State Auditor Shad White: Fatherlessness, Labor Woes, School Choice, and Public Safety

In this episode, host Grant Callen sits down with Mississippi's 42nd State Auditor, Shad White. They discuss Mississippi’s incredible cultural and economic advantages and our challenges, like our low Labor Force Participation Rate and our high number of unwed mothers. White advocates for addressing critical issues like single-parent households, introducing The Success Sequence, and incorporating essential life skills into school curricula.

The episode also delves into education policy, emphasizing the importance of supporting teachers, addressing overtesting, and the need for school choice through charter schools and education savings accounts (ESAs). White shared his legislative priorities for the current legislative session, including the whistleblower reward act, amendments to the Open Meetings Act, a reevaluation of higher education spending, and scholarship incentives for graduates of mentorship programs, specifically highlighting the positive impact of JROTC.

Transcript 

Welcome to the Empower Podcast, the show where we talk about Mississippi's big challenges and big opportunities. Each episode, we'll talk with lawmakers, policy experts, and community leaders about how we can break down barriers together to create a Mississippi where everyone can rise.

Grant Callen: Welcome back. This is Grant Callen. Thanks for tuning in. I am super excited about today's conversation with, my friend, fellow Jones County native, and Mississippi's 42nd state auditor, Shad White. Auditor White and I both grew up in the Free State of Jones, of course you were in Sandersville. I'm from Laurel, about 10 miles apart.

Shad White: The big city.

Grant Callen: The big city, you graduated from the University of Mississippi. Where you earned a bachelor's degree in economics and political science. In 2008, you were named a Rhodes Scholar. You have a master's from the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. A law degree from Harvard. You were appointed as State Auditor, by Governor Phil Bryant in 2018 and elected to that office in 2019 and then re elected for a full term last year. You are married to Rina, and you have two children. .

Shad White: Three.

Grant Callen: Three.

Shad White: Just keep adding.

Grant Callen: I can't keep up, and you live in Rankin County. State Auditor Shad White, welcome to the show.

Shad White: It's good to be here, man. It's good to see you again.

Grant Callen: I have been looking forward to this conversation for a number of reasons. But let's just start with this question. So you have lived in D. C., Cambridge Massachusetts, the United Kingdom, maybe other places. You could live anywhere. And yet, after your education, you chose to come back here. Why Mississippi? Why did you come back here? Why do you want to put down roots here?

Shad White: It's a good question, and I think the root of the answer is I just love Mississippi. I grew up here. I think I grew up in an ideal environment, I loved growing up in Jones County, I grew up in a town of 700 people, and I loved knowing my neighbors, I loved being able to fish with my grandfather on the weekends, I loved growing up where I grew up. And of course my family is still here. I met my wife in law school, her family is from Slidell Louisiana, so not far, we grew up about a an hour and 30 minutes or so, from each other. And so I knew that I wanted to be close to family, I knew I wanted to be in Mississippi because I thought Mississippi was a great place to raise a family, I wanted to have a family I knew that. And then on top of that, I felt like I understood Mississippi and I could contribute back to Mississippi in a way that I would never feel about anywhere else if I moved to, New York or stayed in D. C. or moved to California, I would never understand California, might not want to understand California, and I might never be able to contribute in the way that I thought I could contribute back to Mississippi, and so it was really a no brainer for me, I'll tell you this fast story. In law school, about your second year of law school, you do this big week of interviews with law firms. So the law firms at Harvard descend on campus and they come from Wall Street and D. C. and all over the place.

Grant Callen: I've watched Suits. So I have.

Shad White: I've actually never seen an episode of Suits so this is, I guess I'm confirming the reality of Suits at this moment. It's about a week and you sign up for this process and then you go through all these interviews with all these law firms and of course the job placement rate is about a hundred percent. You will find a law firm that likes you and you'll like them.

I knew that I wanted to be back in Mississippi. And I just, I not only did not sign up for that interview week, I purposefully booked interviews with Mississippi law firms that same week. Instead of being in Cambridge Massachusetts, I got on a plane and flew back to Mississippi and did interviews with Mississippi law firms that I set up on my own because I wanted to be back here, and in one of the interviews I got asked by a partner, look this is neat that you're back here and interviewing. Why should we give you a summer internship and think about hiring you if you're just going to go off to some other big city firm? Are you just going to take our money for the summer internship and then never show back up again? And I told them no, and the proof is that I burned the boats behind me. I don't have another interview with any other firms because I specifically rejected those interviews, I want to be here in Mississippi and thank goodness that was compelling enough that firm gave me an offer. So I just knew pretty early on that I wanted to be back here and really in my life that is born out, I'm super happy with the life that I have here, I'm able to give back through my position as state auditor, we see my family all the time, we see my wife's family all the time, this is a great place to raise kids, cost of living here is low. You can make a real difference here, my commute is not that bad, there's just tons of advantages of living in Mississippi that don't get talked about in the national media.

