In just four decades, the size of the U.S. state prison population grew by more than 700 percent. By 2008, the number of incarcerated individuals in the United States hit an all-time high, with 1 in 100 adults in either prison or jail and fully 1 in every 31 American adults under some form of correctional jurisdiction (including incarceration, probation, and parole).

Researchers have noted these patterns and trends with alarm. Yet while expansive studies have been conducted on correctional systems in the United States, most of this work begins and ends with a focus on the incarcerated. Much of the early literature either ignores correctional personnel altogether, or paints an overly simplistic picture. While interest in those who work inside American prisons has begun to grow, we still know surprisingly little about what happens to correctional personnel as a function of spending a career inside the prison system.

Like the number of people incarcerated, the ranks of people employed by the U.S. criminal justice system have increased substantially. As of 2003, almost 13 percent of all public employees (and a larger percentage in 15 states and the District of Columbia) worked in the criminal justice sector. Corrections alone accounts for more than 63 percent of state criminal justice employees, with police protection and judicial/legal employees accounting for the other 14 and 22 percent, respectively. In recent years, the correctional system has employed more people than General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart combined.

On the front lines of the prison system, correctional officers, perhaps more than anyone else, directly affect the practice of incarceration in the way that they perform their jobs. Because of this, correctional programs and policies can have little chance of success without their overall health. This is particularly important when considering the mission of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) and its goals of promoting public safety through a professional staff, as well as a constructive correctional and rehabilitation environment. Understanding that correctional work can negatively impact the well-being of both inmates and correctional officers, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA), the CCPOA Benefit Trust Fund (BTF), and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) have joined forces with researchers at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) to address the issues of law enforcement health and wellness.

As a starting point, Dr. Amy E. Lerman and her team at UCB developed the California Correctional Officer Survey (CCOS). The CCOS is a large-scale effort to gather individual-level information on the thoughts, attitudes, and experiences of criminal justice personnel. The CCOS was first conducted in 2006, and the instrument was then expanded and replicated from March to May of 2017. The most recent survey includes a sample of 8,334 officers and other sworn staff, providing a vast cross-section of officers across all of California’s correctional institutions and parole offices.

This report summarizes the results of the CCOS across a set of broad but related categories: mental and physical wellness; exposure to violence; attitudes towards rehabilitation and punishment; job training and management; work-life balance; and training and support.

Using qualitative data-mining methods, this study analyzed 39 child welfare case records in order to identify examples of skillful practice. Conducted in partnership with a public child welfare agency in northern California, the study found that child welfare workers are implementing many of the practices promoted by statewide and national child welfare practice frameworks. Broad categories of skillful practice identified included: (1) effective communication by social workers, (2) support for client self-determination, and (3) active intervention strategies. Study findings provide support for incorporating case record review processes in training and supervision in order to integrate practice-based expertise with research-based evidence.

Solar radiation management is increasingly considered to be an option for managing global temperatures, yet the economic effects of ameliorating climatic changes by scattering sunlight back to space remain largely unknown. Although solar radiation management may increase crop yields by reducing heat stress, the effects of concomitant changes in available sunlight have never been empirically estimated. Here we use the volcanic eruptions that inspired modern solar radiation management proposals as natural experiments to provide the first estimates, to our knowledge, of how the stratospheric sulfate aerosols created by the eruptions of El Chichón and Mount Pinatubo altered the quantity and quality of global sunlight, and how these changes in sunlight affected global crop yields. We find that the sunlight-mediated effect of stratospheric sulfate aerosols on yields is negative for both C4 (maize) and C3 (soy, rice and wheat) crops. Applying our yield model to a solar radiation management scenario based on stratospheric sulfate aerosols, we find that projected mid-twenty-first century damages due to scattering sunlight caused by solar radiation management are roughly equal in magnitude to benefits from cooling. This suggests that solar radiation management—if deployed using stratospheric sulfate aerosols similar to those emitted by the volcanic eruptions it seeks to mimic—would, on net, attenuate little of the global agricultural damage from climate change. Our approach could be extended to study the effects of solar radiation management on other global systems, such as human health or ecosystem function.

