important one is having board leadership and having a state superintendent who come from outside the state, and then having a board chair or board president who is not going to just do what the staff of the state education agency says or what the district superintendents say. We saw this work quite well about fifteen or twenty years ago. There was a big movement nationwide in educational reform led at the state level, and a number of states chose out-of-state superintendents and commissioners of education who did a terrific job of shaking things up and advancing a bunch of important proposals. The downside is a lot of them were so brash and so young, and I have to say so cocky, that they made unnecessary waves and kicked a lot of people in the shins in the states where they landed. So my view is a place like Missouri should pick someone from out of state for a state chief, someone with a long track record of success, but someone who isn’t so green as to think he or she knows everything. Someone with enough humility and enough time on task to know what they don’t know, and who can come in and be bold enough to make some changes, but not think that everyone in the state is a dummy who needs to be ignored. That’s how I would think about it. And if you have a board chair and board membership who get all of this, it makes things a whole lot easier. But that might be the hardest part of all. Who is your board president? Who are the board majority going to be? They have to be the ones with the backbone.

Susan Pendergrass (05:57):
Yeah. I feel like we’ve had people come in and say, well, I’m only the commissioner, it’s not my fault that the kids don’t read. And then people say, well, we’re a local control state, so it’s really the local guys’ fault that the kids can’t read. Then the legislators are like, well, who’s supposed to be making sure the kids can read? And technically, kind of they are, but them plus the board, and there’s just fingers pointing every different direction with nobody really taking responsibility. If we had the capacity for hard things, we would not have all of our districts be fully accredited. There’s even pushback on the letter grade idea because folks will say, well, then the teachers in those F schools feel bad and the parents feel bad and the kids who go there feel bad. I’ve seen some states change it to colors or something where nobody feels bad. I’ve also heard folks say it’s racist because a lot of the D and F schools enroll large percentages of students of color. So there are just all of these reasons to resist. It’s going to happen because there’s an executive order, but I feel like we’re going to have a hard time finding somebody who’s willing to do those things.

Andy Smarick (07:17):
Well, your state, like every other state, has a state constitution that makes the state ultimately responsible for education. Your state, like others, has both tradition and some laws that give a number of powers to local districts. The weird thing, and I’ve seen this in a lot of different states, is the state government ends up in a very weird position. The state can get sued and state leaders can get criticized if kids aren’t learning, because the state actually has constitutional authority to make sure kids are learning. But as a matter of practice, and often of state statutes, a lot of this power is delegated to districts. States then try to recapture some of that power through the accreditation system. It’s the way the state can say, okay, districts, you have the power to do these things, but we’re going to hold you accountable for results and we’re going to accredit you or not. And then it turns out it’s virtually impossible to take away the accreditation of these districts because of legislative pushback, and the state typically doesn’t have the capacity to run a district if it does take away accreditation. It just becomes a complete hot mess. That’s why you need state leadership who has some experience but also some backbone to say, this is how we’re going to thread the needle of state authority, state responsibility, local control, and still making sure that kids learn. This is not easy, other states have gone through it, but it isn’t the kind of thing that someone who has lived in Missouri all their life and grown up professionally there can do easily. It’s going to be hard for that person to get out of that box. Having someone from the outside who can start to do some bold things, including hiring smart, tough lawyers, having board leadership who’s going to stick by it. But I just want to emphasize this point: every state I ever talk to begins by saying, well, you know, we’re a local control state, our districts have all the power. Everybody says that. Go back to your state constitution. The state is the one that’s going to be responsible. And if the state has the backbone, it can do a whole lot. But whether it has the backbone is the operative phrase.

Susan Pendergrass (09:41):
Yeah. So about seven years ago we developed our own school report cards with letter grades, called MOSchoolRankings. I’ll just plug it. It was with GPAs, and this year for the first time I just took the GPAs and converted them to letter grades because folks found GPAs tricky. I put up the methodology. I took all the data from our state education agency, DESE, and just tried to make it a map you can zoom in and out on, easier to navigate. And my thinking is you have to do these things, make sure you say how you do it, and then people can argue with you and debate whether it’s right or wrong or good or bad. And many people have. A lot of people don’t like that the average is a C. I’m open to discussing why the average should be anything other than a C, but you have to at some point just make the move and then be confident enough in what you did that you can defend it and change it if people point out flaws. But this is where I think we struggle at DESE. They struggle to just put that out there because they worry about every negative outcome and consequence. And it’s like, yeah, but at some point to not do it is worse than to do it.

Andy Smarick (11:10):
For sure. And I’ve gotten to the point of realizing that if you have been in a system at different ranks for thirty or thirty-five years, all of your friends, your reputation, your pension, your income, everything about your identity is wrapped up with that system. Expecting these folks to suddenly turn the corner and say, you know, we’ve messed up, tens of thousands of kids are not learning right now today in classrooms, and we have to start holding the adults accountable for that, including teachers and principals and local school board members and local superintendents, and we have to be courageous about it. That’s asking a lot of people who are of, by, and for the system. It can be a whole lot easier if you just get someone from the outside with the courage to do it.

Susan Pendergrass (11:54):
Yeah. So can you think of an example of a state that has done this well?

Andy Smarick (12:02):
Definitely during the late No Child Left Behind era and then the Race to the Top era, a number of states found people from outside. Tennessee was famous for this. Arne Duncan ended up going to a couple of different places, including Rhode Island. New Jersey ended up picking Chris Cerf. There was a movement where probably ten or fifteen states did this quite well. My state, Maryland, brought in the superintendent of Mississippi after Mississippi had had so many gains, so she could carry some of those especially reading reforms to our state. This is not uncommon. Texas did something like this for a while. Louisiana became very famous during the John White era for doing this. But in all of these cases it began often with a governor, and then some members of a state legislature who said, we just can’t keep doing things the way we’ve done in the past. We have to do things differently. Once the governor says something like that, he or she can appoint people to the Board of Education who will do things differently, and the legislature, at least his or her party, will start to fall in line, and the media then starts to understand how serious it is. It is hard to do this without the governor leaning forward and giving the blessing to the bureaucracy to do things differently. So the question for you is, is your governor going to spend any political capital on this and say things are messed up and we have to do things differently?

Susan Pendergrass (13:29):
I don’t know. I hope so. But I haven’t seen evidence of that. I suspect, though I could be wrong, that they’re looking more internally than externally. However, I just want to add one wrinkle to this context that we’ve been thinking a lot about at the Show-Me Institute. If you’re following the US Department of Education, I believe you used to work there. Is that right?

Andy Smarick (13:54):
Yes, back in the day.

