Ignoring The Will Of The Voters

Wendy Schaetzel Lesko | Dec 2022 |

(The opinions expressed in blog posts are those of the author and not necessarily those of YouthFacts.org)

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Elections are full of surprises, including squeakers.

Take the recent defeat on a ballot measure in the west Los Angeles hub of film studios with a population of 40,000. A small cadre of high school students led a campaign with so little money that yard signs got delivered in the final days before November 8. Their goal:

To extend the right to vote in municipal elections to 16 and 17 year olds in Culver City
with the same protections as everyone else, because we know that this age group can
vote credibly and is affected by legislation.

If only seventeen more adults marked “yes” for Question QY, the Culver City city council and
school board candidates would have had a new cohort of teen voters in 2024.

But wait, probably not.

A predictable pattern of public officials failing to respect the will of the voters and an equal
travesty, fail to respect minors.

Travel north to Alameda County with a population of 1.6 million. In 2020, a whopping 67
percent voted to expand voting rights to 16 and 17 year olds for board of education
candidates. With that overwhelming support, including the endorsement by the current school
board directors, one might think the powers-that-be might roll into action.

But not a single eligible new voter voted this November. Even though it is complicated to
develop a special ballot and automate the process for these new voters, the county registrar
gets a failing grade. There’s been “zero progress” and students “are pissed,” says Lukas
Brekke-Miesne, an Oakland Unified Student District graduate and executive director of
Oakland Kids First.

At the November 2022 Candidates Forum organized by students, Jennifer Brouhard, who
won a seat on the school board, said ”I think that it’s a shame and it’s criminal that you were
not allowed to vote in this election. That should have happened. There should have been a
plan.”

Can you stand more evidence of this disenfranchisement?

In 2016, Berkeley, California voters had also approved lowering the voting age for school
board races but punted the financial responsibility for implementation on the school district.
Stalemate. Once again, not a single student has cast a vote since this ballot measure passed
six years ago.

With all these liberal folks warning about the future of our democracy, it is difficult to believe
they really give a damn about engaging the “leaders of tomorrow.” Quite the opposite: instead
of encouraging the habit of voting that research demonstrates is most effective when people
begin at age 16, these public servants lack the will and ingenuity.

Rather than promoting increased voter turnout, these adults may be responsible for lifelong voter turnoff.

“Unfortunately, across California, suicide rates among Black youth doubled between 2014 and 2020.”

Anthony Bernier | Dec 2022 |

What fake news is this!?

This claim, highlighted in a recent youth writing program’s newsletter, was obviously designed to shock and awe readers into understanding the urgent necessity for the program’s contribution to the youth community.

But it’s crap. It’s fake news.

First and foremost, troubled or not, Black youth deserve access to quality experiences and opportunities as valued and important members of the community. Their stories, positive and negative, deserve to be cultivated, documented, shared, and respected.

Second, trumpeting a program’s self-serving claims unethically misrepresents reality. Readily available public information reveals two dimensions of this all-too common strategy among many youth programs.

Black youth suicides, tragic as they are, represent numbers far too small to extrapolate larger patterns. Also, the actual numbers reveal the following about being young and Black in California: 11 suicides in 2014; 23 in 2021; but then a return to 11 in 2022. It represents behavior by one in 30,000 Black youth annually, not tragedy sweeping the youth population. Of course, each instance is a horror for the individuals and families involved. But the program could have just as easily (and equally unethically) claimed that Black youth suicide between 2021 and 2022 had been cut in half!

Nevertheless, neither claim is useful and both would come freighted with highly negative implications.

Beyond ignoring how Black youth just deserve quality opportunities, and beyond manipulating statistics, another relevant objection should apply to this and any other youth program advancing similar fake news claims. What possible evidence does the program offer demonstrating a causal behavioral link between its program and any specific behavioral outcome (suicide, drug abuse, grades, reading levels, or anything else)? What possible evidence could the program offer?

Answer: none.

The role of a youth writing program is to cultivate, facilitate, and promote the voices and writing of young people. That’s a difficult enough job. It’s a worthy enough job. And when done well it can enrich the lives of young people, their families, and their community.