This paper examines the relationship between income, vehicle miles traveled (VMT), and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for households with varying access to rail transit in four metropolitan areas—Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, San Diego, and Sacramento—using data from the 2010–2012 California Household Travel Survey. Daily vehicle GHG emissions are calculated using the California Air Resources Board’s 2014 EMFAC (emission factors) model. Two Tobit regression models are used to predict daily VMT and GHG by income, rail transit access (within or outside 0.5 miles of a rail transit station in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, and linear distance to rail in San Diego and Sacramento), and metropolitan area. Comparing predicted VMT and GHG emissions levels, this paper concludes that predicted VMT and GHG emission patterns for rail access vary across metropolitan areas in ways that may be related to the age and connectivity of the areas’ rail systems. The results also show that differences in household VMT due to rail access do not scale proportionally to differences in GHG emissions. Regardless, the fact that GHG emissions are lower near rail transit for virtually all income levels in this study implies environmental benefits from expanding rail transit systems, as defined in this paper.

Linkages between climate and mental health are often theorized but remain poorly quantified. In particular, it is unknown whether the rate of suicide, a leading cause of death globally, is systematically affected by climatic conditions. Using comprehensive data from multiple decades for both the United States and Mexico, we find that suicide rates rise 0.7% in US counties and 2.1% in Mexican municipalities for a 1 °C increase in monthly average temperature. This effect is similar in hotter versus cooler regions and has not diminished over time, indicating limited historical adaptation. Analysis of depressive language in >600 million social media updates further suggests that mental well-being deteriorates during warmer periods. We project that unmitigated climate change (RCP8.5) could result in a combined 9–40 thousand additional suicides (95% confidence interval) across the United States and Mexico by 2050, representing a change in suicide rates comparable to the estimated impact of economic recessions, suicide prevention programmes or gun restriction laws.

We examine the effect of the EITC on the poverty and income of single mothers with children using a quasi-experiment approach that leverages variation in generosity due to policy expansions across tax years and family sizes. We find that the income increasing effects of the EITC are concentrated between 75% and 150% of income-to-poverty with little effect at the lowest income levels (50% poverty and below) and at levels of 250% of poverty and higher. Specifically, a policy-induced $1000 increase in the EITC leads to an 8.4 percentage point reduction in the share of families with after tax and transfer income below 100% poverty. These results are robust to a rich set of controls and whether we compare single women with and without children or compare women with one child versus women with two or more children. They are also robust to whether we limit our analysis to the sharp increase in the 1993 expansion or use the full period of policy expansion, back to the 1986 Tax Reform Act. Importantly, event study estimates show no evidence of differential pre-trends, providing strong evidence in support of our research design. We use these results to show that by capturing the indirect effects of the credit on earnings, static calculations of the anti-poverty effects of the EITC (such as those released based on the Supplemental Poverty Measure) may be underestimated by almost 50 percent. Ours is the first paper to simultaneously estimate the combined direct and indirect effects of the EITC, to quantify how much we miss by ignoring the behavior effect, and to estimate the effects across the income distribution. 

We conduct an experiment on an online game, exploring the effect on
gameplay behavior of voluntary commitment devices that allow players to limit their gameplay. Approximately 25% of players use the devices. Median and 75th percentile device users use devices approximately 60 and 100% of the time, respectively. Players who chose to use the device were those who had previously played longer and more frequently than those who chose not to use the device. Offering the commitment devices decreased session length and session frequency by 2.8 and 6.1%, respectively, while increasing weeks of play by 5.5%. Our results are consistent with some players having self-identified self-control problems, leading to longer and more frequent play than they would prefer, and to demand for commitment, and also with commitment devices creating a more rewarding experience, leading to longerlasting involvement with the game. Our results suggest incentivizing or requiring commitment devices in computer games.

Party polarization is a central feature of American political life, and a robust literature has shown that citizens engage in partisan-confirmation bias when processing political information. At the same time, however, recent events have highlighted a rising tide of anti-government populism that manifests on both sides of the aisle. In fact, data show that large proportions of both Democrats and Republicans hold negative views of government. Using an original set of survey experiments, we examine the psychology of public-sector evaluation. We find that citizens engage in a process of confirmation bias when they encounter new information, which is driven not by party and ideology but by beliefs about the quality and efficiency of government. Taken together, our findings suggest important limitations to citizens’ capacity to learn about public administration, and expand our understanding of what drives confirmation bias with respect to public and private service provision.