Mildred Loving, an African-American woman whose marriage to a white man led to the landmark Supreme Court ruling overturning state miscegenation laws, died on May 2 at her home in Central Point, Va. She was 68.

As a product of an interracial couple it’s sometimes hard for me to believe that there was a time when interracial marriage was illegal and punishable with jail time. Thank you Mildred for your courage and bravery.

San Francisco County Sheriff Michael Hennessey recently reported that over 60 percent of all prisoners in the city’s jail are Black despite the Black population in San Francisco only being 6.7 percent. Nearly half of the inmates are in jail for drug offenses.

The increasing incarceration of Blacks is a direct result of the War on Drugs. As a result of the War on Drugs, Black communities are suffering from mass incarceration. Not only are large numbers of Blacks being locked-up, Blacks are incarcerated at staggering numbers that far exceed any purposeful law enforcement interest and which are destroying Black communities.

The idea that Blacks commit more drug related offenses, and that this is the reason for the disparities, is false. Most drug arrests are for possession. Possession is a crime that every drug user commits and, in the United States, most drug users are white.

Welcome to the seventh iteration of our quarterly e-newsletter! We’re going to explore the implication of social cognition, implicit bias, and situationalism to race equity work and there application to a race-based poverty law practice.
The three contributors to this e-newsletter each bring a unique perspective on the application of the mind sciences and situationalism to legal services work. We hope that you will find their articles informative and inspiring. Enjoy!

The Situation of IDEA for Families with Limited English Proficiency, Jith Meganathan, Staff Attorney, Central California Legal Services.

Reversing the Trend in Antidiscrimination Jurisprudence, Kimberly Thomas Rapp, Director of Law and Public Policy, Equal Justice Society.

Connecting Poverty Practice and Mind Science, William Kennedy, Managing Attorney and Acting Deputy Director, Legal Services of Northern California.

Do you have an idea for a future e-newsletter? Would you like to share the race-based work that you are doing with other interested in achieving race equity? Drop us an email. We would love to hear from you!

Introduction

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (“IDEA”) is meant to ensure that schools provide disabled students with the services they need to progress educationally. IDEA is rightfully hailed for providing comprehensive educational rights to millions of children previously neglected by the public education system. But from the perspective of situationism, IDEA is a disaster, particularly in addressing the needs of low-income, minority children from limited English proficiency (“LEP”) homes.

Situationism seeks to base law and policymaking on realist models of human action. To achieve this end, it draws on cognitive psychology, social psychology, behavioral neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and related fields. Situationism stands in opposition to non-realist models of human action, particularly dispositionist models, such as the rational actor so beloved by law and economics. The key situationist insight is that while it may appear that our dispositions (personality, attitude, preferences, character, free choices) determine our actions, in truth, our actions are ruled largely by our situations (environmental factors and sub-conscious mental & physical processes).

The Situation of IDEA

Education advocates know well the typical trajectory for LEP kids under IDEA. These children are generally identified as eligible for special education services later than children from English-proficient homes, for schools do not rigorously distinguish academic deficiencies due to disabilities from deficiencies due to limited English proficiency. Once LEP children are identified, their parents consent to limited assessments, simplistic goals, and inexpensive services because of their trust in school personnel. Only after years pass, as the children fall further and further behind their peers, do their parents seek out an advocate for help.

The situation established by IDEA virtually guarantees this outcome for the following reasons:

• IDEA requires schools to provide children the services they need in order to achieve “educational benefit” – generally speaking, progress towards individualized educational program (“IEP”) goals – without adequately reimbursing the schools for those services. Administrators and staff at cash-strapped schools may be dispositionally inclined to help disabled children, but absent funding, they have little situational incentive to properly assess children’s needs, to set challenging goals, or to seek out and provide the services they would need to meet such goals.

• IDEA posits a uniform “parent” able to take advantage of a broad array of rights under the law. In reality, LEP parents are subject to a wide variety of situational forces that diminish their ability to take advantage of these rights:

• Those who are illegal immigrants are, as a situational matter, terrified of invoking legal rights and procedures for fear of drawing attention to themselves and thereby increasing their risk of deportation.

