This is our newsletter, Hard Reset. Sign up here. Donate to BigIfTrue.org here.

Crunching the numbers

• Nashville Public Radio and ProPublica investigated Rutherford County, Tennessee’s juvenile court, which locks up children at a rate more than nine times higher that the state average. The piece details how the juvenile court system aggressively pursued incarceration of kids, sometimes without evidence or a suitable charge. In one case, “two 12-year-olds were charged on negligible evidence with a crime that’s not an actual crime for something in which no one was seriously hurt.”
• The United States spends way less on child care than other developed countries. The US government annually spends about $500 per child on early childhood care, compared to $3,327 in Israel and $18,656 in Germany. (Background: Millions of women left the workforce during the pandemic, and one of the reasons was trouble accessing child care.)

That’s nice

• The chain Raising Cane’s is reassigning half of its corporate staff to work fry duty and cash registers in its understaffed fast food restaurants. Since last year, restaurant owners have complained that workers won’t accept low-paid positions, while some chains, like McDonald’s and Chipotle, have started offering higher wages.
• During the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre, Tulsa hip-hop collective Fire in Little Africa released an album to commemorate the mob attack that killed 300 Black residents by some estimates. Now Fire in Little Africa and nonprofit Tri-City Collective are translating the album into a curriculum that educators can use to teach kids about the history of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, The Black Wall Street Times reported.

New from BigIfTrue.org

Local building and property maintenance codes set the standards for housing conditions in most communities. Last week, I wrote about code enforcement in three cities and some of the barriers to identifying the worst-offending landlords. Things to know:

• In New Orleans, Louisiana, code enforcement workers don’t actually look at the properties for every complaint they receive.
• In Oklahoma, cities can’t create or enforce property registries, which some code enforcement departments in other states use to inspect rental units every year or on a rolling schedule. Instead, two local programs in Tulsa provide inspections to rental properties and offer landlords benefits for participating, like access to grants to support repairs or offset past-due rent.
• In Cleveland, Ohio: The city inspects all of its rental units on a rolling schedule. If landlords won’t make repairs, renterscan deposit their rent at the courthouse and ask the court to release what they would need to make the repairs themselves. Renters can also ask the court to end their lease or reduce their rent.

Read more here and support our journalism here.

Thank you for reading Hard Reset! You can find me at bryant@bigiftrue.org and 405-990-0988.
 
– Mollie Bryant
Founder and editor, BigIfTrue.org