Susan Pendergrass (13:55):
Last week they moved the Office of Special Education over to the Department of Health and Human Services. They moved the Office of Civil Rights over to the Department of Justice. The building where the Department of Education used to be is now vacated. All those people are over at an old Department of Energy building. It’s a significantly reduced staff. Without touching the Every Student Succeeds Act, they are effectively dismantling most of the structure over there, at a time when the current president said that sending education back to the states was one of his priorities. I’m particularly concerned that at a time when Missouri has this vacuum, we could be looking at the apron strings being cut, states being told to sink or swim from the federal perspective. You don’t have to maintain the accountability systems. The Secretary is encouraging states to submit requests to waive parts of the law. I don’t really know exactly where it’s headed, but that concerns me. Do you think they’re going to let off the gas on mandated accountability systems in exchange for flexibility?

Andy Smarick (15:15):
Such a good question. To begin with just some editorializing: it is astonishing that Congress has allowed this to happen. In general I’m a big fan of decentralizing education power to the states, but that they’ve been able to administratively dismantle a department without Congress doing anything about it is just shocking to me. Even members of the Republican Party twenty years ago, let alone forty or sixty years ago, who jealously guarded the prerogatives of the legislative branch to create departments and fund departments, would have been appalled at this. There would have been unanimous consent to stop this from happening. So that says a lot that Congress has just sort of excused itself from the discussion. It has been remarkable the extent to which that building where we used to work, and the thousands of people there, is just empty, and they are handing off all the tasks to other places. I don’t know how this is legal, but I guess they’re figuring out a way to do it.

Now, the people who are leading this from inside genuinely believe that education will be better off if Uncle Sam isn’t meddling in it so much. That requires a theory of action, or at least a theory, that the reason why things are bad is that Uncle Sam is causing them to be bad, as though if Uncle Sam backs up there’s going to be a sunnier future ahead. Or it requires believing that it is just morally wrong for Uncle Sam to get involved, and whether states sink or swim after he gets out, that’s up to them. That’s a theory, it’s an ideological approach, and they have the right to pursue it. Donald Trump was elected and he gets to hire who he wants to. But then, to your point, it starts to implicate the Every Student Succeeds Act, which still requires the federal government to do some things related to state accountability systems. And if you believe you have the power administratively to undo a cabinet department, I suspect you probably believe you have the power to ignore some federal accountability provisions and just allow states to do what they want. So we’re going to be left in this position of saying, all right, the federal government is getting out of the business of accountability, therefore the states need to do it well. And then anyone who cares about kids learning will ask, okay, are states going to do this well? And so I turn to you as a state leader. Is Missouri going to

Susan Pendergrass (17:23):
Yeah.

Andy Smarick (17:47):
kick butt and take names?

Susan Pendergrass (17:48):
I’m concerned. I mean, No Child Left Behind was difficult and a lot of people didn’t like it, but test scores went up. Strict accountability, test scores went up. As we backed off, the Race to the Top era with waivers, and then Every Student Succeeds, which allowed more waivers, states were able to lower a lot of bars. Some states raised bars, like you mentioned, Mississippi and Louisiana. Some states are doing a great job, especially with early literacy. Others are not. And so Missouri, I think of it like this: you have a college student and you’re paying all their bills. You’re writing the checks, ordering their textbooks, doing all that work. Then one day you say, you know what, instead of that, I’m going to give you $3,000 a month: you pay your rent, your utilities, get your own books. There are going to be kids who step up and do fine. And there are going to be a lot of kids who take that $3,000 and immediately go to Cancun. We know this. It kind of depends on what you’ve done with the kids so far. And I feel like we have lulled the states into a feeling of compliance. If we just tell you how we spend our Title I dollars, fill out this form, and report that our test scores keep going down, no one cares. There’s no stick. They don’t withhold the money. We just say our test scores this year are lower than last year, and they say, good to know, here’s your

Andy Smarick (19:14):
Yep.

Susan Pendergrass (19:22):
check. So if that’s how you were raising your kids so far, why would you expect them to step up and become suddenly responsible?

Andy Smarick (19:31):
Okay, I have to admit that I have learned a hard lesson in my years doing education policy, which is that I was wrong that the political system of its own volition will always push for big action to make sure schools are great. I believed that if we had accountability systems showing that schools were underperforming, there would be a perpetual energy within the public to say we have to fix this, that it was just a matter of making the knowledge available and then everything else would take care of itself. It turns out it just doesn’t work that way. You need leaders at the top to constantly push and say, we are not doing well enough, we have to do dramatic things to make sure kids are going to be better off. Otherwise, No Child Left Behind is in place for a while and then people get sick of it. Or you have some interesting testing regimes and then there’s pushback to that, or just resistance to Uncle Sam in general. And people like the two of us say, but kids aren’t learning anything anymore. We are seeing a cratering of student learning since the peak of No Child Left Behind’s learning gains. This is horrible. Kids just aren’t learning anymore. The Andy of twenty years ago would have assumed the nation would revolt and say, how dare we do this to our schools and our kids, we have to do something differently. Instead, I don’t want to say it’s crickets, but there has not been a major wave of energy to change things again. The only way to do this is for governors or presidents to say this is not good enough and keep pushing. It is the ultimate dog that didn’t bark. The story is why something isn’t happening. If things are so bad in student learning, why is there not a dramatic energy within the public to do things differently? So maybe I look to you. In Missouri, are people just satisfied? Do they just not want the hassle?

Susan Pendergrass (21:28):
Why do you think? Yeah, they are like, we love our schools. All the time: we love our schools. We love, love, love our rural schools. It’s hard, kids show up with a lot of baggage, it’s just hard. But we love our schools. God forbid we have tiny districts getting below fifty kids. We love it. There isn’t an appetite to say, well, thirty-some percent of our rural high schools don’t offer calculus, and we don’t think we need it. It’s like, well, those kids are going to join a world where a lot of other kids had access to these things. It’s just, I don’t know the word. Complacency for sure. And it gets exhausting to continue to talk about it because it feels like

Andy Smarick (22:20):
Yeah. So this is why it can feel that way. And listen, if I were a state superintendent, based on the things I have learned, I would always begin a big reform movement by saying, first, all of the things you just said, but sincerely, because I believe this. I would say I love our public schools. I know how much they do for kids. I know that we love our teachers. I know that these schools are part of the community. I know that they help shape young people in ways beyond reading and math scores. I know that we love to go to these sports events. I know that we love to go to our fifth-grade graduation. This is an important strand in the fabric of our community. We love these schools, we love our teachers, we need to protect them, and we have to do better. What I found in that previous movement of big, dramatic out-of-state actors who came in and took over is they were awesome at the we-have-to-do-better part and absolutely lousy at the we-love-the-schools-and-teachers part. And that just caused a lot of anger. It was toxic in the long run. It is so important to a state to hear the we-love-our-schools message. That’s why they end up picking leaders, board presidents and superintendents who are of the system, who sincerely love their schools and say that. But they’re bad at the second part: we have to do things differently. The key to leadership right now is finding someone who can say both. We love these schools. We love public education in our communities. But Lord, our kids deserve a whole lot better than this. We have to do some things differently. That’s a rare leader.

