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Gun deaths among children and teens have soared – but there are ways to reverse the trend



Cable locks can help prevent against accidental shootings. 

Rookman / Getty Images

THE CONVERSATION

Published: October 16, 2023 

Firearm injuries are now the leading cause of death among U.S. children and teens following a huge decadelong rise.

Analyses published on Oct. 5, 2023, by a research team in Boston found an 87% increase in firearm-involved fatalities among Americans under the age of 18 from 2011 to 2021.

Such an increase is obviously very concerning. But as scholars of adolescent health and firearm violence, we know there are many evidence-based steps that elected officials, health care professionals, community leaders, school administrators and parents can implement to help reverse this trend.

Trends in firearm deaths

The latest study is based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This data also provides information on whether firearm deaths were the result of homicide, suicide or unintentional shootings.

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We have seen increases over time in all three areas. The steepest increase has been in the rate of firearm homicides, which doubled over the decade to 2021, reaching 2.1 deaths per 100,000 children and teens, or about 1,500 fatalities annually. Firearm-involved suicides have also increased steadily to 1.1 deaths per 100,000 children and teens in 2021.

Whereas the proportion of youth firearm-involved deaths due to unintentional shootings is typically highest during childhood, the share of gun deaths due to suicide peaks in adolescence.

In 2021, homicide was the most common form of firearm-involved deaths in almost every age group under the age of 18, with an exception of 12- and 13-year-olds, in which suicide was the leading cause of firearm fatalities.

Racial disparities in firearm deaths, which have been present for multiple generations, are also expanding, research shows.

Black children and teens are now dying from firearms at around 4.5 times the rate of their white peers.

This disparity is the consequence of structural factors, including the effects of systemic racism and economic disinvestment within many communities. Addressing racial disparities in firearm-involved deaths will require supporting communities and disrupting inequity by addressing long-term underfunding in Black communities and punitive policymaking.

More research is needed to fully understand why firearm-involved deaths are universally increasing across homicide, suicide and unintentional deaths. The COVID-19 pandemic and its exacerbation of social inequities and vulnerabilities likely explain some of these increases.

How to reduce gun fatalities

Reducing young people’s access to unsecured and loaded firearms can prevent firearm-involved deaths across all intents — including suicide, homicide and unintentional shootings.

Gun-owning parents can help by storing all firearms in a secure manner – such as in a locked gun safe or with a trigger or cable lock – and unloaded so they are not accessible to children or teens within the household.

Data shows that only one-third of firearm-owning households with teens in the U.S. currently store all their firearms unloaded and locked.

In addition to locking household firearms, parents should consider storing a firearm away from the home, such as in a gun shop or shooting range, or temporarily transferring ownership to a family member if they have a teen experiencing a mental health crisis.

Families, including those that don’t own firearms, should also consider how firearms are stored in homes where their children or teens may spend time, such as a grandparent’s or neighbor’s house.

Community-based and clinical programs that provide counseling on the importance of locked storage and provide free devices are effective in improving the ways people store their firearms. In addition, researchers have found that states with child access prevention laws, which impose criminal liability on adults for negligently stored firearms, are associated with lower rates of child and teen firearm deaths.

Reducing the number of young people who carry and use firearms in risky ways is another key step to prevent firearm deaths among children and teens. Existing hospital- and community-based prevention services support this work by identifying and enrolling youth at risk in programs that reduce violence involvement, the carrying of firearms and risky firearm behaviors.

While researchers are currently testing such programs to understand how well they work, early findings suggest that the most promising programs include a combination of reducing risky behaviors – through, for example, nonviolent conflict resolution; enhancing youth engagement in pro-social activities and with positive mentors; and supporting youth mental health.

Support structures

In addition to ongoing focused prevention efforts, hospital-, school- and community-based interventions that support youth in advancing social, emotional, mental, physical and financial health can reduce the risk of firearm deaths. Such measures include both creating opportunities for children and teens – building playgrounds, establishing youth programs and providing access to the arts and green spaces – and community-level improvements, such as improved public transportation, economic opportunities, environmental safety conditions and affordable and quality housing. Allocating resources toward these initiatives is an investment in every community member’s safety.

Over the past decade, we have seen an 87% increase in firearm-involved fatalities among children and teens in the United States. But we also have the strategies and tools to stop and reverse this troubling trend.

Authors

Rebeccah Sokol
Assistant Professor of Social Work, University of Michigan

Marc A. Zimmerman
Professor of Public Health, University of Michigan

Patrick Carter
Co-Director, Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention; Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine, University of Michigan
Disclosure statement

Rebeccah Sokol receives funding from the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to conduct research to prevent violence.

Marc A. Zimmerman receives funding from NIH, CDC, BJA, & foundations.

Patrick Carter receives funding from NIH and CDC for conducting firearm-related prevention research.

A reflexive act of military revenge burdened the US − and may do the same for Israel

Israeli tanks gather near the border with the Gaza Strip on Oct. 13, 2023. 

Aris Messinis/AFP via Getty Images

THE CONVERSATION

Published: October 16, 2023

In the wake of the shocking invasion of southern Israel by Hamas militants on Oct. 7, 2023, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to destroy Hamas.

“We are fighting a cruel enemy, worse than ISIS,” Netanyahu proclaimed four days after the invasion, comparing Hamas with the Islamic State group, which was largely defeated by U.S., Iraqi and Kurdish forces in 2017.

On that same day, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant went further, stating, “We will wipe this thing called Hamas, ISIS-Gaza, off the face of the earth. It will cease to exist.” They were strong words, issued in the wake of the horrific terrorist attack that killed more than 1,300 Israelis and culminated in the kidnapping of more than 150 people, including several Americans.

And in a telling comparison, Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Gilad Erdan compared the attack with the toppling of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon in 2001, declaring, “This is Israel’s 9/11.”

As a scholar of military history, I believe the comparison is interesting and revealing. In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks by al-Qaida on the United States, President George W. Bush made a similar expansive pledge, declaring, “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaida, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”

The U.S. response to 9/11 included the American invasion of Afghanistan in league with the Afghan United Front, the so-called Northern Alliance. The immediate goals were to force the Taliban from power and destroy al-Qaida. Very little thought or resources were put into what happened after those goals were attained. In his 2010 memoir, “Decision Points,” former President Bush recalled a meeting of the war cabinet in late September 2001, when he asked the assemblage, “‘So who’s going to run the country (Afghanistan)?’ There was silence.”

Wars that are based on revenge can be effective in punishing an enemy, but they can also create a power vacuum that sparks a long, deadly conflict that fails to deliver sustainable stability. That’s what happened in Afghanistan, and that is what could happen in Gaza.