Grant Callen: So you've hit on a couple of those, but like when you think about what sets us apart from other places, big picture, what are the advantages that Mississippi has that other places don't?

Shad White: Well, I was watching Fox News this week and they were talking about this study that showed a record number of people are moving to new states, because of cost of living. So inflation is a big deal right now Mississippi has the lowest cost of living of any state in the entire country so I think that's a big deal for young folks who are trying to figure out how they're gonna afford their first home or whatever It may be you need to know that it's easier to buy that first home here in the state of Mississippi.

Grant Callen: Your money's going further.

Shad White: Your money's going further exactly right. I do think for folks who have family ties back here that family is very important, and I hear folks in maybe their mid 20's say, I don't really care about being that close to my parents or whatever it may be. I tell them that changes, over time especially if you have a family of your own that changes dramatically once you have kids, you want your kids to know their grandparents, you need the grandparents help to so that you can have a date night with your husband or wife occasionally. So there's some built in advantages. The other thing that I think is a really cool advantage is Mississippi has got a ton of momentum, especially relative to other states, you look at how crazy some other states are going, look at the crime rates in some of the cities around the country. We've got a big and longstanding commitment to law enforcement here in Mississippi, so we've got some structural advantages just based around our values that I think a lot of states don't have, and we can use that to make Mississippi better and overcome some of our big challenges. We just need good people to be back here and to work on those big challenges and that's part of what excites me about Mississippi too.

Grant Callen: Yeah, and I just concur growing up here, spending a little bit of time out of the state, but knowing I wanted to be back and now having five kids here, and in laws close all of that stuff is worthwhile and makes this a special place. But you can't spend time here and you can't spend time other places and look back on Mississippi without being clear eyed about some of our challenges. What would you tick off as maybe our top couple of big, strategic, concerning challenges that you see either growing up here or now in your position as state auditor?

Shad White: Yeah, to start that conversation, I would say let's be honest about the progress that Mississippi has made and then what progress has yet to be made, back in the 1950's, the poverty rate in Mississippi was about 50 percent so about half of the state was in poverty. Today, it's 20 percent. On economic metrics like that we have improved over time and in fact we're catching up to other states. Our median income back in the 1950's was much, much lower than the national average today, it's caught up a good bit with the national average. The thing is, though that we haven't actually leapfrogged many states on these metrics, so even though our poverty rate has improved, we haven't leapfrogged other states so we still rank 50th. So we get down in the mouth a bit when we say, Oh, Mississippi's last and everything, Mississippi's last and everything. You have to realize that Mississippi has made incredible strides just looking at the economic data, over the course of the last 70 years or so. So that's, I think the background context.

Grant Callen: And then there's that next question of how do we continue making progress? What are our big challenges? What do we really need to address in order to go to the next level?

Shad White: So the first thing that comes to mind and I think you and I share this passion, is the labor force in Mississippi has really struggled to keep up with the demand for jobs, and the fancy term for this is our labor force participation rate, that's the percentage of adults over the age of 16 who are either working or are looking for work. And Mississippi ranks dead last among all the states for labor force participation, the last time I looked at the number from the Federal Reserve, our labor force participation was about 54 percent. So only 54 percent of adults are going to work or are looking for work every day and the remaining some odd percent, 45 plus percent are not and that's a big challenge, I think.

I'm very lucky in my job because I get to travel around the state. I get to talk to a ton of business leaders. I spoke this week at DeSoto County in front of probably 35, 40 business leaders. And the thing that I hear over and over again is my business is primed for growth. I have demand. I could sign more contracts, I could produce more goods, I could produce more services tomorrow if I had the people. That's the thing I hear over and over again. The U. S. Chamber of Commerce ranks states based on their labor force shortage, and we right now are among the worst states for our labor force shortage so we just have more jobs than we have people who can do those jobs. And I think the core question that we have to face over the course of the next 20 30 years is how do we get more of those folks who are sitting on the sidelines into the labor force. And then also, for our young people who are coming up, who are going to be dynamic, engaged workers, who are definitely going to be in the labor force, how do we keep more of those folks, or how do we get them back here to Mississippi? If we can answer that challenge over the course of the next 20 or 30 years, our economy is primed to explode in the same way that you've seen South Carolina explode, Georgia East Tennessee, but if we don't, we are not going to be able to achieve the potential that I think the state has.

