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Crunching the numbers
- This year, lawmakers in nine state legislatures have considered changes to unemployment insurance programs. A new Kentucky law reduces the maximum amount of time a person could receive unemployment benefits from 26 weeks to 12. Legislation in Missouri would reduce the maximum duration for benefits to just eight weeks, down from 20.
- A new investigation from Mississippi Today exposes the role of former Gov. Phil Bryant in the state welfare department’s misuse of at least $77 million in federal funds intended to help the state’s poorest residents.
- Across the country, rents rose 11% last year. The Tampa Bay Times reported that a rent hike at a South Pasadena apartment complex that offers affordable housing to older adults left some of its residents paying more than half of their monthly income on rent.
In local news
- Yesterday, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed into law a bill that criminalizes performing an abortion. Under the law, performing the procedure is a felony with a sentence of up to 10 years in prison and a $100,000 fine. Federal courts have recently blocked similar laws from going into effect in Arkansas and Alabama. (Read more: After a Texas law effectively banned abortions, residents of the Lone Star State have relied on abortion providers in Oklahoma. In Texas, a 26-year-old woman was arrested after receiving a murder charge for allegedly performing a self-induced abortion. Starr County District Attorney Gocha Allen Ramirez dismissed the charge, saying that it wasn’t a criminal matter under Texas law.)
- During Freedom Summer in 1964, Klansmen murdered civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Philadelphia, Mississippi. In The Atlantic, journalist Ko Bragg wrote about two very different versions of the city’s civil rights history. One is detailed during informal, word-of-mouth tours given by a small group of Black natives, and the other omits the Freedom Summer murders entirely. At the Philadelphia-Neshoba County Historical Museum, Bragg found exhibits for musicians Marty Stuart, Otis Rush and Foots Baxstrum and the Neshoba County Fair, while the murders weren’t acknowledged.
- A Los Angeles Times review of about 50 police shootings found that officers frequently delay or don’t provide medical aid to the people who they’ve shot. The Los Angeles Police Department requires officers to assist people with injuries if they can, but officers who didn’t provide aid weren’t punished.
New from BigIfTrue.org
Overcrowding at local jails is a long-standing problem in the United States, but it’s not intractable. This week, I wrote about five things communities and states can do to send fewer people to jail.
Thank you for reading Hard Reset. Get in touch with me here at bryant@bigiftrue.org or 405-990-0988.
– Mollie Bryant
Founder and editor, BigIfTrue.org
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