• LEP parents are unable to meaningfully participate in IEP meetings in which school staff provide spoken translation. Staffers will generally translate the group’s conclusions, but not the side discussion that often occurs between team members. Moreover, while parents have the legal right to written translations of IEPs and assessment results, schools are under no legal obligation to inform parents of this right.

• In single-parent homes or in homes with two working parents, it is difficult to make time to learn about children’s rights, or to network with other parents or with disability rights organizations.

• Parents with limited education often trust those with more education and who present themselves as authority figures. Tragically, as system justification theory shows, members of disadvantaged groups regularly internalize perceptions of themselves as social inferiors, are reluctant to challenge the social order, and patiently accept inadequate outcomes. All of these tendencies lead to years of inadequate special education.

• School personnel who participate in IEP teams fall victim to groupthink: they seek consensus rather than airing objections and doubts, they fail to consider outside information and opinions that might contradict the group consensus, and they come to consider loyalty to the group and its consensus as the moral course of action. As Irving Janis, the psychologist who pioneered the study of groupthink, wrote, “Each member is likely to become more dependent than ever on the in-group for maintaining his self-image as a decent human being and will therefore be more strongly motivated to maintain group unity.” For a staffer to admit that a child is not progressing or to consult outside experts for assessments or services is to act immorally and betray the group, all at cost to his or her self-image.

• IDEA is a highly procedural law, exacting in its specification of what must be done to develop an IEP, who must participate, and the timeframes in which each step must be taken. An IEP developed according to these procedures gains procedural legitimacy: because the IEP is the outcome of these rigorous procedures, schools (not to mention administrative hearing officers and judges) presume it to be fair, even in the face of evidence that the child is not progressing. Moreover, much research shows that people view the fairness of procedures as trumping the fairness of outcomes.

• While IDEA gives parents rights to an independent educational evaluation and to a due process hearing, schools often view parents who asserts these rights as dispositionally selfish (i.e., as rational actors freely choosing to privilege their children’s needs over those of the school) rather than as situationally motivated (i.e., as human animals subject to a genetic compulsion to protect their offspring). The IEP team may also view these rights as procedurally illegitimate: invoking them brings in outside opinions and thereby calls into question the morality of group consensus, and also privileges outcomes over procedures. Just as schools view parents who assert their rights as selfish, parents come to view school staff as incompetent, uncaring, or even malicious (rather than as humans seeking procedural legitimacy and subject to economic constraints and groupthink). In taking these stances, both sides make what social psychologists describe as the fundamental attribution error: the human tendency to attribute others’ behavior to their dispositions rather their situations.

What is to be Done?

An obvious solution to this problem would be for federal and state governments (i) to prescribe rigorous assessment for disabilities of all children entering the school system, (ii) to specify exactly what services each disability merits, and (iii) to fully reimburse school districts for the costs of these assessments and services. Such a system would remove nearly all of the situational barriers to children receiving effective services in early childhood, when they are most effective.

Until that day comes, advocates for LEP children are advised to adopt a situationist perspective:

• Attempt to level the linguistic playing field. First, have someone from your office translate for the parent at IEP meetings. Even if you are bilingual, it is ideal to bring someone else so that you can be free to negotiate on behalf of the parent, and save precious time. Request that all written documents produced by the IEP team be translated into the parent’s native language.

• Encourage parents to assert their rights under IDEA (i.e., fight parents’ tendency towards system justification) and discourage them from expressing unwarranted anger or hostility towards school personnel (i.e., remind parents not to make the fundamental attribution error). It will take years for even the perfect IEP to be implemented if the school hates the family and is determined to stonewall on delivery of services.

• In your dealings with the school (and if need be, with administrative hearing officers and the courts), stress the procedural legitimacy of seeking an independent educational evaluation and a due process hearing.

• Resign yourself to groupthink, but use independent educational evaluations and due process as means to route around it. An IEP team will likely never admit that it has spent years signing off on inadequate IEPs; do what is necessary to stop the hearing officer from identifying with the IEP team so that she or she will look at the child’s circumstances with fresh eyes.