Grant Callen: On that issue, and I 100 percent agree it is a key measure of what I think is a deeper challenge here. What's going on? I think culturally we probably have more stay at home moms or dads that have made a decision that is actually a healthy sign, not a concerning sign. That they want one parent at home caring for kids full time, not in the workforce but that would be measured in this low

Shad White: labor force participation.

Grant Callen: But that's clearly not the only thing that's going on. What do you think are the other reasons why Mississippi is worse compared to Alabama or other states in this measure?

Shad White: There are a bunch of different cross cutting things that may move our labor force participation rate up or down relative to other states. One I heard the other day, which was not right was that Mississippi has a large elderly population, and that's why we have so many people on the sidelines so I looked it up and said, okay let's look and see what the average age of a Mississippian is compared to states like Florida which are typically considered retirement states. We're nowhere close to one of the 10 oldest states in the country, so there's a lot of different pieces of this conversation that I think we need to sort through to figure out, why this number this labor force number is the way it is. I'll tell you one that really sticks in my mind that I think we need to focus on.

Mississippi unfortunately leads the nation in the percentage of children born into single parent homes. And that number for whatever reason seems to be pretty correlated with the percentage of adults, who are not in the labor force for example we're the worst when it comes to single parent households, and West Virginia is second worst. We're the worst when it comes to labor force participation, low and behold West Virginia is second worst when it comes to labor force participation. If you dig into the social science around why this might be, we know that kids who grow up in a single parent home without an engaged dad are 20 times more likely to end up in prison, so they're not going to be in the labor force. They're five times more likely to be in poverty, probably not in the labor force. They're nine times less likely to finish high school. Maybe not prepared to do a job. In my mind, we've got to focus on metrics like this. We've got a ton of, sadly, broken families and kids who are growing up in a tough environment, and then we magically expect them to be successful productive workers when they turn 18 or 22. And my argument is, a lot of those folks are just simply not going to have the soft skills that they need to take to hold a job, and that is what is driving that big labor force number. To go back to one of the original points. If that is part of what's driving it, we've got to have a deep conversation about how we change that, you can't go around with shotguns and tell the daddies to get back in the homes and raise their kids, right? You have to have a complicated conversation about what we do to address that if that's actually leading to a labor force that's not producing the workers it needs to.

Grant Callen: Yeah, so one of the aspects of what you're getting at is what you and I have talked a lot about, which is the success sequence. For our listeners who may not be familiar, the success sequence is this idea that really a left leaning think tank, the Brookings Institute arrived at by analyzing the characteristics of those who were prospering. And they found that. If kids basically follow this three part success sequence, it virtually guarantees they stay out of poverty. And the three things are pretty simple. Graduate high school. Get a job. Wait to have kids until after marriage. And what Brookings found was, just by looking at the data, kids that follow that path they have a 97 percent chance of staying out of poverty, and a 75 percent chance of being in the middle class. I think growing up in Mississippi, it's not hard to believe that kind of thing would work, that's just common sense, that's the way we were raised. Why is it so hard to follow that path? And, what can we do to help more kids choose that path?

Shad White: I think the last thing that you said is really important that's how you and I were raised. My parents didn't know research from the Brookings Institute, and they didn't know about something called the success sequence. But they gave me that knowledge that you're talking about, and it was just be smart. Make good decisions. Here are some of the examples of good decisions that you need to make in order to set yourself up well in life, and I feel very lucky that I had two stable parents, not everybody had this, not everybody in my family had this, who could give me that knowledge. And then it was just intuitive, that's what you were going to do, you were going to finish high school. I was not going to get a girl pregnant before I got married and got a job. So these are all basic common sense things to a lot of us, but there are just a lot of kids out there who are not growing up in an environment where they're being taught this. So what can we do? That's the next question. I've been really interested, there's this charter school in New York that has latched onto the success sequence, and they've decided to roll this into their curriculum for their kids in high school. In my mind at the end of the day, if you're a high school kid, you ought to be able to wake up and spout off the success sequence almost like it's the Pledge of Allegiance. You should know this, you should have it memorized because this is really critical, these decisions are really critical for you and your long run success in life. I think we need to do more to teach those kids who are growing up in an environment where they don't know this, where they're not being taught this, that Hey, here's the key right here, and if you don't want to end up in poverty, if you don't want to go down that path, then here are three basic things you can do and if you do them, 97 percent chance you're not going to end up in poverty. That's part of the solution I think, and if we focus on stuff like that, you can really start to unwind this problem of kids growing up in a tough environment without the mentors, without the lessons they need to learn and then ending up in a place that they don't want to end up.