Susan Pendergrass (24:00):
Yeah. Well, I think that’s a great place to end, because what else can you say? That’s awesome. That’s what we’re looking at. We’re going to find out soon, and not just Missouri. Many states have the same problems. I would love to have you come back again, Andy. We love having you.

Andy Smarick (24:16):
I love getting emails from you or Zach asking me to come on. I’m happy to give my bad opinions on anything.

Susan Pendergrass (24:23):
No, you have such a good, crystallized view of these things, and your experience on state boards is invaluable. I do appreciate it. Thank you for taking the time. I know you’re busy and hopefully you’ll come back soon.

Andy Smarick (24:40):
Whenever you call. Have a great summer.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post The Case for an Education Outsider in Missouri with Andy Smarick appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Susan Pendergrass speaks with Doug Burris, retired Justice Services Director and Chief United States Probation Officer, about criminal justice reform in Missouri and St. Louis. They discuss Missouri’s risk-based approach to sentencing and supervision; why building more prisons may not reduce crime; low violent-crime clearance rates in St. Louis; the case for bail reform and expanded electronic monitoring; the Safer Supervision Act before Congress; and more.

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Episode Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00):
Welcome to the podcast, Doug Burris, who has been in and around criminal justice reform. I know you’ve been making a lot of pushes nationally, and you’ve worked within Missouri. What I want to talk about today is that in St. Louis city and county, folks are really celebrating this reduction in crime. Murders are down, and therefore we are on the verge of solving this issue. But it doesn’t feel that way to people who live there. I know you ran the county jail for a while and you’ve been closely involved in what’s going on there. What is your perspective on the St. Louis region in terms of where things stand today, in the middle of 2026, when it comes to criminal justice reform and identifying and clearing crimes?

Doug Burris (00:57):
Well, first of all, Susan, thank you for having me as a guest on your show. It’s greatly appreciated. I’m such a fan of the Show-Me Institute. To answer your question, there has been some progress, but I think what we have done is taken baby steps and we still need to walk and then run. There’s much work that needs to be done. I think the state of Missouri as a whole has been a great example of what can happen when criminal justice reform is done correctly. What was done with the Department of Corrections with prior work, including House Bill 1525, allowed for focusing on more high-risk cases and moving low-risk cases through the system quicker, getting them productive and out once they are. That’s what should be done more at the federal level, following what the state of Missouri did, and also at the local levels in the city of St. Louis. I think that’s exactly where we’re headed.

Susan Pendergrass (02:00):
So what did happen at the state level in Missouri? How did they shift their focus? It sounds kind of strange, but to make this system more effective and efficient, you need to find and lock up violent criminals, but people who are not violent criminals who commit a crime could be dealt with differently. What did Missouri do specifically?

Doug Burris (02:01):
Well, Missouri led the way for the rest of the country, as did Texas, where they implemented various reforms. One was making sentencing decisions and supervision decisions based on a risk level, where they had risk assessments that followed the science of criminal justice on who needs to be the most supervised and frankly the longest incarcerated, as opposed to the exact opposite. I’ll give two extremes of the situation. At the federal level, we have a grandmother who continues to cash her dead husband’s Social Security check, and that person ends up on federal supervision on the same caseload as a violent child predator. It’s really not necessary to have that woman on supervision when the real focus should be on the violent person. There is the Safer Supervision Act that’s before Congress right now, and we’re really hoping that gets passed so there will be more emphasis on supervising the people who are at highest risk, using risk assessments as a tool to determine that.

Susan Pendergrass (03:45):
And how long has Missouri been doing this? Do we know anything about how it has impacted the size of the prison population?

Doug Burris (03:53):
That’s a fantastic question. It’s been in play for about five years now. What has happened is the population of both the prisons in Missouri and the people on supervision has decreased, but the crime rates have not gone up. The same thing has held in Texas, which has done it for just a little bit longer than Missouri. So following the science really does work. And it’s at a considerable expense. It’s about thirty thousand dollars to house someone in a Missouri prison, and in a federal prison it’s over forty-two thousand dollars. It might be cheaper to send these people to college than to send them to jail or prison. And of course there might be more good done too, because there have been all kinds of studies showing that people who get an education or vocational training have drastically lower recidivism rates. That’s what we really need to be focusing on, and not the grandmother I talked about earlier.

Susan Pendergrass (04:58):
Well, it seems to me that a lot of states, including red states, are moving toward the idea of just building more and bigger prisons and locking everybody up, because if you want to show that you really care about crime, you demonstrate that you are ready to lock everybody up. But that’s not effective or efficient, right?

Doug Burris (05:21):
No, that’s exactly right. And unfortunately we’re seeing that in our neighboring state of Arkansas, where they’re constructing a new prison expected to cost one billion dollars to open the doors. One billion dollars. And then to operate it, if their annual rate of housing someone in prison equals Missouri’s, it will cost about a hundred million dollars a year to operate. And again, we’re going to have people in there who could be supervised in the community or given opportunities like drug treatment, job training, and education, things that will have people contributing to the tax base rather than taking from it.

Susan Pendergrass (06:03):
How do you convince people that a risk assessment is going to work when they want all the criminals off the streets?

Doug Burris (06:10):
Well, it’s twofold. One is we have to educate people that putting someone in prison is going to cost tens of thousands of dollars every year, and in the end they may come out more angry and less able to adapt to the community. The other thing is to follow the science. Look at what Missouri has done and what Texas has done, where they have lowered the prison population and crime has actually gone down. This is something other states should be following as well. We can’t keep everyone in prison forever. We just can’t afford it. And not only that, but it’s also inhumane. The cost would be astronomical if we start keeping people in prison for low-risk crimes that in some cases have no victims.

Susan Pendergrass (07:10):
A couple of things came up in the last legislative session. Governor Kehoe passed a violent crime clearance rate grant program, but the legislature hasn’t funded it. What are your thoughts on that?