This article was authored by Jith Meganathan, Staff Attorney, Central California Legal Services.

Who has found (or is even looking for) the “racist” at the center of the foreclosure crisis? Granted, diverse and voluminous people have been harmed by the crisis across America; but growing data demonstrate brown and black renters and homeowners have been disproportionately impacted by the sub-prime mortgage meltdown. Searching for relief using our traditional model of discrimination would lead us down a trail for a single cause or single actor, an individual perpetrator with “intent” to discriminate, who is responsible for the present uprooting of families and utter demise of entire neighborhoods inhabited by people of color.

While there may be no shortage of people, institutions and other places to begin assigning blame, the ultimate root of the foreclosure problem is, in large part, the unfettered capitalist driven interests of financial institutions, mortgage brokers, securities dealers and investors. Certainly, that is not to suggest that people of color and limited income have not been the targets of irresponsible low- and no-money down adjustable rate lending options—which certainly is true in some cases. Rather, the point here is to bring front and center an illustrative example of how a constricted single actor with intent approach will hardly adequately rectify this and other complex systemic problems harming members of our society and impeding the achievement of racial equality in housing, health, employment, education, and other social and economic necessities.

Since Washington v. Davis, 426 U.S. 229 (1976), the disregard of harm experienced by members of society and focus on the intent of decision-makers and institutional actors has placed confounding limitations on constitutional interpretation and the availability of remedies for victims of varying forms of discrimination. Specifically, this Supreme Court case gutted the protections of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution by setting a standard that places the burden on plaintiffs bringing discrimination claims to establish the intent of the alleged perpetrator to discriminate. Under this intent doctrine, the plaintiff alleging an equal protection violation must prove that the discriminating actor or agency “selected or reaffirmed a particular course of action at least in part ‘because of,’ not merely ‘in spite of,’ its adverse effects upon an identifiable [racial] group,” Personnel Administrator of Massachusetts v. Fenney, 442 U.S. 256, 279 (1979). More generally, this intent standard and its proliferation in antidiscrimination jurisprudence unjustly shifts the focus of our protective laws away from shielding members of our society and away from reaching restorative outcomes that begin to address institutional structures, practices and social norms that facilitate the kinds of sub-prime lending abuses and other racial inequities evident today.

Modern science explains why always seeking to finger a racist, or an individual with intent to discriminate, is an outdated approach to combating discrimination. Cognitive and social science research shows we all, at some level, have subconscious or implicit beliefs, attitudes and expectations about people based on our exposure to the race, gender, age or other groups to which such individuals belong. These implicit biases often influence our decisions and interactions with others even though we may not possess any explicit prejudice, ill will, or animus. By now, most of us have heard of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) that measures our subconscious biases or read about research studies looking at the implications of these biases in myriad sectors of society.

For example, the Washington Post ran an article about the reflection of the implicit attitudes of physicians in disparities in their medical judgments and treatment recommendations. (“The Color of Health Care: Diagnosing Bias in Doctors,” Washington Post, Aug. 13, 2007.) The New York Times covered a study on the National Basketball Association (N.B.A.) concluding that “players who were similar in all ways except skin color drew foul calls at a rate difference of up to 4 ½ percent depending on the racial composition of an N.B.A. game’s three-person referee crew.” (“Study of N.B.A. Sees Racial Bias in Calling Fouls,” New York Times, May 2, 2007.) The USA Today discussed a study about immigrant skin tone and U.S. earning potential that found “[o]n average, being one shade lighter has about the same effect as having an additional year of education.” (“Study Says Skin Tone Affects Earnings,” USA Today, Jan. 26, 2007.) Ascribe Newswire reported that the risk of housing discrimination begins when prospective tenants simply send email inquiries signed with names commonly affiliated with particular racial or ethnic backgrounds. (“Name is Enough When it Comes to Discrimination,” AScribe Newswire, May 23, 2006.)