A war of weak results

The U.S. invasion toppled the Taliban from power by the end of 2001, but the war did not end. An interim administration headed by Hamid Karzai took power as an Afghan council of leaders, called a loya jirga, fashioned a new constitution for the country.

Nongovernmental and international relief organizations began to deliver humanitarian aid and reconstruction support, but their efforts were uncoordinated. U.S. trainers began creating a new Afghan National Army, but lack of funding, insufficient volunteers and inadequate facilities hampered the effort.

The period between 2002 and 2006 was the best opportunity to create a resilient Afghan state with enough security forces to hold its own against a resurgent Taliban. Because of a lack of focus, inadequate resources and poor strategy, however, the United States and its allies squandered that opportunity.

As a result, the Taliban was able to reconstitute its forces and return to the fight. As the insurgency gained momentum, the United States and its NATO allies increased their troop levels, but they could not overcome the weakness of the Kabul government and the lack of adequate numbers of trained Afghan security forces.

Despite a surge of forces to Afghanistan during the first two years of the Obama administration and the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden, the Taliban remained undefeated. As Western forces largely departed the country by the end of 2014, Afghan forces took the lead in security operations, but their numbers and competence proved insufficient to stem the Taliban tide.

Negotiations between the United States and the Taliban went nowhere, as Taliban leaders realized they could seize by force what they could not gain at the bargaining table. The Taliban entry into Kabul in August 2021 merely put an exclamation point on a campaign the United States had lost many years before.
The U.S. exit from Afghanistan in July and August 2021 was chaotic and dangerous, and it left the Afghan state at the mercy of the Taliban.

A goal that’s hard to achieve

As Israel pursues its response to the Hamas attack, the Israeli government would be well advised to remember the past two decades of often indecisive warfare conducted by both the United States and Israel against insurgent and terrorist groups.

The invasion of Afghanistan ultimately failed because U.S. policymakers did not think through the end state of the campaign as they exacted revenge for the 9/11 attacks. An Israeli invasion of Gaza could well lead to an indecisive quagmire if the political goal is not considered ahead of time.

Israel has invaded Gaza twice, in 2009 and 2014, but quickly withdrew its ground forces once Israeli leaders calculated they had reestablished deterrence. This strategy – called by Israeli leaders “mowing the grass,” with periodic punitive strikes against Hamas – has proven to be a failure. The newly declared goal of destroying Hamas as a military force is far more difficult than that.

As four U.S. presidential administrations discovered in Afghanistan, creating stability in the aftermath of conflict is far more difficult than toppling a weak regime in the first place.

The only successful conflict against a terrorist group in the past two decades, against the Islamic State group between 2014 and 2017, ended with both Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq reduced to rubble and thousands of men, women and children consigned to detention camps.

Israel has the capacity to level Gaza and round up segments of the population, but that may not be wise. Doing so might serve the immediate impulse of exacting revenge on its enemies, but Israel would likely receive massive international condemnation from creating a desert in Gaza and calling it peace, and thus forgo the moral high ground it claims in the wake of the Hamas attacks.

Author

Peter Mansoor
Professor of History, General Raymond E. Mason Jr. Chair in Military History, The Ohio State University

7 activists in Norway meet with the king to discuss a wind farm that is on land used by Sami herders


Seven activists representing the Sami Indigenous people arrive at the Royal Castle in Oslo for a meeting with Norway’s King Harald and Crown Prince Haakon, in Oslo, Monday, Oct. 16, 2023. Seven of the activists who repeatedly have demonstrated against a wind farm in in central Norway they say hinders the rights of the Sami Indigenous people to raise reindeer, were Monday received by the Norwegian king. At the center of the dispute are the 151 turbines of Europe’s largest onshore wind farm. 

(Gorm Kallestad/NTB Scanpix via AP)

 October 16, 2023

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — Seven of the activists who repeatedly have demonstrated against a wind farm in central Norway that they say hinders the rights of the Sami Indigenous people to raise reindeer met with the Norwegian king on Monday and his son who is heir to the throne.

”It was a very strong moment for us — emotionally charged,” activist Ella Marie Hætta Isaksen told the VG newspaper after the meeting with King Harald and Crown Prince Haakon at the royal palace in Oslo. “We experienced not only being believed, but a human meeting with someone who really meets people with compassion and sympathy.”

”It makes a world of difference in the face of this state, which is so strong and arrogant and difficult to talk to,” she told the daily.

Before the meeting, another activist told Norwegian news agency NTB that “we have nowhere else to go.”


Norway activists press on with their protest against wind farm on land used by herders

Norway activists renew protest against wind farm on land used by herders

“We hope his majesty will listen to us and remind the responsible state of its responsibility,” Elle Nystad said.

At the center of the dispute are the 151 turbines of Europe’s largest onshore wind farm, which is located in Norway’s Fosen district, about 450 kilometers (280 miles) north of the capital, Oslo. The activists say a transition to green energy shouldn’t come at the expense of the rights of Indigenous people.

They have protested several times since the Supreme Court of Norway ruled in October 2021 that the construction of the turbines had violated the rights of the Sami, who have used the land for reindeer for centuries.

The activists, many dressed in traditional colorful garments, have sat down inside parliament, outside the building in Oslo of the state-owned company that operates 80 of the wind turbines at Fosen, outside the offices of Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre and the Ministry of Petroleum and Energy for four days in February. They also have temporarily blocked the entrances to 10 ministries.

They had asked for the meeting with the Norway’s monarch, who has a ceremonial role as the country’s head of state. They said they know that the king has no political power. But they have said that “we just want to be listened to.”

The palace confirmed the meeting took place and “they presented their view” to the monarch and his son.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for SAMI 

Archie’s dark side

America’s most wholesome comic wanted to remake the comics world in its image.
A new exhibit at Olin Library, “Domesticated Pulp: Archie Publications and the Comics Code,” which runs through December 17, includes ephemera from the Archie offices, including editorial policy, printer’s proofs and original artwork.

By Rosalind Early 

 October 16, 2023

Fans of Riverdale, the CW TV show based on the Archie Comics series, might be surprised to learn that in the comic books Archie Andrews never went to juvie and Veronica Lodge never ordered a hit on her father. Archie and the gang were actually a byword for wholesome, an idealized portrait of small-town American youth where the teens faced problems like making a mess when tie-dying clothes, getting up early to run charity races and making fun of Archie’s old jalopy.

“You get a vision of teenage life that has wacky hijinks but none of the angst and loathing actual teenagers experience,” says D.B. Dowd, a nationally known illustrator and professor of art in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.

Archie publisher John Goldwater led a self-censorship organization — the Comics Code Authority — homogenizing comics for decades. 