Doug Burris (07:27):
When it comes to violent crime, I’m all in favor of keeping the most violent people in as long as possible and perhaps even for life. The question is where can we find ways to save money with those who aren’t violent? That’s what we really need to be focusing on. When you’re supervising a violent person but you also have nonviolent people on your caseload, it really just doesn’t make sense.

Susan Pendergrass (08:01):
Well, I was just thinking specifically about trying to direct some funds toward clearing crimes, because even though murders are down, clearance rates on murders are still pretty low in St. Louis, in the thirty to forty percent range. I would think that the same people who are interested in locking everybody up would like to clear more of these crimes. If you look at carjackings, most of those go unsolved. Maybe one in ten is cleared. While we focus on risk assessment, which is a great idea, there are other things we could be doing, like working harder to clear the crimes that are committed.

Doug Burris (08:39):
Absolutely. That makes complete and total sense, because when you’re talking about the worst of the worst, they don’t commit one crime and then never do it again. This is an excellent idea for putting resources toward making the community safer.

Susan Pendergrass (08:56):
Another thing that came up in the last legislative session was DNA testing people who are arrested, running their DNA and then disposing of it if they don’t match anything. I don’t think that went anywhere. I know there are a number of bills that have moved through trying to make Missouri a safer place. It wasn’t a really productive legislative session in 2026 in Jefferson City. A lot of things didn’t happen, but things are being attempted. What about St. Louis specifically? Having run the jail in the county, what do you think needs to be done there to improve residents’ feeling of safety?

Doug Burris (09:38):
I think more resources need to be directed at the court level, first of all, and at the investigative level like you talked about. But there are people in jail awaiting trial who have not been found guilty for three to five years. Can you imagine what it would be like to be in a place where you don’t see the sun for three to five years? You don’t feel the sun on your face or the hug of a loved one. I saw some of those cases where people were headed to trial and after three to five years the case just goes away. I think we need to really focus on giving the courts resources, and that includes both prosecutors and public defenders. Public defenders have some of the highest caseloads in the nation here in Missouri. If someone is innocent or can be dealt with quickly and given a path to become a productive citizen, that’s what we really should be focusing on.

Susan Pendergrass (10:37):
What about the bail system? Does that need reforming?

Doug Burris (10:41):
Yes, I really think so. That’s one of the things some other states have done that has shown incredible results: using a risk assessment at bail. The federal system does that currently, and I think it’s still underutilized. There are things that can be done with that risk assessment in terms of supervision strategies, but I think the judge needs to know the absolute risk of that person and what can be done to address it when making a decision on bail.

Susan Pendergrass (11:14):
Can’t we put more people on monitoring? I hate to suggest everyone gets an ankle monitor, but can’t we monitor more people while they’re awaiting trial rather than having to house and feed them?

Doug Burris (11:31):
Yes, absolutely. That’s an area that needs to be expanded. In the St. Louis County jail, for example, which is the largest jail in Missouri, there are three hundred people in custody right now who are low risk. We’re spending about a hundred and twenty dollars a day to keep them in jail, potentially for years. Low-risk people, if you follow the science, can typically be supervised in the community.

Susan Pendergrass (12:06):
So do you think that if we were to implement all of these reforms, do a risk assessment on every person charged, only lock up the violent criminals, and let people await their trial at home, that St. Louis would feel more safe or less safe?

Doug Burris (12:07):
Well, I think with proper supervision you’d have to do it right. You just can’t let everyone out. Utilizing the risk assessment would really be the key, because someone may be charged with a low-risk crime this time, but they could be on parole for a prior murder or rape or something along those lines. That’s why you really need to look at the risk assessment to determine the appropriate strategies for releasing people.

Susan Pendergrass (12:42):
Yeah. This just seems to be a growing sector of our economy and a growing slice of the budget pie. Missouri has budget problems. We’re putting so much money toward this idea of reducing crime, and for some reason people still just don’t want to walk to their car alone at night. I know there’s a lot of general public disorder in St. Louis, graffiti, homelessness, panhandlers, that also contribute to it. I wish I could understand a reasonable, cost-effective approach to

Doug Burris (13:26):
Yes.

Susan Pendergrass (13:37):
improving those conditions, because I know other cities have and I believe St. Louis can do it, but we have this reputation of being a crime-ridden city, and I think that’s so unfortunate.

Doug Burris (13:47):
Right. I completely agree with you. The truth is the answer isn’t to lock everybody up. The United States has the second highest rate of incarceration on the planet, only behind North Korea. The Department of Justice reports that if incarceration rates remain the same, one out of every fifteen adults in the United States will serve a prison term. One out of every fifteen. And that’s a prison term for a felony conviction, not a jail term for a DUI or a bad check. The costs are astronomical: thirty thousand dollars a year to house someone in a Missouri prison, paid for by the taxpayers. There have been proven strategies for getting people in and out of the criminal justice system. Ninety-three percent of those who remain employed on supervision successfully complete supervision. Those who remain unemployed throughout their supervision have a more than fifty percent failure rate. Getting people a decent job where they can care for others and find meaning is really one of the keys to lowering crime.

Susan Pendergrass (14:45):
Yeah. And there are public-private partnerships, and partnerships through religious organizations and other programs that have been shown to work, if we would free them up.

Doug Burris (15:13):
That is so true. Chuck Colson’s old organization, Prison Fellowship, is one of the best with the programs they offer in prisons and to people when they get out. It has proven, particularly in Iowa, to show drastic reductions in recidivism.

Susan Pendergrass (15:25):
Wow, that’s great. So I’m surprised to hear that Missouri has led the way on prison populations. I thought there was consideration about building a new prison, but I believe it’s not happening. Is that right?

Doug Burris (15:55):
Yes, that’s exactly right. Our prison population has actually decreased in the last few years.

Susan Pendergrass (16:03):
Wow, that’s really surprising to me. But good to hear. So what are you looking for the governor or the state legislature to do in the coming years?

Doug Burris (16:12):
I think they should build on the reforms that have already been proven to be successful. The one thing you mentioned that I think is frankly brilliant is the idea of working to close open violent crime cases, because on the violent cases, the chances are it’s not one crime they committed and then they go to work the next day and never commit another crime. I think that would be something fantastic for the state legislature to do.

Susan Pendergrass (16:37):
And at the federal level, what are you hoping to see done?

Doug Burris (16:46):
The Safer Supervision Act, as I mentioned before, is actually a bipartisan act, but it’s being led by the right right now. The conservatives are the ones who have introduced it into Congress. The Department of Justice is in favor of it. It would make the assessments we talked about more prominent, and it would also give people incentives to do things right, like getting a college education or a good-paying job and paying off restitution, where they can get off supervision earlier. That makes complete sense. But also, almost everyone convicted of a federal crime now is given supervision, like the grandmother I mentioned earlier who cashed her dead husband’s Social Security checks after he passed. This would allow for a more

Susan Pendergrass (17:33):
Mm-hmm.

