One of the biggest problems with tax-paid, government-provided entitlements is that government makes promises without a credible source of funding. The universal approach to entitlements is that legislators identify a problem, assume government is the best vehicle for a solution, then craft a bill, pass it into law and go home to their voters and t...

You are likely to hear two arguments — myths, really — favored by Medicaid expansion advocates. The first is that Medicaid expansion will save our Wyoming hospitals; the second is that all enrollees will have their health needs met. As for our hospitals, is true that the discounted "100% reimbursement" promised by the federal government for an esti...

It was painful to sit in December's Labor Committee meeting and listen to the Department of Health and others advocate for Medicaid expansion. This is such a terrible idea in so many ways that it is hard to know where to begin explaining what is wrong with it. We get help from Gillette's Doctor John Mansell, who is on the front lines treating patie...

Happy New Year, taxpayers! If you live in Wyoming you are probably very happy not to have to pay income taxes. Make the most of it for now - you never know when the state may find itself at a point where it needs to introduce a personal income tax. Actually, strike that. We can foresee the income tax with fairly good accuracy. Let me first stress t...

Police officers stationed at schools are generally known as School Resource Officers (SROs). According to the National Association of School Resource Officers (NASRO), the formalized organization of SROs began in 1991 although alternative sources predate the existence of SROs by several decades. Irrespective of the history of SROs there is little d...

For months we have been investigating problems associated with troubled youth in the state of Wyoming. Recently we published a series of reports on How to Keep Kids Out of Jail. Within this series is a piece focusing on the presence of School Resource Officers increasingly in schools. An inflammatory news article appeared in the press just before C...

According to juvenile justice advocates such as the ACLU, the School to Prison Pipeline prioritizes incarceration over education due to several factors including failing public schools, zero tolerance policies, increased reliance on police for school discipline, "alternative schools" for disciplinary problem students, court involvement and juvenile...

The juvenile justice system in Wyoming is unique in the country. It would be pleasing to have a juvenile justice system unique due to its stellar qualities, but unfortunately, Wyoming stands alone based on its failure to achieve even the most basic expectations standard in juvenile justice systems in the rest of the country. One of Wyoming's diverg...

I intended this to be an upbeat resource-rich article highlighting success stories, strategies and promising new approaches to keep children out of the juvenile justice system. In the course of researching for this paper I certainly did find some promising trends and programs and I will mention them and explain why they offer exciting possibilities...

The Legislative Service Office continues to post bills that will be introduced next month when the Wyoming Legislature convenes for the 2015 General Session. Recent appearances include some proposed joint resolutions. On the House side so far there is a proposed amendment to the Wyoming Constitution that would make the Wyoming superintendent of sch...

Steve Klein and Glenn Woods from Boldrepublic.com discuss civil asset forfeiture in Wyoming and Senate File 14 (2015), which would reform Wyoming law to only allow for forfeiture of property after owners are convicted of a crime. 

In October, comedian John Oliver discussed the practice of civil asset forfeiture on his HBO program "Last Week Tonight." His bit closed with a parody of the show "Law & Order," featuring a police detective interrogating a pile of money and another running in dramatic slow motion with a seized toaster. Unfortunately, in real life civil forfeitu...

Jason Gay and Glenn Woods from Boldrepublic.com discuss the federal debt and whether the U.S. can continue to spend nearly $4 trillion annually without the debt finally crushing the economy. 

In late September I submitted comments to the Wyoming Department of Administration and Information ("A&I") opposing two proposed changes to the State of Wyoming Personnel Rules. My memo discussed two vague and overbroad provisions, one which could lead to unconstitutional abridgements of free speech and the other which unequivocally punished ap...

The state government's pending revenue problems, which I pointed to recently, are now beginning to make real headlines. On Sunday the Casper Star Tribune made its contribution: Dear rest of the country: Spare a thought for oil country. Your cheap gas comes at a cost. The national average gas price hit $2.75 a gallon last week, the lowest price for ...

As Wyoming and other states consider expanding the reach of campaign finance laws to capture "dark money," some consideration of what's happening in Chicago is helpful. Aggressive campaign finance regulations, touted as combatting corruption, allow for easy manipulation of the law. We learned last week that Rahm Emanuel pulled in $400,000 in campai...

Although not in the news for a while, the efforts to classify internet access as a utility are not nearly as benign as they may first appear. Net Neutrality, the innocuous, misleading name chosen by proponents of internet regulation, remains an ongoing issue. Recently, President Obama called for the FCC to act unilaterally. There is a major push on...

On November 26, 2014, the Wyoming Department of Health presented its SHARE report, a 32-page long argument for Medicaid expansion. The report makes a pro-expansion case that appears to sprawl in all directions, but perhaps the biggest selling point is that Medicaid expansion will create hundreds of new jobs and add millions of dollars to the state'...

In mid-November, Wyoming Attorney General Peter Michael joined an amicus (friend-of-the-court) brief filed in a Maryland case that will soon be heard in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. The case, Kolbe v. O'Malley, challenges a law recently enacted in Maryland that bans numerous semi-automatic rifles in the state and limit...

Our introductory blog on this topic focused on the premises of graduate criminal justice fellow Brice Hamack's recent article in the Wyoming Law Review. It is important to clarify that while Mr. Hamack's general concerns are well founded, Wyoming's juvenile justice system has uniquely entrenched problems unique from and, in many ways, worse than th...