(Courtesy Dowd Illustration Research Archive)

Introduced in 1941, Archie was as popular as it was long-lasting, but Archie’s impact on comics goes further than its popularity.

Archie publisher John Goldwater led a self-censorship organization — the Comics Code Authority (CCA), which set the decency standards for pulp publications — that would homogenize comics for decades. Without the CCA’s seal of approval, comic book publishers were essentially cut off from wholesale distribution.

Goldwater and Archie’s impact is the subject of a new exhibit in the Newman Tower of Collections and Exploration at Olin Library, “Domesticated Pulp: Archie Publications and the Comics Code.” The exhibit, which runs through December 17, includes ephemera from the Archie offices, including editorial policy, printer’s proofs, original artwork from illustrators Bob Montana and Don DeCarlo, and more.

The Archie Comic Collection, which includes more than 100 pieces of original works of art, was amassed by notable cartoonist, author and collector Craig Yoe and acquired by the University Libraries in 2020. The collection is just one of many housed in the Dowd Illustration Research Archive, which aims to preserve the history of illustration and visual culture.

“It was a trove of stuff,” says Dowd, who curated the exhibit along with Andrea Degener, interim curator of the Dowd Illustration Research Archive. But the exhibit is more than just Archie, it tells the history of pulp publishing in the United States and how the Comics Code Authority re-shaped the industry.

“The Archie Comic Collection provides a unique study of how Goldwater leveraged the code to promote the long-term success of the Riverdale universe,” Degener says. “Before the advent of Archie, Goldwater published titles like Close-Up and Dash, which were essentially pin-up magazines categorized in the men’s humor genre. But he seemed to sense an opportunity with the popularity of Archie and began branding Archie Comics as wholesome and appropriate for readers of all ages well before the code was even established.”

Pulp publishing, the rise of an industry

Kids liked pulp publications too, and some of the content was alarming to experts. In the November 1953 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal in “What Parents Don’t Know About Comic Books,” psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, MD, posited that comics could cause juvenile delinquency. (Courtesy Dowd Illustration Research Archive)

The 1930s saw the rise of “what we think of as ‘pulp’ publishing,” although cheap printing for the working class dates to the 19th century. Printed on inexpensive paper were humor comics like in the newspaper, but also detective comics, crime and horror comics, girlie magazines with pin-ups and, later, superheroes.

“There’s lots of experimentation,” Dowd says. The work was “aimed at a working-class audience, and a lot of immigrants read pulp magazines.” But kids liked pulp a lot, too, and some of the content was alarming to experts, most prominently Fredric Wertham, a psychiatrist, who wrote Seduction of the Innocent that claimed comics caused juvenile delinquency.

Wertham’s outcry led to Senate hearings in 1954. William Gaines, the publisher of Entertaining Comics (EC), was advised against taking the stand. His company had titles like The Haunt of Fear, Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror. The covers often featured scantily clad women in danger — the exact comic books Wertham was critiquing. One of EC’s covers, “Crime SuspenStories Vol 1 No. 22,” featured a man holding a bloody hatchet in one hand and the implicitly decapitated head of a blonde woman in the other. Her body is on the floor at his feet. Gaines was asked if he thought this was appropriate.

“Yes sir, I do, for the cover of a horror comic,” Gaines replied. “A cover in bad taste, for example, might be defined as holding the head a little higher so that the neck could be seen dripping blood from it.”


“For the most part, the Comics Code just eliminated a whole bunch of comics. A variation of the code — one that would have rated the comics for various age groups — would have been preferable.”Rebecca Wanzo

The public was scandalized. By the fall of 1954, publishers formed the Comics Magazine Association of America and the Comics Code Authority to burnish their industry’s reputation and keep the government from censoring them. As a result, comics had to adhere to certain decency standards: no sex before marriage, no pin-ups, no comics with “horror,” “terror” or “weird” in the title, etc. This meant EC had to end most of its lines.

“For the most part, the Comics Code just eliminated a whole bunch of comics,” says Rebecca Wanzo, chair and professor of women, gender and sexuality studies in Arts & Sciences and author of The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging. “A variation of the code — one that would have rated the comics for various age groups — would have been preferable.”
The rise of the Comics Code Authority

Behind the censorship was Goldwater, who served as president of the Comics Magazine Association of America for 25 years. He had the market cornered on wholesome: Archie had proved so popular after being introduced in a Pep comic that the company, formerly MLJ Comics, renamed itself Archie Comics. And the editorial policy was clear, as a memo in the exhibit from the company explains: “Archie Andrews is a positive force; he provides wholesome, non-violent entertainment in the role of the clean-cut, ‘typical American teenager’ we wish all teenagers were.” (Emphasis theirs.)

“Archie is very much Americana. It was an answer to quiet the adult critiques that comics were the cause of rebellious youth culture,” Degener says. “For several decades, Archie Comics was the only publication with a teenage cast that could speak to both a younger and slightly older demographic. The problems faced by the cast were very cyclical and simple; the predicament was always resolved by the end of the comic and in a way that satisfied both adult and youth readership.”

Goldwater skirted his own rules, particularly with regard to pin-ups. Katy Keene, a spinoff in the Archie Comics world, was the worst offender, always striking a pin-up pose. The excuse: Keene was supposed to be modeling fashions that had been suggested by readers. (Courtesy Dowd Illustration Research Archive)

Goldwater exported his attitude about “typical” Americans to the rest of the industry. “The fixation on the typical was highly normative and majoritarian: Racial minorities were invisible, heterosexuality unquestioned, and gender roles strictly enforced,” a placard in the exhibit points out. “Critics were already speaking out against the ‘conformism’ of the 1950s, and John Goldwater is poorly remembered by the insurgents who created alternative comix in the 1960s.”

Plus, Dowd argues, Goldwater skirted his own rules, particularly with regard to pin-ups. Betty and Veronica both regularly modeled fashions in pin-up-like poses. Katy Keene, a spinoff in the Archie Comics world, was the worst offender, always striking a pin-up pose as she pulled on her stockings or powdered her nose. The excuse for all this leg? Keene was supposed to be modeling fashions that had been suggested by readers.

“Katy Keene is an interesting study because her character sets the precedent for Betty and Veronica’s famous fashion specials and one-on-one dialogue with readers,” Degener says. “Katy Keene was glamorous, and she was always followed around by her younger sister, Sis, who aspired to be like Katy. Katy even had her own fan club.”

“The term pin-up refers to a whole woman shown in an illustration in a cheese-cakey way,” Dowd says. “Betty, Veronica and Katy Keene are like pulp vixens. There’s never any sexual content, but there’s certainly a sense of buried sexuality that’s in this wholesome package. That’s why we called the exhibition ‘domesticated pulp,’ because that’s what Archie did.”