Doug Burris (17:42):
thorough assessment at the time of sentencing, for the judge to not put people on supervision who don’t need it. That would clear up resources so more time could be spent on the people who really need to be supervised, as opposed to those who don’t.

Susan Pendergrass (18:01):
Yeah. A lot of the sentencing reform we hear about involves mandatory minimums, which force judges into incarcerating people whether they want to or not. I assume that’s not something you would support.

Doug Burris (18:16):
No. I worked in the federal system for twenty-three years and saw the damage that mandatory minimums have done. For instance, with crack cases, I saw a judge sentence someone who was selling five grams of crack. A gram is equal to about a sugar packet you put into your coffee, and five grams carried a mandatory five years. And then you would have people with no mandatory minimums who robbed a bank and did a shooting receive lower sentences than drug cases. Thankfully there were two reductions in the crack mandatory minimums, applied retroactively. Over 23,000 people had a resentencing, and when they were released, they did not offend at higher levels than those who served their full terms. That was money well saved. The judge has a better idea on sentencing someone when they have all the facts of the case before them, rather than relying on a statistical report done ten years prior that says, because he was convicted of this crime, he gets this sentence.

Susan Pendergrass (19:17):
Yeah. Right. Well, I’m relatively new to this area, but I think it’s all pretty fascinating. We struggle enough to get people to live in our cities, and if they don’t feel safe, that’s not going to help. I look forward to learning more about this area of policy and following more closely what Missouri and St. Louis specifically are doing. I would like to have you come back and talk about it again when there are real policies being considered, because it’s not going away and there’s a lot to learn.

Doug Burris (20:11):
Well, I appreciate it. I enjoyed my forty-year career in the criminal justice system, and hopefully I’ll be the only guy you’ve ever met who has been in more prisons than John Gotti.

Susan Pendergrass (20:16):
Hopefully. Thank you so much, Doug. I really appreciate it.

Doug Burris (20:27):
Thank you, Susan. It was a real honor.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post Risk, Reform, and Public Safety in Missouri with Doug Burris appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

One of the most common mistakes in public policy is assuming that because one event follows another, the first event must have caused the second. Crime declines after a new program is launched, so the program gets credit. Crime rises after a policy change, so the policy gets blamed. Often, the evidence for either conclusion amounts to little more than timing.

The KSHB story quotes Jackson County Prosecutor Melesa Johnson, who said she believes SAVE KC is playing “a real role in the success that we are seeing.” Perhaps it is. The problem is that belief is not evidence.

Violence rises and falls for many reasons: gang conflicts, police deployment, prosecution decisions, demographics, economic conditions, and the churn of individual offenders. A before-and-after comparison cannot isolate any one cause.

That is why researchers do not determine whether a program works by simply comparing crime rates before and after implementation. They look for evidence that the intervention itself produced measurable changes that would not otherwise have occurred. Jackson County’s COMBAT program has long suffered from this same problem: public claims of success without rigorous evaluation.

To its credit, SAVE KC has been careful to acknowledge on its website that multiple factors influence violence trends; it does not claim sole responsibility for recent declines. That’s a welcome departure from what we’ve seen before. But public officials are already drawing connections between the program and declining violence. That may ultimately prove justified. But Kansas City has heard similar claims before.

The Kansas City No Violence Alliance (KC NoVA) offers a warning. KC NoVA was once praised as an innovative violent-crime strategy. But a U.S. Department of Justice review found no statistically significant effect on homicides, group-member homicides, or aggravated assaults after two years.

In 2014, city leaders were celebrating the lowest number of homicides since 1972. Public officials were quick to claim credit. “We’re making progress,” proclaimed then-Mayor Sly James, citing targeted police work, community engagement, and anti-crime initiatives for the decline. But after homicides continued to rise in subsequent years, Mayor James’s confidence disappeared.

The lesson is not that violence-reduction initiatives never work. The lesson is that confidence should follow evidence, not precede it.

Rather than asking whether a new program coincides with lower crime, reporters should ask what evidence exists that the program caused the decline. Has an independent evaluation been conducted? Are outcomes being measured against comparable groups? What metrics are being tracked? How will success be defined? What would constitute failure?

Lower homicide numbers are worth celebrating. But celebration is not evaluation. Before officials claim victory, and before reporters repeat the claim, Kansas City deserves evidence that the program worked.

The post Crime Is Down in Kansas City. That Doesn’t Prove SAVE KC Worked appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Having both Jackson County and Kansas City build their own new local jail is ludicrous. The Jackson County jail is going to cost $301 million (at least). There was discussion of sharing facilities and some resources (such as food service) but now Kansas City is moving ahead with its own facility at a to-be-determined cost.

In the “up-is-down” government universe, the county’s jail contractor told the city council that:

J.E. Dunn, the construction company working on the new county jail, told city council last week that a shared jail would cost more in the long run, because the city would have to pay for services like food and laundry.

Will Kansas City not have to pay for food or laundry at the new facility they are going to build by themselves? Because I don’t think that is going to be a very appetizing or ambrosial jail without food or laundry.

Local governments sharing jails can absolutely work to save tax money and still provide the necessary safety and justice functions jails are there for. Regional jails are common in Virginia, and the U.S. Justice Department released a very favorable report on this practice a while back.

I don’t know who or what to blame here. Contractors running amok and running the show? Political disputes between the two bodies? Quietly disruptive employees who actively oppose service sharing and cost savings because they reduce the number of government jobs? One local elected official is putting the blame squarely on the latter, and I commend him for his blunt comments:

Jackson County Legislator Manny Abarca IV said it’s ridiculous the city and county couldn’t work out an agreement. “It’s a waste of taxpayer dollars to build two facilities that are naturally gonna have similar shared services that we could’ve combined,” he said. “As a taxpayer I’m very upset that this is the outcome.”

Abarca said it seemed like city and county staffers stalled on the project, “long enough to make this impossible to move forward.”

I am delighted that both Kansas City and Jackson County have all of this extra tax money to throw around. Now I don’t have to take the city seriously when it says it can’t afford to operate without an earnings tax.

The post Kansas City and Jackson County Do Two Things Twice appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Speaking of the restoration of the centuries-old Bourbon monarchy — following the massively convulsive interlude of 22 years between French Revolution and Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1814 — Talleyrand quipped, “They [the Bourbons] have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.”