Why are these positive goals founded in treating young people as valued citizens, rather than tragedies waiting to happen, so frequently viewed as insufficient?

Why do programs constantly lay claim to outcomes that are none of their business, claims they can’t prove, claims that only reinforce misrepresentations of youth itself as broken, at-risk, and even dangerous? Not even full-time and experienced teachers make assertions like this – so why do we accept the claims of these otherwise well-intended non-profit programs?

Don’t bother with that old saw about what funders want to hear. Funders benefit from hearing about what youth derive from crafting, drafting, writing, editing, documenting, and being respected for their work.

The next time you hear a program trumpeting fake, alarmist claims and trying to get away with making connections between what they do and other things for which they have nothing to do, call them out and ask them why they don’t believe that kids simply deserve what they offer.

Are Young People and African Americans Better Off under Marijuana Reform?

21 March 2016

This brief, preliminary report uses the multi-year experiences of two states that legalized marijuana for adults (Colorado and Washington) and three that decriminalized marijuana for all ages (California, Connecticut, Massachusetts) to test predictions by proponents that legalizing marijuana would benefit young people through regulation and benefit minorities by reducing racial disparities in arrest. Given the high costs and consequences in fines, jailings, loss of student loans, criminal records, etc., of arrest even for simple marijuana possession, reducing arrests is an important policy goal.

The answer to date is that reforms in these states have brought great benefits to persons under age 21 and to minority races, though not necessarily those predicted. The benefit is large reductions in arrests during the reform period, 2008 through 2014.* In the states that reformed laws, rates of marijuana arrest have fallen by 71% among those under age 21, 79% among those over 21, 80% among African Americans, and 76% among all other (nonblack) races. In the 45 states that did not reform marijuana laws, rates of marijuana arrest fell by 23% among those under age 21, 9% among those over 21, 15% among African Americans, and 16% among other races.

Table 1. Change in marijuana arrest rates, 5 reform vs. 45 non-reform states, 2014 vs. 2008

Source: CJIS (2016). “Disparity” is ratio of black to nonblack arrest rates.

Thus, states that reformed marijuana laws reduced arrests among young ages 3 to 4 times faster, and among African Americans 6 to 7 times faster, than occurred in states that did not reform their laws. In 2 of the 5 reform states, arrest rates fell faster for those under 21 than for those 21 and older (and in one, by the same amount), the most interesting of several “spillover” benefits from marijuana reform on ages and offenses not targeted by the reform. That marijuana arrest rates have fallen substantially for ages under 21 in most states – led by those that decriminalized marijuana for all ages, followed by those that legalized marijuana for ages 21 and older, and including lesser but substantial reductions in states that did not reform marijuana laws – is an intriguing development meriting further study.

However, reforms have not reduced racial disparities in arrest rates. In three of the five reform states (Colorado, Washington, and Connecticut), disparities in arrests rates of blacks versus non-blacks remained roughly the same; in one (Massachusetts), disparities increased substantially; and in one (California), they fell. In states that did not reform marijuana laws, African Americans remained 3 times more likely than other races to be arrested for marijuana throughout the period.

Figures 1-4 sum up these findings. The Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice will be following up with more detailed reports on marijuana reform and age, race, and offense structure of arrests.

Figures 1-2. Change in marijuana arrests, reform states vs. non-reform states, rates per 100,000 population by black and nonblack race, 2014 vs 2008 (see note on method*)

Source: Criminal Justice Information Service (CJIS)(2016). Crimestatinfo, ASR drug by state. Annual data file provided by request from CJIS.

Figures 3-4. Change in age structure of marijuana arrests, reform states vs. non-reform states, rates per 100,000 population by age group, 2014 vs 2008

Source: CJIS (2016).

*Note on method: the Criminal Justice Information Service (2016) provides state-by-state Uniform Crime Report statistics on arrests for drugs by race, age, and type of offense for 2008 through 2014. These numbers for felony and misdemeanor marijuana arrests are adjusted for the percentage of each state’s population covered by jurisdictions reporting to UCR and divided by each state’s population to produce population adjusted rates. UCR does not separate Latino ethnicity, and so arrest rates for Black populations are simply compared to those of all other races.

Contact: Mike Males, YouthFacts, mmales@earthlink.net