Censorship, then and today

Today, school and public libraries face scrutiny about the books they carry. Across the country, Republicans have introduced laws or regulations to prevent kids from accessing “illicit material” that is not that illicit, such as Fun Home, a graphic memoir about author Alison Bechdel’s family and struggles with her sexuality.

But Wertham was not a conservative. “Wertham was a pretty progressive psychiatrist,” Wanzo says. “He was interested in the problems of racism being represented in comics and things like that.” (This problem may have been exacerbated by the CCA, which once took issue with a Black man being depicted as an astronaut, for instance, despite that not being against the Comics Code.)

Still, the excuse for the censorship, protecting the youth, is a common refrain. “Young people are going to find ways to access things they want to access,” Wanzo says. “But there’s a tension between what the state should do in terms of regulating content and what providers should do.” She points out that parents should be able to regulate what their child sees, but not be able to eliminate legal content that others may want to see.

“The desire to control what young people encounter in the world — and the danger that they will think thoughts that aren’t ours — is deeply unattractive.”D.B. Dowd

“There are ways to talk about content,” she says.

Most publishers stopped using the Comics Code Authority by 2001, and they’d been pushing against the CCA for decades with comics like Watchmen.

One of the earliest publishers to push against the CCA was Gaines. He eventually left the pulp industry and started MAD magazine to circumvent the CCA, and for decades, the groundbreaking publication didn’t even have ads so it could be fully independent. (Learn more about MAD at another comics-focused exhibit: “MADness Unleashed: The World of MAD Magazine” in Olin Library on Level 1 of the Kagan Grand Staircase. The exhibit runs through January 28.)

Despite essentially fostering MAD magazine, very little redeems the CCA in the eyes of most comics and illustration fans. “The desire to control what young people encounter in the world — and the danger that they will think thoughts that aren’t ours — is deeply unattractive,” Dowd says.

Canada forges agreement to help Philippines track illegal fishing vessels using satellite technology


 Fishermen work on nets as they spend time on the shores of their coastal village in Cavite province, south of Manila, Philippines, on May 7, 2020. Canada will help the Philippines detect illegal fishing with its satellite surveillance system under a new agreement, Philippine officials said Monday, Oct. 16, 2023. 

(AP Photo/Aaron Favila, File)

Updated October 16, 2023


MANILA, Philippines (AP) — Canada will help the Philippines detect illegal fishing with its satellite surveillance system under a new agreement, Philippine officials said Monday.

The arrangement gives the National Coast Watch Center of the Philippines access to data from Canada’s “Dark Vessel Detection System,” which harnesses satellite technology to track illegal fishermen even if they switch off their location transmitting devices, the Department of Foreign Affairs in Manila said.

Illegal and unregulated fishing is a problem across the Philippine archipelago, including in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The Philippine coast guard has accused Chinese coast guard ships and fishing vessels of switching off their location-transmitting devices to avoid detection and surveillance.

Canadian and Philippine officials signed the agreement last week on the sidelines of talks held in the Canadian capital of Ottawa to discuss ways to strengthen relations between the two countries, the Foreign Affairs Department said without providing other details.

China claims virtually the entire South China Sea on historical grounds but this was invalidated by an arbitration tribunal ruling in 2016. China refused to participate in the arbitration sought by the Philippines, rejected the ruling as a sham and continues to defy it.

Aside from China and the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei have had overlapping territorial claims in the South China Sea, which straddles one of the world’s busiest sea lanes.

Canada is among several Western countries that have recognized the 2016 arbitration ruling and called on countries, including China, to respect it.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

AI Doesn’t Live in the Cloud

Hype around the technology’s potential masks real-world liabilities.

Kyle Hiebert
October 16, 2023
Auto bodies are seen on the assembly line at a new factory of Chery Automobile, September 21, 2023, in Qingdao, China. (Photo via REUTERS)


The release of ChatGPT last year marked an inflection point in humanity’s relationship with artificial intelligence (AI). In less than 12 months, it has spurred an AI arms race among tech firms and rendered the technology a mainstream phenomenon. The emergent role of AI in war, its impact on business and politics, and its permeation of legal systems, education, art and more are suddenly subjects of intense debate. Meanwhile, mountains of capital are being marshalled toward its evolution and application. According to multiple recent estimates, the rush to deploy AI into nearly every sector of society could expand its global market size from US$200 billion currently to US$1.8 trillion by 2030.

Yet relatively little attention is being paid to the inputs needed to sustain this big bang in AI. While it may resemble an alien form of intelligence capable of creating new ideas and perhaps someday even novel forms of culture, the technology’s growth and development are not siloed off within the nebulous ether of the digital realm. For all its wondrous capabilities, AI is still bound by the limitations of the real world. The data that fuels it must be painstakingly labelled by humans. The infrastructure it relies on requires energy and water to function and skilled labour to build and operate. The chips that power its neural networks are in increasingly short supply.

If we don’t recognize and account for these factors now in AI’s adolescence, they will manifest new forms of risk and volatility — not only for governments but also for those business models based on a presumption of limitless growth in computational power.
Keeping the Lights On

The industrial-sized data centres used to run and train algorithms around the clock require staggering amounts of water to keep from overheating. According to its 2023 environmental report, Google alone used 5.6 billion gallons, or more than 20 billion litres, of fresh water in 2022 — 20 percent more than in 2021, an increase researchers attribute to the search engine giant’s heightened focus on AI development. Based on the United Nations’ definition of water rights, that’s the same amount needed to provide potable water for one year to 2.7 million people in the developing world. Microsoft’s water use likewise spiked by 34 percent between 2021 and 2022. The company used 6.4 billion litres of water last year — more than 2,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools’ worth.

Calculations by a team of researchers from the University of California, Riverside, suggest that infrastructure supporting ChatGPT consumes at least 500 millilitres of water every time the bot responds to more than a handful of user prompts. While creating GPT-4, the latest large language model underpinning ChatGPT, the program’s Silicon Valley owner, OpenAI, drew water from two rivers near its data centre west of Des Moines, Iowa. According to the Associated Press, local communities were not aware this was happening. “It’s a recipe for disaster,” a member of the grassroots organization Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement later told tech news site Futurism. “ChatGPT is not a necessity for human life, and yet we are literally taking water to feed a computer.”