On a smaller scale, the same judgment applies to the lessons learned (or studiously ignored) in a lengthy report released last week into the “underlying issues” behind the riots and looting that erupted in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson (pop. 21,200) following the shooting death of a young black man by a white police officer on Aug. 9, 2014.

Commissioned by Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon, the report is long on liberal pieties and dogma, including the advocacy of some policies that will only worsen existing problems, but short of practical suggestions for improving economic or social conditions in a close-in, big-city suburb that went from predominantly white to predominantly black in the space of two decades.

For example, the Ferguson Commission calls for expanded job opportunities for black youth. Who can argue with that? As the commissioners point out, for blacks aged 16 to 19, the unemployment rate (nationally) is 30.1 percent, compared with 15.5 percent for whites in the same age group. But then the report endorses calls for almost doubling the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

The adverse impact of a dramatic increase in the minimum wage on teenagers looking for their first jobs should be clear to anyone who stops to think about it. If a business is forced to pay $15 an hour to a worker whose true value to the enterprise is, say, $8 an hour, that amounts to a hidden tax of $7 an hour, or 87.5 percent, on the employment of that person — a tax that does not apply to people making, say, $20 or $30 an hour. Naturally, such a tax would encourage employers to invest in automation and concentrate their hiring on more skilled and experienced workers. As Milton Friedman put it, “The minimum wage law is most properly described as a law saying that employers must discriminate against people who have low skills.”

The commissioners call for concerted efforts to “enhance college access and affordability” through expanded scholarships and other means, but they ignore the biggest problem: poor test scores and a lack of readiness for college. In the Normandy school district — Michael Brown’s alma mater — 93 percent of students who took the standard college entrance examination scored below the national average. Normandy students taking the ACT test had an average score of 16 —not high enough to gain admittance to most four-year state institutions. It isn’t funding that is keeping these students from going to college. It is their abysmal K-12 preparation.

Predictably, the Ferguson Commission urges the state to invest in a universal pre-K program and move the compulsory education age down to 5 from 7. This would become a new (and hugely expensive) entitlement, while adding another layer onto K-12 schools that are not meeting the needs of low-income, African-American students (who make up 80 percent of Ferguson-Florissant students and more than 96 percent of students in nearby Normandy). How is expanding a broken system going to help anyone?

In its 198 pages, the Ferguson Commission Report calls for the expansion of a broad mix of other programs at multiple levels of government — ranging from food stamps and public transit to Medicaid and housing assistance — and it recommends a panoply of new programs to raise the awareness of police officers, teachers, and other public officials of the danger of unconscious or unintentional racial bias.

“In the 2011-12 school year,” the report notes, “14.3 percent of black elementary school students in Missouri were suspended, compared to 1.8 percent of white students.” It then adds, “Research suggests that some of the discipline gap may be attributed to teacher bias, which predisposes them to expect less of minority students and to discipline them more frequently and more harshly.”

However, the report makes no attempt to assess, or discuss, what part of “the discipline gap” — if any — may be due to other reasons — including the high incidence of low-income black children growing up in single-parent homes, with no live-in, working fathers.

Among the 189 “calls to action” contained in the report, one of the more startling recommendations is the complete elimination of all school suspensions and expulsions for disruptive behavior from kindergarten through third grade.

At the outset of the report, the commissioners give themselves a broad pass in describing their work as “a study of underlying issues — not an investigation of an incident.” They write:

This report is not in any way an investigation of what happened between Michael Brown Jr. and Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson on August 9, 2014, nor is it an investigation of the response to the uprising that followed. Other bodies have been responsible for those investigations.

For the record, it should be noted that Officer Wilson was twice cleared of charges of any wrong-doing in the death of Brown: First, by the Saint Louis County grand jury’s decision not to bring murder or manslaughter charges against him, and second, in an 86-page report by the U.S. Justice Department in early March which supported that decision.

Over the past 12 months, numerous newspaper and magazine articles have called attention to the widespread misuse of local police and courts in Saint Louis County (including Ferguson) as de facto tax collection agencies — imposing heavy fines and fees for minor traffic violations and other municipal code infractions while often jailing people for failure to pay tickets.

The Ferguson Commission report rightly condemns such practices (as did the U.S. Justice Department in a separate investigation of Ferguson Police Department procedures). In July, Gov. Nixon signed a bill into law that greatly limits the extent to which municipalities can rely on fines and fees to fund themselves.

On balance, however, the Ferguson Commission fails in its stated purpose of “outlining a (new) path to racial equity.” For the most part, it is a compendium of tried-and-failed liberal policy recommendations.

The post The Liberal Solution To Ferguson, Mo? More Liberalism appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The essence of the dispute is that Tesla, uniquely among U.S. car companies, does not use middlemen (dealerships) to sell its cars. MADA, which represents those middlemen, wants it to be illegal for a car company to directly sell its vehicles to consumers. They claim it already is illegal, under the Missouri Motor Vehicle Franchise laws. But the Missouri Department of Revenue disagrees, claiming the laws are only applicable to manufacturers that have dealerships in the state and are not designed to enshrine dealerships as the only method of selling cars.

Along with their legal and legislature maneuvering, MADA is publicizing why Missouri should create more regulations to enshrine the dealership model as the only way to sell cars. They argue that without car dealerships the state’s economy would suffer and that consumers need the type of long-term car care that only they, and not the manufacturer, can provide.

Without a doubt, using car dealerships as a sales and maintenance unit has many advantages for manufacturers and consumers. After all, it became the dominant mode of selling cars for a reason. However, it is not an intrinsically superior way to buy and sell a car and certainly should not be afforded new legal protection.

For example, according to a report from the Department of Justice, dealerships can raise the costs of selling cars. Experiences from General Motors sales internationally have shown that manufacturer-direct sales can lower the cost of a car by 8.6 percent. Furthermore, consumers may prefer manufacturer-direct sales over the uncertainty of haggling with car dealers, if they are given the choice. One poll conducted in the United States found that half of respondents would prefer to buy from the manufacturer even if they were not offered a lower price.

MADA’s efforts would take that choice away. They claim that buying a car is an important financial decision and that dealers provide the long-term care customers need. But there is no shortage of ways consumers could choose to service their vehicles if they buy directly from Tesla, including agreements with auto-repair shops. Car buyers are no less capable of looking after their assets than homebuyers, who somehow manage to purchase and maintain houses without house dealerships.

As for the economy as a whole, protecting a certain way of selling cars is no way to increase jobs or increase competitiveness. Business models change constantly and create new opportunities and products even as they replace older ones. That sentiment underlined the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) criticism of Missouri’s legally entrenched franchise system. They stated, “[C]onsumers are the ones best situated to choose for themselves both the cars they want to buy and how they want to buy them.” That may not always be to the benefit of car dealers, but it’s good economics and good for the state.

