No. 137: Reagan Tokes

Greg Rancourt -

This week's story is all about designing laws to influence behaviors and how that can create positive and negative social impacts. It's one of the more complicated topics I've covered, but it has broad applicability to the kind of change management efforts you find at social enterprises and nonprofits.

If you've ever led a team before, you'll probably recognize some of the ideas here. We'll be looking at a law in Ohio called Reagan Tokes that was designed to incentivize good behavior in prisons and reduce recidivism, but it's not playing out as lawmakers intended.

In addition to our change management focus this week, I'm sharing a great role at a company that supports philanthropic efforts and pointing you to an online course that introduces you to the language of social enterprise. Lots of ways to take action this week, so let's not dally any longer.

~ Greg

What we're reading

Ohio's Reagan Tokes law has become a one-way street to longer prison terms, despite being sold as a carrot-and-stick approach to curb recidivism and reward good behavior. (The Marshall Project)

  • You may have heard me say what looks like a people problem is often a situation problem, which comes from the book Switch. When you see people exhibit uncharacteristic or poor behavior, our first reflex should be to ask, "What is incentivizing that behavior?"
    • Lawmaking in general is an exercise in creating incentives: whether you're trying to spur certain economic development, encourage charitable donations, reduce drug use, and so on, you're creating systems that drive behaviors. Sometimes this goes very well, and sometimes lawmakers create incentives with unintended results.
  • The Reagan Tokes law is a perfect illustration of this. The law gives prison administrators the power to extend sentences for bad behavior and reduce them for good behavior. Carrot and stick.
    • Unfortunately, since it was enacted in 2019, no incarcerated people have been granted early release under the law, while 700 people have had their sentences extended at an estimated cost of $32 million to taxpayers. Those who have had their sentences extended are overwhelmingly Black.
    • Judges handed down the original sentences, but unelected officials are effectively overriding their decisions. Again, this is by the law's design.
  • The law itself is not the only incentive at play. The prisons face a conflict of interest, and Reagan Tokes prisoners become targets for cellmates.
    • Both public and private prisons benefit from having additional prisoners and longer sentences. Consider how private prisons, particularly those with shareholders, benefit from increased prison populations.
    • If you have been marked as Reagan Tokes, your cellmates know you are less likely to fight back due to the risk of extended prison sentences. That makes you a bigger target for bad actors.
  • Given the data – and six years' worth of data is plenty – it seems like lawmakers should revisit the implementation of the bill.
    • Even if the intent is still valid, the incentives should change. Additional oversight of the decision making process is a start, though I question whether Reagan Tokes is just a complicated solution to keep people from breaking the law a second time. How do we keep people from breaking the law in the first place?

Job of the week

When you donate to charity, what sort of criteria do you use to decide who gets your donation? Imagine that kind of question for philanthropy at scale, and you start to understand the value of a company like Magic Cabinet, which helps organizations build relationships with their communities to improve their philanthropic efforts. They act like a bridge between organizations that want to invest in social impact and organizations with deep experience on their communities' issues, providing insights that maximize everyone's efforts.

Magic Cabinet is hiring their first product manager – a Senior Product Manager to be exact – who will help develop solutions across their various service offerings, like grantmaking and philanthropy. You could be based in the San Francisco or Seattle areas, and the qualifications are very reasonable. If you have a few years of product experience and want to help givers maximize their impact, don't pass this opportunity by.

Community roundup

  • Colorado State University and AccuWeather are both predicting heavy hurricane seasons this year, where nearly half could become major hurricanes. (Grist)
    • One thing I'll be watching for this year is how the weather reports and disaster response change as a result of federal layoffs and budget updates.
  • Vermont's EV registrations exploded more than 40% last year. For context, they registered more vehicles in 2024 than in the first six years' worth of registrations combined. (Electrek)
  • Abortions for out-of-state patients have more than doubled since 2020, before Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court. (The Guardian)
    • Data for 2024 was similar to what the Guttmacher Institute reported for 2023. Some states adjacent to those with bans have emerged as hubs for out-of-state care; for example, most of the abortions in Kansas and New Mexico were for out-of-state patients.
  • The International Maritime Organization, part of the United Nations, has introduced the first carbon tax for global shipping. It still needs to be adopted later this year. (Grist)
    • The U.S. decided not to participate, so we can anticipate some amount of pushback in the future. Part of what makes these regulations so important is that they are international: countries have been making their own emission reduction efforts, but applying rules to shipping requires international cooperation.