Elsewhere, Meta’s new US$1 billion-plus data centre and corporate campus being built on 400 acres on the outskirts of Mesa, Arizona, is touted by the company as a cutting-edge facility that will diligently recycle waste water and be landscaped to capture rainwater. It will still consume 6.4 million litres of water per day when in operation. This in a place, Arizona, that has become so dry after years of drought that its government allocated US$1 billion of its 2022 budget to finding replacement sources of water. Officials tasked with mitigating a water crisis in one of America’s fastest-growing states are now proposing an extreme solution: build a desalination plant in a Mexican coastal town along the Sea of Cortez, some 320 kilometres away, and pipe water north to meet Arizona’s needs. Doing so would require clear-cutting a path through the heart of a UNESCO biosphere reserve.

The same data centres are also voracious consumers of energy. The world’s 10 leading data centre companies operate more than 1,250 such facilities, based on research by market analysis firm Dgtl Infra. Topping that list are the commercial cloud-computing service divisions of Amazon, Microsoft and Google. In fourth place sits Meta, which needs its own data centres simply to process the massive amounts of information generated by its various platforms. According to the IEA (International Energy Agency), the combined electricity demand last year of the roughly 8,000 data centres globally — at least a third of them in the United States — was between 240 and 340 terawatt-hours. If it were a single country consuming that larger amount, it would rank eleventh in the world, ahead of Saudi Arabia and behind France. A country consuming the lower amount would rank nineteenth, slightly ahead of Australia.

To their credit, all big tech firms have boosted their water and energy efficiency in recent years by pivoting to green power sources and investing in water restoration projects. However, Microsoft’s 2022 sustainability report highlights a key dynamic — the company’s water usage rose in lockstep with its year-on-year business growth during that same period. Incremental steps toward sustainability by tech providers, which take time, risk being outstripped by the swelling tidal wave of demand for their AI-powered products.

IBM’s latest Global AI Adoption Index indicates more than three-quarters of businesses worldwide have either already integrated AI into their systems or are exploring its potential. A related proliferation of new networked devices will also lead to an explosion in demand for data-processing capacity. A study published in 2021 by an offshoot of the journal Nature says the number of devices online is expected to increase from 18.4 billion in 2018 to more than 29 billion by the end of the decade. Consulting firm McKinsey forecasts that data centre demand in the United States alone will grow 10 percent per year through to 2030.

Such exponential increases in AI use will motivate developers and tech firms to create bigger and better machine-learning products to capture greater market share. Implicit in this quest will be the necessity of companies’ acquiring ever greater amounts of energy, land and water. To be clear, the growth of the AI industry will not suddenly render it a leading cause of carbon emissions or water consumption. Even if it grows by an order of magnitude, its environmental impact will be vastly less than other sectors, such as manufacturing, construction, transportation and agriculture.

But in a hotter, more water-stressed world, it will spark localized conflict with communities adjacent to sites selected by companies for new data centres. Officials will court backlash for offering tax incentives and water drawing rights to lucrative tech firms whose facilities create few permanent jobs. Such facilities will also place significant burden on local electricity grids, driving up energy prices for nearby consumers. Projects in progress also risk becoming ensnared in campaigns and lawsuits by activist groups.

This may become especially true in the United States, which is draining its aquifers at a spectacular rate nationwide. However, it’s a dynamic that will likely appear elsewhere too. President Emmanuel Macron has advocated turning France into a continental tech hub by cultivating a “start-up nation.” And yet Paris is already contending with the outbreak of violent demonstrations at reservoir sites in western parts of the country ring-fenced for irrigation.

One possible outcome is that new data centres will start to be more frequently located in undemocratic jurisdictions; authoritarian regimes hungry for tax revenue can streamline the building process by silencing local opposition through coercion or force. Should this happen — placing users’ data beyond the reach of democratic oversight — it would compound the emerging race to the bottom on AI safety.



Some may argue that advancements in the technology are bound to reach a point where these tasks can be automated. But that could risk the very integrity of machine-learning models themselves.

The Human Factor

Another element deeply intertwined with AI’s development is labour. Underpinning the surface-level brilliance of various generative programs are countless hours spent by an invisible legion of human workers. These are the people who label and codify the data inputs that make machine-learning models work as intended, by ensuring data is properly formatted, annotated and corrected for bias. This function is critical — particularly when developers are using a raw data set purchased from data vendors. It also involves tedious, time-intensive and often harrowing work.

Rather than employ their own staff for data labelling, developers mostly crowdsource freelance contractors through platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk. Another method is to outsource to third-party agencies that offer employment in “digital sweatshops” in low-wage regions abroad — places such as the Philippines, Venezuela and others.

An investigation by TIME magazine released this past January details how, beginning in November 2021, OpenAI used a Bay Area recruitment company to pay workers in Kenya less than US$2 per hour to read through reams of graphic accounts of murder, suicide, sexual abuse and other horrific activities. The purpose was to reformat these texts for use in training ChatGPT’s internal content moderation algorithm. A contractor in India doing similar labelling of harmful video content for Facebook’s AI-powered moderator function recently told The Guardian that each day of work, “I log into a torture chamber.” In May, 150 workers in Kenya whose data-labelling work supported the development of AI used by Facebook, TikTok and ChatGPT — while leaving them claiming post-traumatic stress disorder — formed a union to push for better compensation and mental health supports.

By contrast, American contract workers doing data labelling are paid relatively well. At US$15 an hour, they earn above the minimum wage in all but California, Massachusetts and Washington state. However, as AI becomes ubiquitous, developers will need to enlist more data labellers — whose compensation could rise based on increased demand — meaning unprofitable start-ups will burn through investors’ cash even faster. Absent strong regulations, unsafe products could be rushed to market out of desperation to cover losses.

Some may argue that advancements in the technology are bound to reach a point where these tasks can be automated. But that could risk the very integrity of machine-learning models themselves. A dangerous feedback loop has been identified where algorithms crash and AI systems become unstable after cannibalizing other machine-generated inputs. And fixing the issue seems like a remote prospect; the world’s leading AI scientists admit that even they can’t comprehend the inner workings of their creations. The upshot is that human labour will remain an indispensable component for AI’s development for a very long time to come.
More Roadblocks Ahead

Yet the AI industry is already grappling with a more immediate real-world concern: serious bottlenecks in the global supply of semiconductors. It’s an intractable issue with no end in sight because of the sheer complexity of the chip-making process. Companies may be pouring billions of dollars into the race to build new factories by taking advantage of lavish government subsidies on offer in Asia, Europe and the United States. But ramping up chip supply will require much more than money and overwhelming demand.

This is perhaps best illustrated by the Biden administration’s US$52 billion CHIPS and Science Act — a bipartisan strategy to secure America’s chip supply by investing in onshore production. In order to succeed, it must essentially outcompete the administration’s parallel landmark infrastructure and green energy investment plans for a limited number of construction workers. Complicating things further are the demands of organized labour. The new chip-making plants will also need to overcome a deficit of around 100,000 skilled workers to operate at full capacity. Being trained in an applicable field, such as electrical engineering, right now requires an American worker to forgo fully taking advantage of a historically strong, high-paying labour market to undertake several years of education at great individual expense. On top of that, Dutch firm ASML is the only company in the world capable of designing and producing the lithography machines needed to produce the most advanced chips.