The post Don’t Ban Tesla to Protect Middlemen appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

However, MADA’s claims hold little merit. The Motor Vehicle Franchise Law bans manufacturer-direct sales for franchisors (meaning those with franchises in the state). Tesla does not use the franchise model to sell its cars, and hence is not banned from direct sales. And this is not a loophole. The Franchise Law was designed as a series of protections to prevent large car companies from undercutting their own franchisees. It was not written to enshrine the independent car dealerships as the only method to sell cars in the state.

That is an important distinction, because whether or not Missourians believe car companies need to be legally prohibited from cannibalizing their own marketing and sales outlets, there is no economic justification banning a manufacturer-direct car sales model. As I wrote in a recent op-ed:

. . . vehicle distribution through dealerships can be costly to the consumer. The 2009 Department of Justice paper “Economic Effects of State Bans on Direct Manufacturer Sales to Car Buyers” reported that as much as 30 percent of the cost of a new car is due to auto distribution. Enshrining the car dealership model in law has limited the ability of car manufacturers to both reduce inventory costs and increase customization, practices common in other markets. In Brazil, where GM can engage in direct sales, cost savings from order to delivery averaged 8.6 percent through direct sales.

Car buyers . . . might prefer directly buying from manufacturers for lower prices, customization, or simply to avoid bargaining at a dealership. A J.D. Power and Associates poll found that half of Americans profess a desire to buy manufacturer-direct, even if the prices are equivalent.

While that does not mean the dealership model would or should disappear, the government should not stop Tesla or any other car company from trying something different. That freedom to innovate is essential for a competitive market.

The post Don’t Ban Tesla, Let It Compete appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The last time I bought a MacBook I made the purchase from an electronic goods store, but I could have bought it from one of Apple’s retail locations. In fact, millions of Americans purchase products directly from manufacturers rather than through a local storefront under independent ownership. Should Missouri pass a law barring Apple from directly selling computers? Such a prohibition would strike many people as an abridgement of freedom of choice, but that sort of policy is exactly the approach some lawmakers want when it comes to selling cars.

In Missouri, like other states, it is illegal for any car manufacturer with franchises to sell directly to the public. Dealerships fought for that regulation, implemented in the 1980s, under the argument that they needed to be protected from predator car companies.

Tesla, a new electric car company that has no dealerships, is selling cars directly to Missourians. Instead of welcoming a new business model to the state, car dealers and politicians like Mike Kehoe (himself a former dealership owner) want to ban direct-manufacturer car sales entirely.

Supporters of direct sales bans claim dealerships just want a level playing field, and that Tesla is getting special treatment. They claim, as all middlemen have, that their position is necessary, that allowing direct competition from manufacturers could allow car companies to destroy the dealership model. That would be bad for Missourians, they assert, because dealerships protect consumers and provide competitive markets. Having many dealers supposedly creates competition, leading to the lowest possible price for consumers.

In reality, vehicle distribution through dealerships can be costly to the consumer. The 2009 Department of Justice paper “Economic Effects of State Bans on Direct Manufacturer Sales to Car Buyers” reported that as much as 30 percent of the cost of a new car is due to auto distribution. Enshrining the car dealership model in law has limited the ability of car manufacturers to both reduce inventory costs and increase customization, practices common in other markets. In Brazil, where GM can engage in direct sales, cost savings from order to delivery averaged 8.6 percent through direct sales.

Car buyers in Missouri, and in America, might prefer directly buying from manufacturers for lower prices, customization, or simply to avoid bargaining at a dealership. A J.D. Power and Associates poll found that half of Americans profess a desire to buy manufacturer-direct, even if the prices are equivalent. If dealerships cannot lure customers the way they operate now, why should Missourians be forced to buy their new cars only from them?

Allowing manufacturer-direct car purchases does not necessarily mean the death of dealerships, as long as they can be of service to both buyers and car companies. From the manufacturer perspective, dealerships allow the company to devolve responsibility for advertising, selling, financing, and maintaining a car, which allows the company to focus on car production.

I bought my MacBook from a store, but I wouldn’t force that choice on others in the market. The next time you purchase a computer, you will have the choice to buy from many types of stores or even directly from a manufacturer—business models that meet the needs of customers in different ways.

That’s a vibrant marketplace, and there is no reason the same type of market cannot exist for cars in Missouri. Indeed, if the playing field between Tesla and other car companies needs to be leveled, we should do so by scrapping the ban on direct car sales. There is no reason manufacturer-direct sales cannot exist side-by-side with competitive dealerships.

Joseph Miller is a policy researcher at the Show-Me Institute.

The post Give Tesla and Missourians a Fair Deal appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

A 2004 report by the U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission found that CON programs “pose serious anticompetitive risks that usually outweigh their purported economic benefits.” So far, I have written about how CON regulations can limit access to care and have been shown to not effectively control costs. CON regulations have the potential to stifle competition and grant existing hospitals monopolies over certain regions. Some existing hospitals may even attempt to use these regulations to prevent competition from entering the market.

How does this play out in Missouri?

In the past, any time a new hospital wanted to open up in Missouri, it had to apply for a CON – irrespective of its size and cost. A revision to Missouri’s CON rules changed the criteria for review from every new hospital to every new hospital whose cost is at least $1 million.

In April 2010, Patients First Community Hospital expressed its intent to build a small hospital in Saint Louis County that did not meet the new threshold for certificate of need review. Shortly thereafter, a regional rival, St. John’s Mercy Health System, filed a lawsuit against the Missouri Health Facilities Review Committee and Patients First. St. John’s challenged the legitimacy of the new $1 million amendment and construction of the new hospital. In 2012, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that the new criteria for review was perfectly legal, thus giving Patient’s First the green light for the project.

Despite the ruling against St. John’s, this is an excellent example of a hospital using the legal system in an attempt to stomp out the competition, all under the pretense of CON regulation. It took about two years for Patients First to have its plan approved. These sorts of delays can deprive patients of new, much-needed medical facilities.

The state should not allow such an environment to exist.

The post Show Me Better (Part 4): Certificate Of Need And Market Power appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

On the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that it is suing to block the Louisiana school voucher program. The Louisiana program provides mostly poor, minority children with access to private schools. The DOJ claims the voucher program may be in violation of desegregation orders, essentially claiming that the voucher program is hurting desegregation efforts. This is an empirical claim, but the claim is false.