Additionally, examples of subconscious biases becoming institutionalized or built into the fabric of institutional structures, practices and norms have made their way into mainstream media. Fortune magazine highlighted the Dukes v. Wal-Mart, 474 F.3d 1214 (9th Cir. 2007), case as an example of the increasing prevalence of social science testimony on implicit bias in discrimination lawsuits. (“The War Over Unconscious Bias,” Fortune, Oct. 15, 2007.) Testimony in the early stages of that case suggested that managers involved in promotion and pay decisions unknowingly engaged in “‘spontaneous,’ and ‘automatic’ stereotyping and ‘in-group favoritism’” that systematically resulted in the most favorable jobs being filled by men, and the company’s historic and overly discretionary promotion and pay procedures allowed managers to unintentionally reinforce structural barriers to women’s advancement. Today, startling statistics of persisting disparities in the number of women and people of color represented in the upper ranks of corporate, academic, legal and other institutions often have little to do with overt gender and racial discrimination, but more to do with “locked-in” or “unquestioned” norms and habits and our country’s history of denying equal opportunities to certain groups in avenues fundamental to social and economic advancement.

As the Wal-Mart case illustrates, our courts have begun to acknowledge the existence and grapple with the implications of implicit and institutional bias. In some areas of law, the presence of implicit bias has provided a basis for judicial findings of discrimination. Courts have long recognized that unconscious biases can shape juror selection and jurors’ perception of plaintiffs and defendants. In the Supreme Court case Miller-El v. Dretke, 545 U.S. 231 (2005), which involved a prosecutor who peremptorily struck ten of eleven prospective black jurors, the existence of unconscious racial bias supported the Court’s ultimate conclusion that the prosecutor’s use of peremptory challenges constituted purposeful discrimination. In the immigration context, an officer’s unconscious bias proved sufficient to constitute a constitutional violation when a deportee was stopped solely on the basis of his Hispanic appearance, as the court noted, “…Border Patrol officers may use racial stereotypes as a proxy for illegal conduct without being subjectively aware of doing so.” Gonzalez-Rivera v. INS, 22 F.3d 1441 (9th Cir. 1994). In EEOC v. Inland Marine, 729 F.2d 1129 (9th Cir. 1984), the court ruled that African American employees alleging racial discrimination based upon a disparate wage structure proved intentional discrimination even though “[t]he company did not consciously set out to establish a two-tiered wage structure, and hence did not act maliciously.”

These cases and social examples briefly discussed here illustrate some of the progress advocates, litigators, scientists and other members of our society have made toward updating our understanding of discrimination and reversing the trend to always identify a racist in order to provide relief for racially disparate outcomes. Legal services and other civil rights advocates are uniquely positioned to continue identifying instances where race may be a factor and urge our courts to understand modern discrimination. Our courts must be encouraged to grapple with persisting racial disparities in areas such as housing, education and employment, and provide a remedy where a “racist” decision-maker may be nonexistent because subconscious and institutional biases may be causing the harm. Our combined efforts can avoid leaving individuals with evidence of discrimination without remedy.

This article was authored by Kimberly Thomas Rapp. Kimberly Thomas Rapp is the director of law and public policy at the Equal Justice Society, a national organization strategically advancing racial justice through law and public policy, communications and the arts, and alliance building.

The past few years have witnessed a vibrant discussion about Social Cognition and Mind Science and its theoretical implications for the practice of law. The science is fascinating but many busy advocates overwhelmed with demand are left wondering, “what is its relevance to the day to day practice of law?”

What is this science and why should be care?

Social Cognition examines the ways in which the brain perceives, sorts, associates and recalls information using mental schemas (or shortcuts). The process affects the way we analyze information and our approach to problem solving. Our schemas color our attitudes and beliefs, both conscious and unconscious, and guide our behavior. See Jon Hanson & David Yosifon, The Situation: An Introduction to the Situational Character, Critical Realism, Power Economics, and Deep Capture, 152 U. Pa. L. Rev. 129, 149-77 (2003); Gary Blasi & John T. Jost, System Justification Theory and Research: Implications for Law, Legal Advocacy, and Social Justice, 94 Cal. L. Rev. 1119 (2006).