In the meantime, for start-ups to get their hands on the semiconductors they desire — such as Nvidia’s prized graphic-processing units — means having to endure long wait times, overspend, leverage personal relationships or pool resources. Even OpenAI itself has reportedly had to set usage limits on the products it is selling to clients because it is unable to acquire enough chips to increase its behind-the-scenes computing capacity.

Looming in the background is the costly legal reckoning awaiting developers of generative AI programs around copyright infringement. Then there is mounting public distrust of the technology itself. A survey by the PEW Research Center in August indicates that 52 percent of adults in the United States say they now feel more concerned than excited about the role of AI in daily life — up from 37 percent in 2021.

It’s clear that AI is a transformative technology that will profoundly change the world — in ways for the better and for the worse. Even so, this will not happen in isolation. AI’s future will still be determined by how it interacts with the real world, including the complex and unpredictable consequences of human agency.


The opinions expressed in this article/multimedia are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of CIGI or its Board of Directors.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kyle Hiebert

Kyle Hiebert is a researcher and analyst formerly based in Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa, as deputy editor of the Africa Conflict Monitor.

USA

Why Pay Inequality Could Grow in Coming Years

Research from Professor Melanie Wallskog shows newer firms pay workers differently than older firms

OCTOBER 11, 2023

Finance

Pay policies of firms entering the market in recent years are showing a pattern that might forecast more inequality in the future. Research shows newer firms have higher levels of pay inequality than older firms.

Melanie Wallskog, an assistant professor of finance at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, examined payroll data from the U.S. Census Bureau and found that firms that entered the market after the 2010s are more spread out in how they pay their average workers than firms that entered in the past. And since pay-setting policies rarely change during the life cycle of companies, these findings might also imply a rise in earning inequality among workers in the coming decades.

In a live session on Fuqua’s LinkedIn page, Wallskog said U.S. pay inequality has slowly, but consistently, risen during the last five decades. Today, she said, if you randomly took 100 workers in the U.S. economy, the 10th highest worker would earn about 13 times higher than the 10th lowest worker. For context, it was nine times higher in the 1980s.

Wallskog said “70% of that rise in inequality” is the difference in pay in different firms, versus differences internally in organizations.

“It’s not the difference between how much CEOs make versus how much their firm’s average worker makes that explains most of the recent rise in inequality,” she said.

Wallskog also observed that the number of businesses entering the market every year has decreased in the last 25 years, and as a result each year a growing share of workers are employed in older firms. This means that as the most recent firms—those who pay their average workers differently—age and take up the largest share of employment, “pay inequality will likely rise in the future,” she said.

Wallskog has several reasons that might explain why newer firms are more unequal. Newer entrants might pay similar workers differently, she said, or they might hire different workers. They might also specialize in technologies and processes that result in lower pay.

“Changing technologies affect how labor is used and therefore how labor is remunerated,” she said.

Newer firms also specialize in whom they hire, she said. For example, some firms might only hire college-educated workers, which Wallskog says produces more pay inequality across firms.

Other macrotrends affecting inequality include the practice of outsourcing workers, the changing of norms about sharing profits with workers, and the decline in unionization, Wallskog said.

“However, I don't think that unionization decline is driving the vast majority of this trend,” she said. “The rise in pay inequality among newer entrants is common across all different types of sectors, not just sectors where unions have declined.”

All these macrotrends, Wallskog said, shape whom the newer firms hire and how they pay them.

“Firms fundamentally choose their compensation structure and the types of workers they hire when they enter,” she said. “And will stick to them over time, because managerial decisions tend to be sticky.”

Inequality matters, Wallskog said, and has important consequences on general welfare—especially in the U.S., where workers’ benefits are tied to their employment status and “things like health insurance, flexibility, or parental leave tend to be better at higher paying firms,” she said.

Regulation could play a role in reducing pay inequality, she said. “For example, a policy that limits offshoring and forces companies to hire more American workers would likely reduce inequality,” she said.

Wallskog believes regulation might be more effective on the benefits side of compensation.

“People getting increasingly cut off from firms that don't have good health care might be an argument for universal health coverage,” she said.

Amazon, OneWeb slowly stalk SpaceX for piece of Pentagon SATCOM pie

Amazon recently launched the first two prototypes for its Project Kuiper; OneWeb now has all 634 satellites it needs to provide global internet access.

By THERESA HITCHENSON

October 16, 2023


A ULA Atlas V rocket carrying the Protoflight mission for Amazon’s Project Kuiper lifts off from Space Launch Complex-41 at 2:06 p.m. EDT on October 6. (Photo by United Launch Alliance)

WASHINGTON — After a year of delays, Amazon on Oct. 6 launched the first two prototype satellites in its planned Project Kuiper broadband constellation — a network under development by billionaire-owner Jeff Bezos to compete against rival Elon Musk’s Starlink mega-constellation.

The question is: Can Amazon, or any other industry player, actually catch up, as SpaceX continues to expand and strengthen its near-market lock on space-based internet services with nearly 5,000 Starlink satellites already on orbit?

Beyond global civilian internet connectivity, the answer will be of acute importance to the Defense Department as it seeks to broaden its use of commercial space capabilities, especially as some officials and members of Congress increasingly fret about the wisdom of relying too heavily on the infamously mercurial Musk.

While Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall last month said he isn’t concerned about working with SpaceX, which also is a primary supplier of launch services for military satellites, due to DoD’s contracting practices, Musk’s actions over the past year regarding Starlink’s role in the Ukraine war have raised eyebrows elsewhere in Washington. For example, Sen. Jack Reed, R-R.I., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, in a Sept. 14 announcement said that the committee is “aggressively probing” Musk’s alleged actions in Ukraine and vowed “to engage” with DoD to ensure US national security interests are protected. (Musk has defended his company’s work in Ukraine.)

One way to do that, of course, would be to find other commercial partners for low-latency, high-volume satellite communications required to do things like stream video and support data-dense military battle management networks —if such an alternative exists.


“That’s the big thing here, and not just for DoD,” said Secure World Foundation’s Brian Weeden. “Can another company overcome the same engineering and technical hurdles to build out a constellation of thousands of satellites that will create competition with Starlink?”

Veteran telecoms industry consultant Tim Farrar agreed, noting that even if other constellations such as Kuiper and OneWeb get up and can provide similar global access to Starlink, it could be hard for new entrants to convince customers to sign up.