Grant Callen: And I think the way you just described it is a key distinctive of the way we need to talk about it. This is not necessarily moralizing, and it's not necessarily that our schools, certainly our public schools, need to be moralizing and slapping kids on the wrist and it's more about teaching kids the statistics of this, like if you just look at the outcomes that work best for kids who follow this versus the kids who don't follow this, the outcomes are so much better for kids who follow this. And we ought to be explaining this to kids like we explain a lot of other things in life that will produce better outcomes.

Shad White: We teach them how to drive. We teach driver's ed. You stop at the stop sign. This is a choice that you must make and stopping every time is going to be good for you. These are important life skills that we're already teaching in high schools. Let's add the other important stuff in there. The stuff that can lead to long run success, and we know that works to if you look at some of the charter schools around the country. I know Kip is an example of one, they adopt a mantra for their kids, their kids almost sing a song back to the teachers about how important colleges and low and behold, more of them end up going to college. It's not rocket science, tell kids what's important, pounded into their brains, and they're more likely to follow your advice, especially when they hear it at a young age.

Grant Callen: So I want to come back to charters in just a second but, one more follow up on this and that is why are so many people so afraid to talk about the importance of marriage before children? It is statistically, empirically, social science is very clear. The benefits of marriage are profound. And yet In elite circles, most people are terrified to talk about the benefit of it like we're somehow wagging our finger at somebody who didn't get married or a marriage that fell apart. And let's be clear, there are plenty of reasons where people might find themselves in a broken marriage or a broken family. Many times it's not their own fault. And to say kids do better in intact families is not to say that kids can't have a great life and succeed and do well without that. Kids overcome all kinds of things, but statistically it's clear they do better in intact families.

Shad White: That's right.

Grant Callen: Why are we so afraid to talk about marriage?

Shad White: I think It comes back to this attitude of some folks say if you say that out loud you're bad mouthing single moms. And I'll just tell you this quick story, we produced a study in my office in the auditor's office about the cost of fatherlessness to the taxpayers in Mississippi. And one of the first things that I heard from people in my office, we have a very nice woman who's on the support staff at the office, so she's not an auditor, she hadn't seen this report until it came out publicly, a single mom. She came up to me and she said, thank you for writing that report. First time she's ever told me, thank you for writing an auditor and analysis. She said, these men need to step up. So actual single mothers know this is true. I have single mothers in my own family, they know this is true. And sometimes you can't help get divorced if you have an abusive husband or something like that, but they know. They know, single mothers know that two parent households are important, and they want somebody to stand up and say, Dads, you need to get it together. And you need to stand up for your kids and you need to come and help raise your kids, they want that. Now, there's this other subset of society, and I find it to be overwhelmingly left leaning. There are folks who say, you can't say this out loud. It is demeaning to single mothers. And some of them, when we came out with the fatherlessness study said, Oh you can't say that because it's racist. You can't say that it's so mean. And then I look at their families, if you look at some of the research on that's come out from Charles Murray, he's pointed out that a lot of successful liberal families tell their kids that you need to get married before having children yourself. So they're telling them this stuff, these secrets to success, but they don't want it said out loud. They don't want to set out loud to the rest of society. So that's the stuff that, it's a little bit annoying to me and also at the same time, is driving this apprehension to talk about the importance of marriage, and it's just further proof really that we've got to as folks who actually read this research, as folks who have seen the benefits of marriage, we have a moral responsibility to stand up in the community and talk about how important it is. And if we do that, we can change some lives. But if we bow to the folks who say no, you can't say that. Don't say that out loud, that's mean to somebody or this person or that person. You got to realize that they're coming from a place from a hypocritical place, they're probably telling their kids the opposite. They just don't want you to impart that knowledge to the rest of society.

Grant Callen: Yeah they're practicing these principles. I heard somebody say recently, we got to start preaching what we practice. Which is exactly what you're talking about.

Shad White: That's exactly right.

Grant Callen: So let's talk about education. We've touched on it a little bit, you mentioned charters. But before we get into specific policy, solutions within education. How's our system doing? How would you grade Mississippi's education system?