Social Cognition science establishes that all of us have cognitive bias that influences how we perceive and make decisions about other people. Categorization is a basic tool the mind employs for interpreting perceptions, encoding those perceptions into memory and making both conscious and sub conscious decisions based upon those perceptions and memories. People continually use cognitive shortcuts, exaggerations, over-simplifications, and generalizations to allow them to prioritize and make sense of the overload of incoming information.

We also learn from social cognition scientists that we make most of our decisions at the unconscious level. It could not be any other way considering the conscious mind is very slow compared to the blinding speed of unconscious calculations. Imagine trying to drive to work if you had to be conscious of all of the minute speed and steering alterations necessary to drive. You would probably go mad or at least crash your car. Driving to work each day no longer becomes a matter of conscious thought, but is the result of decisions once made consciously that are so routine they are moved below the conscious level.

Racial stereotyping is one method that people employ almost automatically in order to understand their surroundings. Current law ignores much of what we now understand about how the mind works. The courts are bound by science that has long ago been discredited. When our civil rights laws were first interpreted, social scientists believed that prejudice operated largely in conscious, explicit, deliberate modes. Now it is generally viewed by social scientists as also operating in a less conscious, implicit, spontaneous, mode, below the level of conscious thought. At the same time it was believed that all discrimination contained an element of antipathy or animus. Social scientists no longer believe that this is a necessary element. Finally, social scientists once believed that discriminatory actions were an aberration in civil society so that removing bad actors would return society to a natural state of racial harmony. It would be hard to find a social scientist today that holds this position today.

Social cognition science has powerful implications in matters of race. First, it undermines the central assumption of society’s dominant frame, the “colorblind paradigm” that tells us that that racial discrimination, if it exists, must be the result of a conscious act. To affect a remedy there must be a perpetrator with conscious intent and a victim. Outside of that analytical framework the law assumes that discrimination does not exist. It directly challenges the psychological assumptions that are the underpinning for the “Intent Doctrine” announced by the Supreme Court in Washington v. Davis that effectively closed the door on equal protection claims more than 30 years ago. The social scientists have given us a new frame for understanding intent by de-linking intent with consciousness.

This impressive body of research has confirmed that much of society’s racism is not a series of unconnected, intentional acts, but is a collective, historically influenced institutionalized, structural and often sub conscious process. The implicit association test is but one measure of social cognition as it applies to race. We have learned that awareness of the brain’s natural tendency to sort everything and everyone, which otherwise causes both helpful and harmful unconscious bias, actually helps to mitigate discriminatory conduct. Social Cognition/Mind Science and its application to a poverty law practice. One Advocates Perspective. See Christine Jolls and Cass R. Sunstein, Debiasing through Law (2005); see generally Jerry Kang, Trojan Horses of Race, 118 Harv. L. Rev. 1489, 1508 (2005). We also learn that the brain is malleable and conscious consideration of desired outcomes can lead to an adjustment of our brain’s schemas in a way that leads to better results.

So, How does this apply to the practice of law?

A. An understanding of Social Cognition can make our work more conscious and purposeful

We have learned from Social Cognition science that our daily routine often becomes “second hand”. These second hand habits can continue long after the environment in which they were developed has changed. It is necessary then, to raise matters of importance to the conscious level to examine whether our shortcuts achieve the goals we seek. If we don’t raise the important matters of race to a conscious level it can compromise how we might be assessing a client’s statements and claims.

So the first practical lesson from Social Cognition is that you must bring an analysis of the outcomes of your claims to the fore and be conscious of them in one’s evaluation of cases. All race-based claims are not the same and a similar claim brought 5 years ago may not yield the same result if it were brought today. It is important that we internalize the lessons of social cognition to make conscious race as a matter of ultimate concern.

It is likewise important that these lessons of mind science be shared with those with whom we work to insure that unconscious bias does not unfairly filter out race-based claims. Using powerful audiovisual presentations that allow one to experience the limitations of our perceptions and our own bias, Legal Services of Northern California trained staff at all levels in this important new science. In the 5 years since the training began, staff have become acutely aware of the vast chasms that separate people from opportunity along racial lines and actively set out to find remedies, once thought too difficult to address.