“They’re going to be held to a higher standard because Starlink’s already in the market with a global service that offers high bandwidth,” he said.

Project Kuiper: A Long Road Ahead

Amazon intends to loft a total of 3,236 satellites to provide global connectivity, and under its current license with the Federal Communications Commission is on the hook to have half of them on orbit and working by the end of 2026. In an explainer on Amazon’s website, the company said its “first production satellites are on track for launch in the first half of 2024, to be in beta testing with early commercial customers by the end of 2024.”

The Oct. 6 launch included two prototypes, KuiperSat-1 and KuiperSat-2, that will serve as test-beds for the constellation.

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“This is Amazon’s first time putting satellites into space, and we’re going to learn an incredible amount regardless of how the mission unfolds,” said Rajeev Badyal, Project Kuiper’s vice president of technology in the explainer.

DoD’s Defense Innovation Unit already is looking at Project Kuiper’s potential to be part of a future “hybrid architecture” that links together government and commercial satellite communications networks, under a contract announced last November. DIU is collaborating with the Space Force, the Space Warfighting Analysis Center (SWAC), and Air Force Research Laboratory on the effort, which is interacting with total of eight companies.

But Farrar argues that “it’s going to be quite a few years before [Project Kuiper] have enough satellites to offer a commercial service,” with connectivity to rival Starlink not likely available until 2026 of 2027.
Enter OneWeb

In terms of p-LEO coverage and broadband capacity, Starlink’s biggest competitor currently on the market is OneWeb, recently acquired by European telecoms giant Eutelsat with a special share remaining in the hands of the British government.

OneWeb’s constellation is operating at about 1,200 kilometers above the Earth, where fewer birds are needed to cover the globe than at the approximately 550 kilometer orbit where Starlink is stationed. And rather than looking to sell directly to consumers like Starlink and Project Kuiper, OneWeb is employing a business-to-business model. It sells service packages to distributors, such as its close partner Airbus, which in turn broker deals with users — with an emphasis in the near-term on governments and militaries.

“OneWeb has managed to do it with hundreds of satellites, but they’re at a different altitude and have a different strategy,” Weeden said.

In particular, OneWeb from the get-go has had an specific interest in sales to the US military, via its US arm, OneWeb Technologies, based in Virginia. “OneWeb Technologies was built from the ground floor up to meet or exceed the US DoD requirements,” Kevin Steen, CEO of OneWeb Technologies, told Breaking Defense On Oct. 13. For example, he said, the company’s terminals employ jam proofing and use open standards to allow military users to pair them with outside satellite providers — thus to avoid vendor lock.

OneWeb now has all 634 satellites needed to provide global access on orbit, Charlie Clark, mobility marketing director, told Breaking Defense in an Oct. 6 interview.

While the satellites are now in place, she explained, OneWeb at the moment has yet to expand connectivity outside of Europe and the United States.

“Today, we have commercial service live from the North Pole down to 35 degrees north, which effectively means we cover the majority of the US, Canada, Alaska, Scandinavia and, and all of mainland Europe and the UK, and then the oceans in between. So, we are rolling out our our coverage and by Q1 Next year, we will have global service availability.”

That footprint does mean, however, that OneWeb now can provide connectivity over the Arctic, which is something US Northern Command has been pushing for. It also could augment or provide an alternate to Starlink for the embattled government in Kyiv as it enters its 21st month of fighting to repel Russia’s invading forces.

OneWeb already is a participant in the Space Force’s five-year indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract vehicle launched in July to enable acquisition of services from commercial operators of constellations in low Earth orbit (called p-LEO networks).

The initial set of contracts involved 16 firms, but a Space Force spokesperson told Breaking Defense on Oct. 3 that since summer three more had been added.
Building A Diverse Supplier Base

However, SpaceX for the moment is the only one of those firms to have one an actual tasking order for services from the US military, the Space Force spokesperson said. Bloomberg first reported the Sept. 1 contract, worth $70 million, for services to be provided by SpaceX’s military-oriented twin to Starlink called Starshield. It represents Starshield’s first (public anyway) contract.

The Space Force spokesperson stressed that the service does intend to issue more tasking orders under the contracting vehicle that would likely go to other firms.

“The Commercial Satellite Communications Office (CSCO), as a part of the Commercial Space Office, has received great demand for service under the pLEO IDIQ from services and Combatant Commands. CSCO is gathering requirements and is responsive to customers and will be executing numerous task orders under the pLEO IDIQ,” the spokesperson said.

Farrar, however, noted that the big question will be what more funding actually is available. But despite all the challenges facing potential SpaceX broadband rivals, he said the emergence of new providers is good for DoD and other government customers.

The US government “is going to have an increasing set of choices over time. It’s going to be able to use OneWeb over the next year, and Amazon, at some point within four or five years. That’s very helpful in terms of disciplining Starlink in terms of their demands,” he said.

Clark concurred.

“It’s supplier diversity, isn’t it? You never want to be caught in a situation where you’ve got all your eggs in one basket,” she said.

PRISON NATION U$A

No Release: Parole grant rates have plummeted in most states since the pandemic started

Among the 26 states we surveyed, only 6 saw an increase in parole approval rate, and almost every state held substantially fewer hearings than in years past.

by Emmett Sanders, October 16, 2023

Earlier this year, Alabama’s Board of Pardons and Paroles made headlines when it denied parole to someone who had died ten days prior to their parole hearing. This is just one of many threads in the Alabama parole board’s tapestry of dysfunction. For months, their three-person parole board operated with just two members despite requiring a majority vote to grant parole. It is no wonder that Alabama is on track to have a parole grant rate — the percent of parole petitions approved — of just 7% for 2023. This also comes as studies show racial disparities in parole grant rates are widening: for example, non-white people in NY were released at a rate almost 29% less than their white counterparts in 2022 (up from a difference of around 19% between 2016 and 2021).

With parole board practices so much in the news, we thought it was important to look around the country and evaluate the direction in which state parole boards are moving. We filed dozens of records requests and curated the best research to explore whether state parole boards are helping reduce mass incarceration or whether they are disregarding the hard-learned lessons of the pandemic, when they released even fewer people than before the crisis as people died behind prison walls.


The state of parole

In the 28 states for which we collected 2022 parole approval data, only 7 had grant rates above 50% – Connecticut, Idaho, Nevada, North Dakota, Utah, Vermont, and Wyoming. Wyoming had the highest grant rate of 78%. At the other end of justice’s sliding scale, Alabama (10%) and South Carolina (7%) have the lowest parole approval grant rates in the nation.

To see full information about parole grant rates by year in each state from 2019-2022, see the appendix.

