Fact Sheet: A Blueprint for Reducing Mass Incarceration in America

America has less than 5 percent of the world's population, but nearly 25 percent of its prisoners. Our criminal justice system drives and reinforces deep-seated racial inequity. It disproportionately punishes people of color, and is the greatest civil rights injustice of our time.Politicians, law enforcement, advocates, and economists agree we need to end the era of mass incarceration. The Brennan Center's new report, How Many Americans are Unnecessarily Incarcerated?, conducts an empirical analysis to document how many prisoners are behind bars without a justifiable public safety reason.Mass incarceration exists because our lawmakers created it. Responding to rising crime in the 1980s and 1990s, states and the federal government enacted a series of laws that dramatically increased sentences for many crimes, and created entirely new ones. But today, crime has plummeted, reaching levels not seen since the 1960s. And, mass incarceration was not the cause. In fact, a majority of states reduced their prison populations while cutting crime.This report is the first analysis providing a blueprint for how to safely and significantly cut our prison population. Considering a variety of factors -- including seriousness of the crime, impact on the victim, intent, and risk of recidivism -- we looked at how many people don't need to go to prison in the first place, and how many are there for too long

The Environmental Responsibility of the Regionalizing Electric Utility Industry

In this Article, I will address environmental issues in the context of our rapidly evolving understanding of restructuring. The market for electricity is fast becoming a series of regional marketplaces for wholesale transactions, operating on bid-based systems that move power at the lowest cost. There are plenty of states where power is still delivered as it has been for decades: by bundled service provided by vertically integrated utilities. However, the trend is toward regionalization, where independent entities control the transmission grid and play a major role in determining how power is delivered. These market participants, confusingly, have been known by a number of names and acronyms, though the most recent one is regional transmission organizations ( RTOs ). The trend toward regiona

On Growth and Income Distribution in a Globalizing World

The basic idea explaining the relationship between economic growth and income distribution is the “U- shaped hypothesis” postulated by Simon Kuznets. This can be shown in a dual-economy model with technical progress. Initially, inequality is low, but as labour participation in the modern sector increases, higher wages in this sector tend to increase inequality. However, if enough labour is incorporated in the modern sector, wage inequality begins to diminish. Income inequality continues to worsen between the two sectors, if a new modern economy (e.g. IT-based technical change) is introduced and potential GDP shifts to a new trajectory before the turning point is reached. In a globalised word, the substantial unskilled-labour-saving technical progress puts pressure on wages of unskilled workers (in industrialized countries). Also, globalization may be blamed for leaving many nations and millions of people out from reaping the benefits of globalization. This problem can only be overcome by appropriate reforms of the international economic system.Economic Growth, Income Distribution, Globalization

Characterization of the Mycobiome of the Seagrass, Zostera marina, Reveals Putative Associations With Marine Chytrids.

Seagrasses are globally distributed marine flowering plants that are foundation species in coastal ecosystems. Seagrass beds play essential roles as habitats and hatcheries, in nutrient cycling, and in protecting the coastline from erosion. Although many studies have focused on seagrass ecology, only a limited number have investigated their associated fungi. In terrestrial systems, fungi can have beneficial and detrimental effects on plant fitness. However, not much is known about marine fungi and even less is known about seagrass associated fungi. Here we used culture-independent sequencing of the ribosomal internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region to characterize the taxonomic diversity of fungi associated with the seagrass, Zostera marina. We sampled from two Z. marina beds in Bodega Bay over three time points to investigate fungal diversity within and between plants. Our results indicate that there are many fungal taxa for which a taxonomic assignment cannot be made living on and inside Z. marina leaves, roots and rhizomes and that these plant tissues harbor distinct fungal communities. We also identified differences in the abundances of the orders, Glomerellales, Agaricales and Malasseziales, between seagrass tissues. The most prevalent ITS amplicon sequence variants (ASVs) associated with Z. marina tissues could not initially be confidently assigned to a fungal phylum, but shared significant sequence similarity with Chytridiomycota and Aphelidomycota. To obtain a more definitive taxonomic classification of the most abundant ASV associated with Z. marina leaves, we used PCR with one primer targeting a unique region of this ASV's ITS2 and a second primer targeting fungal 28S rRNA genes to amplify part of the 28S rRNA gene region corresponding to this ASV. Sequencing and phylogenetic analysis of the resulting partial 28S rRNA gene revealed that the organism that this ASV comes from is a member of Novel Clade SW-I in the order Lobulomycetales in the phylum Chytridiomycota. This clade includes known parasites of freshwater diatoms and algae and it is possible this chytrid is directly infecting Z. marina leaf tissues. This work highlights a need for further studies focusing on marine fungi and the potential importance of these understudied communities to the larger seagrass ecosystem

Virtual in situs: Sequencing mRNA from cryo-sliced Drosophila embryos to determine genome-wide spatial patterns of gene expression

Complex spatial and temporal patterns of gene expression underlie embryo differentiation, yet methods do not yet exist for the efficient genome-wide determination of spatial expression patterns during development. In situ imaging of transcripts and proteins is the gold-standard, but it is difficult and time consuming to apply to an entire genome, even when highly automated. Sequencing, in contrast, is fast and genome-wide, but is generally applied to homogenized tissues, thereby discarding spatial information. It is likely that these methods will ultimately converge, and we will be able to sequence RNAs in situ, simultaneously determining their identity and location. As a step along this path, we developed methods to cryosection individual blastoderm stage Drosophila melanogaster embryos along the anterior-posterior axis and sequence the mRNA isolated from each 25 micron slice. The spatial patterns of gene expression we infer closely match patterns previously determined by in situ hybridization and microscopy. We applied this method to generate a genome-wide timecourse of spatial gene expression from shortly after fertilization through gastrulation. We identify numerous genes with spatial patterns that have not yet been described in the several ongoing systematic in situ based projects. This simple experiment demonstrates the potential for combining careful anatomical dissection with high-throughput sequencing to obtain spatially resolved gene expression on a genome-wide scale.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, 7 supplemental figures (available on request from [email protected]

Characterization of the transcriptome, nucleotide sequence polymorphism, and natural selection in the desert adapted mouse Peromyscus eremicus

As a direct result of intense heat and aridity, deserts are thought to be among the most harsh of environments, particularly for their mammalian inhabitants. Given that osmoregulation can be challenging for these animals, with failure resulting in death, strong selection should be observed on genes related to the maintenance of water and solute balance. One such animal, Peromyscus eremicus, is native to the desert regions of the southwest United States and may live its entire life without oral fluid intake. As a first step toward understanding the genetics that underlie this phenotype, we present a characterization of the P. eremicus transcriptome. We assay four tissues (kidney, liver, brain, testes) from a single individual and supplement this with population level renal transcriptome sequencing from 15 additional animals. We identified a set of transcripts undergoing both purifying and balancing selection based on estimates of Tajima’s D. In addition, we used the branch-site test to identify a transcript—Slc2a9, likely related to desert osmoregulation—undergoing enhanced selection in P. eremicus relative to a set of related non-desert rodents