Since the training, advocates handling Medicaid cases are now questioning why the programs pays out benefits to white people at twice the rate of people of color. Disability advocates are uncovering a well-established bias against the granting of disability benefits based upon posttraumatic stress disorders to Southeast Asian Immigrants. Frontline staff are examining how strict enforcement of public housing rules against unauthorized guests prevent young African American fathers from visiting their children. We witness new examples every week as advocates consciously evaluate cases through the lens of race.

The new evaluation was made possible through an understanding of social cognition science.

B. Using cognitive science to frame our advocacy before decision-making bodies.

When advocates approach a decision maker in court or in a legislative/regulatory body, an understanding of social cognition science helps to frame our advocacy. The science teaches us that it is absolutely essential that we put the issue of race back on the table in our advocacy specifically articulating the impact of decisions along racial lines. Employing racial impact statements forces a decision maker to consciously consider the disparate impact of seemingly race neutral policies.

In recent inclusionary housing advocacy, an advocate’s study demonstrated that the historical market based “colorblind” policies would insure that all new growth areas would create housing affordable only to that part of the population that was overwhelmingly white. Advocates argued that only the adoption of an inclusionary housing policy would address the structural inequity that leads to segregated communities by providing a racial impact analysis that measured the proposed policies performance on people by economic strata and race. By making the issue of race a conscious consideration, decision makers would have to ratify the inequities in the structure or engage in a discussion of remedies.

In a courageous piece of advocacy the Homeless Action Center of Alameda County challenged cuts in the County General Assistance program with a Race Impact Statement (RIS) that showed how African American were unfairly targeted in the cuts. Employing a structural racism analysis, the RIS revealed that African American were unfairly classified as employable and not eligible for services while at the same time being segregated into neighborhoods without transportation or jobs. It is reported that framing the cuts in the context of their racial impact caused two members of the board to question the proposal and this may lead to its defeat.

In a “colorblind” world, decision makers are given the luxury of not considering the impact of their decision on racial minorities. Social Cognition science confirms that bowing to the colorblind paradigm is destructive to the interests of racial equity by allowing unstated unconscious bias to go unchallenged.

C. In the long term social cognition science may reopen the courts to equal protection claims.

Ultimately it must be an advocates’ goal to see that the law catches up to the science. We must begin to incorporate the science into case law. The long-term goal would be to recast the intent doctrine in Washington v. Davis to allow a showing of implicit bias and/or unconscious intent. This alone would re open the doors to the courthouse to equal protection claims. Without more field-testing of social cognition and implicit bias that goal may be a decade away.

We are more likely to have success in the near future by planting the seeds of change in cases outside of employment or housing. Land use and health care may offer fertile soil for advocates to use race impact statements to expose structural defects in society that lead to an inequitable distribution of essential services and resources. In these cases, decided at a local level race impact statement have the greatest promise.

We must also encourage the writing of scholarly articles that employ social cognition science to re frame discrimination in American society outside the context of perpetrator and victim and in the context of structural racism. Reframing our litigation in these terms may support our efforts to expand the interests of race equity.

This article was authored by William Kennedy, Managing Attorney and Acting Deputy Director, Legal Services of Northern. California

In a courageous piece of advocacy, the Alameda County Homeless Action Center, argued that proposed cuts in the general assistance program would have a disparate impact upon African Americans in Alameda County. In support of their contention staff attorney, John Engstrom, crafted a Racial Impact Statement clearly demonstrating how the cuts would fall most heavily upon those in the African American community. He also challenged the “exemption process” that classified most unemployed African Americans as employable by describing the societal structures that prevented these recipients from accessing job opportunities. Kudos to Pattie Wall, John Engstrom and the clients of the Homeless Action Center for so effectively putting race on the table in their advocacy.

The Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity advisory board and staff has invited us to join in their First Critical Issues Forum: A Virtual Convening to Address Progressive Racial Justice Issues in Philanthropy.