With few exceptions, parole grant rates dropped significantly from 2019 to 2022

In the 26 states for which Prison Policy Initiative was able to track changes in parole approval rates from 2019-2022, only 6 — Connecticut (+29%), Georgia (+17%), Texas (+11%), Hawai’i (+8%), South Dakota (+6%), and Nevada (+1%) — have seen any increase since 2019. In the remaining 20 states from which we received data, parole grant rates have seen either no change or have seen a marked decline, with South Carolina (-80%) and Alabama (-67%) seeing the biggest drop offs in grant rates.

But state parole boards did not only choose to release fewer people. They heard fewer cases as well. With the exceptions of Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Arkansas, parole boards continued to hear significantly fewer total cases in 2022 than they did in 2019. The result is that since 2019, the number of people released through discretionary parole has decreased across the board.

To see full information about the number of parole hearings by year in each state from 2019-2022, see the appendix.

Ironically, South Carolina’s Department of Probation, Parole, and Pardon Services’ website is quick to highlight the money the state has saved by reducing the number of parole revocations over the past decade. Of course, it would be difficult to have more revocations, given that they released 84% fewer people via discretionary parole in 2022 than they did in 2019. South Carolina is far from alone, however. Alaska has reduced the number of people released through discretionary parole by 79% since 2019; Alabama 70% and Maryland by 66%. In fact, with the exception of South Dakota, every state for which data was provided released fewer people through discretionary parole in 2022 than in 2019, with an average overall decline of around 41% fewer people released per state. South Dakota’s increase is also extremely modest – the state released just 62 more people in 2022 than in 2019.



To see full information about the number of people released on parole by year in each state from 2019-2022, see the appendix.
Why are parole boards releasing so few people?

Denial is often effectively the default disposition for parole boards, and the burden of proof is usually on the person who is incarcerated to justify their release. This is problematic, as the board often considers factors that are beyond the applicant’s control, such as the availability of programming or education in the prison, or factors that cannot be changed, such as the nature of the offense for which they were incarcerated. When release rests on these factors, there is very little a person can do to influence the outcome.

Another issue is the general outlook some politicians and parole board members have toward people who are up for parole. State Representative Matt Simpson defended Alabama’s abysmal grant rates, saying “We’ve gotten to a point where the people up for parole are the ones that don’t need to be out; it’s not like it used to be where we had a number of non-violent offenders.” While recent reports have cast doubt on this claim, it still begs the question: how can those with this viewpoint provide a fair hearing to those who come before them? There is nothing fair about a body that decides people’s fates before they ever appear. It’s important to note that the seriousness of an offense is taken into account when a judge first sets a prison sentence. When parole boards solely or exclusively make their release decisions based on the underlying charge, they are continually punishing incarcerated people for a factor they cannot change. Moreover, policies that provide relief only for those with non-violent offenses are simply not impactful enough to address the juggernaut of mass incarceration. And although parole boards are charged with looking at a person’s likelihood of rearrest, they often seem to ignore the fact that people sent to prison for violent charges have the lowest rearrest rate of any group.
Parole Boards are influenced by politics

In 2019, Mississippi had a grant rate of 74% — one of the highest rates in the nation. However, that same year, the parole board made the ethical but unpopular decision to parole a person who had been incarcerated for 30 years. That person had their death sentence commuted on the basis of intellectual disability but the board determined them not to be a threat to public safety. In the aftermath of this decision, Mississippi saw its grant rates freefall 42 percent by 2022. The political outrage at the decision led to increased scrutiny and political pressure which has undermined Mississippi’s presumptive parole system.

Though parole boards are typically thought of as serving a judicial function (i.e., weighing evidence and rendering a judgment that results in freedom or continued incarceration), they are still bureaucratic bodies beholden to political good will. Parole board members are usually appointed by governors and confirmed by legislative hearings, which often makes their selection fundamentally political. More than a third of states with parole boards in the US mandate no qualifications to sit on the board, meaning no actual knowledge of law, prison, the judicial system, mental health, or even basic social dynamics are required to sit on boards that can prevent a person from ever again experiencing life outside prison walls.
Policy efforts to increase release rates are often stalled or undermined

Efforts to restore discretionary parole in Maine, Virginia, and Illinois led by groups like Parole4ME and Parole Illinois have come achingly close to success in recent years. Some states with discretionary parole have begun to implement presumptive parole in an effort to increase fairness and remove subjectivity and political pressure. While presumptive parole is a key strategy to reduce incarceration, in states that have implemented it, the efficacy of this policy is limited by carveouts — exceptions in policies that exclude certain categories of people from relief. Most states with some form of presumptive parole will not apply the presumption to people with certain offenses, those who have received recent disciplinary infractions, or those who haven’t completed relevant rehabilitative programming. As we noted, offense-based carveouts do not have a strong basis in policy, and programming-related carveouts are problematic because programming is neither universal nor guaranteed and can vary immensely from prison to prison. Reports have also shown that Black and Brown people who are incarcerated are more likely to receive disciplinary infractions than their white counterparts, meaning they are more likely to be denied presumptive parole based on this carveout.

Conclusion

Despite the dangers of incarceration in a post-pandemic world and the efforts of many to make the parole system more just, fewer people are receiving parole hearings, and fewer still are released through discretionary parole. In fact, discretionary parole accounted for only a small fraction of total releases from prison in 2021.

Expanding access to discretionary parole won’t by itself end mass incarceration; however, expanding its usage in conjunction with presumptive parole while eliminating undermining carveouts could be a powerful tool for decarceration. Hopefully, a review of parole in 2023 will see incarcerated people given a greater chance to be paroled.

Footnotes

While we sought to collect data from all 34 states with discretionary parole as a primary mechanism of release, not all states make parole board data publicly available and several were not forthcoming with data via records requests. Arkansas has a residency requirement for records requests that prevented submission; Missouri denied having records responsive to our request, which strains credulity; New Hampshire cited the records as exempt. We are awaiting data for Massachusetts, Nebraska, and West Virginia. Kentucky and Idaho provided some information, but were unable to provide statistics for 2019. In the appendix to this briefing, we provide details about each state’s response to our open records requests. ↩


Presumptive parole is a form of non-discretionary parole in which people are automatically released if they meet certain established criteria. ↩


New Jersey’s programming requirement for Administrative Parole Release eligibility (that state’s equivalent of presumptive parole), for instance, includes a provision that people will not be disqualified from APR if programming was unavailable. ↩


Appendix tables

Discretionary Parole Grant Rates by state, 2019-2022




Emmett Sanders is a Policy and Advocacy Associate at the Prison Policy Initiative. (Other articles | Full bio | Contact)