Civic corner

  • The Colorado House passed a bill this month that would require a disclaimer at gasoline pumps noting a link between fossil fuels and air pollution. It reads like the warning you might find on a carton of cigarettes or in response to California's Proposition 65: burning fossil fuels "releases air pollutants and greenhouse gases, known by the state of Colorado to be linked to significant health impacts and global heating." (Grist)
    • This isn't law yet, and I think it faces an uphill battle. If I were going to push for a disclosure like this, it would be to educate someone about the impacts. I suspect most people know there's a link between fossil fuels and air pollution though, even if they're not sold on climate change.
  • Hot on the heels of last week's issue on the ethical application of artificial intelligence in education, it appears that the White House is drafting an executive order to increase training for teachers and improve AI instruction at the K-12 level. (WaPo)
    • Gosh, I've never inspired an executive order before! I'm flattered – and joking of course.
    • I actually think this is heading in the right direction. When I see K-12, however, I hope this applies to the more senior grade levels and that we preserve critical thinking instruction – you can imagine the damage if we teach our kids to be reliant on AI instead of teaching them AI literacy and how these services work.
  • This one gets my hackles up, so I almost didn't include it. That's your trigger warning, but if you're still with me: The Covid.gov and Covidtests.gov websites now redirect to a webpage calling COVID-19 the result of a lab leak and alleging a coverup by the Biden Administration. (The Verge)
    • These government websites used to help people learn about COVID-19 symptoms and treatments and order test kits. You can still access that data using the Web Archive – such as this snapshot from January – but the average person is unlikely to know such a tool exists.
    • I keep thinking of the amount of data pulled from government websites and efforts to restore it, and I'm starting to think we ought to have an independent repository for this information. Might make for a new project idea...you know it's bad when enough data is removed to warrant an accounting effort on Wikipedia.

Hot job opportunities

Resource of the week

I talk a lot about finding a social impact job, but what about creating your own? That's the inspiration for this week's resource: a course called "Social Impact Strategy: Tools for Entrepreneurs and Innovators" offered on Coursera by the University of Pennsylvania.

They offer a few courses related to social entrepreneurship, and this one is more focused on impact business models, measuring impact, and developing a theory of change. It's a great introduction to some of the language of social enterprises – whether you choose to create your own or not.

The course is offered as part of Coursera Plus, which is a paid subscription that provides access to the broader Coursera catalog. That said, the course is only 8 hours long and something you could breeze through in a week – short enough to fit within the free trial period. Frankly, I might have to take advantage of that opportunity myself. Book club, anyone?

Test your knowledge

The Endangered Species Act was enacted in 1973 and helps protect – and ideally restore – endangered species facing extinction. I asked you which species was the first to be delisted due to recovery, and the answer is the Brown Pelican. The Endangered Species Act is itself endangered of late, as a proposed word change would remove protections on habitats critical to endangered species' survival.

In a previous issue, I mentioned that air pollution has improved in Kathmandu in part because of an aggressive push for electric vehicles. This week, I thought we'd dig into electric vehicle history to find an early tipping point:

In what year did the cumulative number of all-electric vehicles reach 1 million sold?

Email me your guess, and I'll send one lucky winner a couple of One Work stickers!

I finally made it to the Portland Art Museum last week. Evidently the museum is under an expansion effort that will vastly increase the amount of art on offer, although I was impressed by what I saw in the one wing that was open.

They had a painting of Monet's waterlilies that floored me – the kind of thing you read about as a student but don't really appreciate until you see in person. The greats are greats for a reason. I'm looking forward to going back once construction is complete.