Using student-level data, Anna Egalite and Jonathan Mills, Doctoral Academy fellows at the University of Arkansas, examined the impact of each student’s “switch” on the racial composition of each school in a recent article in Education Next. They concluded:

Our analysis of the Louisiana Scholarship Program reveals that the vouchers used by the subset of recipients for whom information is available have supported public-school desegregation efforts. By leaving schools in which their racial group was overrepresented relative to the surrounding communities, voucher users have improved integration in Louisiana public schools….Based on this evidence, we conclude that the LSP is unlikely to have harmed desegregation efforts in Louisiana. To the contrary, the statewide school voucher program appears to have brought greater integration to Louisiana’s public schools.

In response to the DOJ lawsuit, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal remarked, the “Department of Justice is attempting to use old rules designed to prevent discrimination against minority children to try and keep these children trapped in failing schools.” Egalite’s and Mills’ research demonstrates that those “old rules” most likely are not being violated, because the data actually show that the voucher program is improving racial integration.

The post Louisiana Voucher Program Improves Desegregation Efforts appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The controversy in the Boone County case involved several issues: The bonding agent lacked a license to work in Boone County (not a big deal, in my opinion); the bonding company itself did not have the assets to guarantee such a large bond (a very big deal, obviously); and the unusual structure through which the family of the accused agreed to pay the bonding company (I have no idea whether this is a big deal). To sum it up quickly, the court rejected the bond after the accused was released, and he was taken back into custody at a higher bond. Because the suspect is accused of a heinous crime — murder — I have no problem with the higher bond requirement.

The Times article focuses on the big scheme of things in the bonding world, and contains a number of quotes that could have been written by somebody at a free-market think tank. Here are a couple:

The system costs taxpayers nothing, [Professional Bail Agents of the United States spokesman Bill] Kreins said, and it is exceptionally effective at ensuring that defendants appear for court. […]

“Here’s what everybody forgets,” [bail bondsman Wayne Spath] said. “The taxpayers have to pay for these programs. Why should they pay for them? Why should they? When we can provide the same service for free.”

Sounds good to me. But this is the key question: Does the system work? From the article (emphasis added, for all quotations throughout this post):

According to the Justice Department and academic studies, the clients of commercial bail bond agencies are more likely to appear for court in the first place and more likely to be captured if they flee than those released under other forms of supervision.

Why does the system work?

That may be because bail bond companies have financial incentives and choose their clients carefully.

Wait a minute … are they saying that incentives work? There are, of course, critics of the industry:

“The bail bond system is rife with corruption,” said Joshua Marquis, the district attorney in Clatsop County, Ore. Since bond companies do not compete on price, they have every incentive to collude with lawyers, the police, jail
officials and even judges to make sure that bail is high and that
attractive clients are funneled to them.

Mr. Kreins, the industry spokesman, acknowledged scandals in Illinois, where “basically all the agents were in collusion with the judges,” and in Louisiana, where sheriffs were also in the mix.

The first part is a legitimate critique, if it’s true. While the amount of bail set should not be a matter of debate or competition, the fee percent charged by various bail bondsmen can certainly fluctuate, unless governments regulate that fee as part of the licensing requirements? If that is the reason agents don’t compete on price, it’s the regulation that should be gotten rid of — not the industry. As for the second critique of corruption in Illinois and Louisiana, those two states have corruption even in the kindergarten industry, along with everything else. Corruption in those two states (plus Rhode Island) is a problem with the entire system, not just one industry.

Since the critique comes from Oregon, what does the article say has happened since Oregon banned the bail bond industry?

Mr. Marquis, the Oregon prosecutor, said doing away with commercial bonds had affected the justice system in a negative way as well. “The fact of the matter is,” he said, “that in states like Oregon the failure-to-appear rate has skyrocketed.”

What does the rest of the world do (except for the Philippines, which uses our system, certainly a leftover from colonialism)? Please trust that the inserted sarcastic comments in brackets below are mine, and were not in the original article:

Some simply keep defendants in jail until trial [oh, that’s a much better solution for someone who is poor and genuinely innocent]. Others ask defendants to promise to turn up for trial [’cause a criminal would’nt lie]. Some make failure to appear a separate crime [I am sure someone facing 20 years is very worried about the addition of a failure-to-appear charge]. Some impose strict conditions on release, like reporting to the police frequently [I can’t see any possible way around that, like stopping at the police station while on your way to the bus station]. Some make defendants liable for a given sum should they fail to appear but do not collect it up front [see above comment on separate crime]. Others require a deposit in cash from the defendant, family members or friends, which is returned when the defendant appears. [Because taking money from a poor family is preferable to taking it from a for-profit business? What the hell?]

There are very good, historical reasons why our system evolved as it did. The Times article is outstanding, and it goes through those reasons. But it only hints at the fact that our bail system — like our overall criminal system — is much more favorable than the systems in the rest of the world toward people accused, but not yet convicted, of a crime. The rights to counsel, the presumption of innocence, the bail system itself, and many more aspects are all indicative of a system that favors the rights of the people, until those rights are abrogated by a conviction in court — not the other way around.

Plus, Charles Grodin was lying when he said he wasn’t able to fly. That part was funny.

The post Stokes Posts Bail appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The NSA, President Bush, and the other intel agencies argue that attaining this private communications information is crucial to preventing another terrorist attack, and that the process of “data mining” has worked to catch terrorists and prevent such an attack by finding terrorist cells based on their communication patterns. They further assert that such “wiretapping” actions are justified under the Patriot Act and the broad authority granted the president as commander-in-chief to prosecute the ongoing “war on terror” in whatever manor he finds most suitable.

The issue here is efficacy. If the procedure of “data mining” works, and the associated right to privacy being surrendered is made up for with real added security and effectiveness against terrorists, and the information being gathered is being used solely for that purpose, then it’s reasonable to surrender some privacy right in exchange for that security. Commissioner Steve Gaw sums it up nicely:

“We have tried to be sensitive on not delving into issues that could cause a security issue,” Gaw said. “At the same time, if we give up rights and freedom in order to be secure, what have we gained? And what have we lost?”

Our friends over that the Cato Institute have published an interesting paper calling into question the very efficacy of “data mining,” or the systematic combing through of billions of bits of information for communications patterns likely to be attributable to terrorist activities. They essentially argue that the process is flawed, largely ineffective, and that the benefits it conveys are not worth the tradeoff in security gains. I am no expert on anything, much less computer science or national security, but I do know that I’m not a terrorist,  nor is there any reason for the gov’t to assume that I am. Until they have probable cause to believe otherwise, my phone records should remain nobody’s business but my own. If my telephone company has circumvented that right to privacy I deserve to know, and will most assuredly switch to another provider more respectful of my civil liberties.

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