These essays focus on critical issues around the AB 624 debate. AB 624 would require that foundations collect and disclose information on race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation for their organizations and grantees.

The most recent free street data that I have found is the StreetMap data (based on 2000 Tigerline data) that comes with an ArcView license. As you can imagine, this data is particularly ill-suited for geocoding addresses in areas that have experienced substantial new development in the last eight years. Luckily, I just found a great web application that allow you to obtain X/Y (latitude/longitude) coordinates based on street address. Better yet, it allows you to batch process the addresses that you want to geocode.

The REP is currently geocoding the addresses of bank foreclosures in Sacramento County. Using StreetMap data (based on 2000 Tigerline data) I was only able to geocode 20% of the 4,681 addresses that I had. Using batchgecode.com, I was able to gecode 4,674 of the 4,484. Not bad for a free web app considering that newer street data can easily cost you over $8,000.

Mark Twain had it wrong. Data and statistics aren’t our enemies. In an effort to promote understanding between people and statistics, we want to share the following data resources with you:

United States Department of Agriculture – Economic Research Service

• Site Summary: ERS conducts research in five major areas: (1) a competitive agricultural system; (2) a safe food supply; (3) a healthy, well-nourished population; (4) harmony between agriculture and the environment; (5) an enhanced quality of life for rural Americans

• Suggested Uses: The REP doubts that you will ever need the US Carrot Statistics or the Hamburger Doneness and Consumer Preferences, however. ERS also offers access to a bevy of more germane data related to health, poverty, and food including Food Security statistics.

California Secretary of State – Reports of Registration

• Site Summary: The California Secretary of State is responsible for producing a statistical reports detailing voter registration levels throughout California several times per year.

• Suggested Uses: The data available here can help you measure and compare civic involvement in California communities.

Office of the Attorney General – State of California – Department of Justice

• Site Summary: The California Attorney General collects, analyzes, and reports statistical data, which provide valid measures of crime and the criminal justice process to government and the citizens of California.
  This site contains more than 5,000 statistical tables, 59 reports, 29 publications, links to federal state, and local agency statistics, and links to other criminal statistics services.

• Suggested Uses: Do you need arrest, domestic violence, or crime statistics for California? This is the place to go.

California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation

• Site Summary: The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation publishes a variety of reports that range from statistical summaries of its offender populations to evaluation research reports on innovative rehabilitative treatment programs. Of particular interest, Adult Operations (formerly CDC) Population Reports and Statistics contain extensive data on characteristics of the institution and parole populations, historical trends, summaries of population movements and parole outcome (including recidivism).

• Suggested Uses: Looking for prison population or demographic reports? Searching for parole population or demographic reports? You will find them here.

Rural Healthcare Policy Council

• Site Summary:The mission of the California Rural Health Policy Council (RHPC) is to formulate and establish rural health policy for the State of California and to provide a focal point for discussion of rural health issues within the California Health and Human Services Agency.

• Suggested Uses: A good site for California rural population demographics and rural access to healthcare services information.

Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development

• Site Summary: The Mission of Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD) is to promote healthcare accessibility through leadership in analyzing California’s healthcare infrastructure, promoting a diverse and competent healthcare workforce, providing information about healthcare outcomes, assuring the safety of buildings used in providing healthcare, insuring loans to encourage the development of healthcare facilities, and facilitating development of sustained capacity for communities to address local healthcare issues.

• Suggested Uses: The REP found the statistics on the disparities along racial and ethnic lines regarding quality of hospitals particularly useful.

Department of Social Services

• Site Summary: A comprehensive source for data and statistics on government benefits and their consumer populations

• Suggested Uses: We like the food stamp, children’s benefits, and the disability and adult program statistics.

US Department of Transportation – Bureau of Transportation Statistics

• Site Summary: This site provides comprehensive transportation statistics for geographic areas within the United States.

• Suggested Uses: Access to public transportation and the effectiveness of the available public transportation is an effective indicator for issues ranging from access to medical care providers to environmental justice to access to employment opportunities.