December 16, 2020

AF Community

Weekly Writers Round-Up: Utah Criminal Justice, Social Media Lawsuits, and Telehealth Deregulation

By: AF Editors

Each week, we’ll be featuring opinion pieces from the alumni and current participants of AFF’s Writing Fellows Program. A few highlights from the past week are below. Do you dream of having bylines like these? Learn more about how the Writing Fellows Program can help boost your writing career!

Utah needs to fully implement the Justice Reinvestment Initiative by Chris Harelson (Fall 2019) in Deseret News
In 2014, Utah passed landmark legislation known as the Justice Reinvestment Initiative (JRI). Its goal was twofold: stem the rising cost of housing our incarcerated population by moving low-level drug offenders from prison or jail to community supervision, and take the savings from lower incarceration and invest them into treatment programs that rehabilitate offenders, therefore decreasing crime rates.

Now, six years later and contrary to JRI’s objective, recidivism has increased by 8%. This is not an indictment of the legislation. Only one-fifth of the original plan has been implemented, leaving out the very measures that were meant to drive down repeat offenses. To realize a more effective criminal justice system, the Legislature and relevant stakeholders must work together to fully implement each element of the Justice Reinvestment Initiative…

Hindsight shouldn’t be 2020 on antitrust by Eric Peterson (Fall 2014) in The Center Square
On Wednesday, New York’s Letitia James led 48 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit against Facebook on antitrust grounds. Not to be outdone, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) then also filed its own antitrust suit against the social media company.

Although there are some meaningful differences in the lawsuits, the main contention of both is that Facebook’s purchase of both Instagram and WhatsApp were done to restrict competition, thus giving Facebook a monopoly over “Personal Social Networking Services.” Both lawsuits suggest remedies, including spinning off Instagram and WhatsApp from Facebook…

Deregulate telehealth to increase access to care at lower cost by Christina Herrin (Summer 2019) in Detroit News
Unlike traditional in-person health care, telehealth offers affordable and accessible health care options for patients, especially those in rural and underserved communities. Telehealth, which focuses on patient-centered care via an app, has made great strides with the advent of smartphones and other technological breakthroughs.

According to a 2016 survey, 80% of telehealth patients accessing care via a mobile app preferred telehealth service compared to in-office visits…