Shad White: I would say improving. That's the word I would use. You can look at our fourth grade reading and math scores on nationally standardized tests, and we're improving, which is really encouraging. And I think that improvement started about 2013 when we had the charter school law, when we had the third grade reading gate statute for those of you who followed all that, I was a baby staffer in the state Senate back in 2011. And I can remember back then. We were not improving as an education system, and in that session that I worked in 2011 I worked with legislators and a whole bunch of people got together and we drafted some early versions of a charter school bill and a third grade reading gate bill and it never got off the ground because the house at the time was controlled by Democrats everything that got sent over there that had to do with education reform died. But in 2013, that changed, or had changed, big education reform year, and then since then you've seen improvement, especially in our 4th grade reading and math scores. The reason I would say improving, but not where we need to be, is you still see some fading effects after 4th grade when you look at Mississippi's ACT scores, for example. So we've had kids that have gone through their K 12 education that got the benefit of either a charter school or the third grade reading gate or whatever it may be, but some of the benefits are fading later in their educational career and so that's the next challenge that I think we have to overcome. One thing that I've worked on as state auditor, because it's not my job to find the next curriculum that works well. It's not my job to go into schools and tell principals do this or that differently. But it is my job to look at how we're spending money. And one argument that I've made from my position is we can improve our schools if we focus on spending more money in the classroom. So if you look back at the most recent 10 years of data that we captured a couple of years ago, the number of students in Mississippi K 12 schools are going down. The number of teachers is going down, but the amount of administrative spending is going up somehow. So if you,

Grant Callen: The staffing surge.

Shad White: Yeah. Exactly. And it's back office staffing. It's not teacher staffing. And I say this as the son of a public school teacher who taught public schools for 35 years, two of my four grandparents were public school teachers. We know that there is an issue where we need more resources in the classroom. But my concern is that it's not getting there, the resources are not getting there. And so I think we really need to focus on how do we get these dollars from administrative back office functions into the classroom, because that's where they're making a difference. McKinsey did this big study a couple of years ago and they looked at the most improved school systems in the world. So U. S. systems, school districts, all the way to Chile and everywhere else. These school districts differed in a variety of ways. Sometimes they had big classes, sometimes they had small classes, sometimes they had really extensive teacher training programs, sometimes they didn't. The one thing that they had in common across the world, if I could summarize that study, is teachers were highly valued, whether it was by money, pay, or reputation. Which in a lot of East Asian countries. Teachers were highly valued. If you get a talented person in the classroom, in front of kids, that's the number one thing you can do to help those kids. So that's where we got to focus our resources. How do we get money into the classroom, teacher salaries, supplies into the classroom and not being spent on back office functions. That's I think our next big challenge.

Grant Callen: So as I talk to teachers across the state and parents and teachers are united, in the belief that we over test that we are, we have taken out the best asset that we have, which is the value of a teacher standing in front of a classroom, having the freedom to meet kids where they are, slow down a little bit if they need to, or speed up a little bit if they're already getting the subject matter. And I talked to teacher after teacher in every corner who feels like maybe an unintended consequence of all of this progress that we have made, which some of that has come from focusing on testing. We have overcompensated and we're in a place now where teachers at least feel like, we are testing all the time and it's really wearing on them, and parents feel the same way their kids are stressed, because of all the testing. So this is not a monetary thing, but people are leaving the profession. Some of our best and brightest teachers are leaving because they're just frustrated with the environment. Do you have ideas on what we do to return some of that classroom freedom that empowers teachers to do their job well?

Shad White: Yeah, I'll tell you what I did a couple of years ago because I, My intuition was that these folks were right, that we were over testing, so I signed up to be a test proctor at Brandon Middle School, and I tried to hide, I tried to not tell them who I was, it was just like, I'm just a random citizen who would like to come and be a test proctor, and for the first half of the day, I think they didn't know who I was, and then I think they figured it out after that but I was a test proctor at Brandon Middle School, because I wanted to see this process for myself, and just sat in there and maybe the most nervous I ever was when the teacher walked out of the room and was like, proctor's got you for the next 30 minutes. Oh my God, what happens if they start throwing chairs and the kids were really good. But I left that day with the same intuition based on my conversations with the teachers when I asked how many weeks per year you spending in testing, how many weeks per year you spending in test prep all that sort of stuff that we are over testing.

I do think that you have to have tests. You have to be able to study how far kids have come, two plus two is always going to be four and you have to know if a kid knows that. There's no way around it. So you have to test some, but I do think that we are over testing based on just my anecdotal conversations with these teachers. What can we do? I think there are things at the state level that we could do, maybe a greater reliance on tests that kids already take, like the ACT. Some of the problem is the federal government, the federal government is telling us, hey, you have to participate in this and that test in order to draw down funding. So there's really nothing we can do with that. And we're just, as a system, as parents, as teachers, we're just going to have to comply with it. There's no other way around it. I really do think, though, that if you're up front with teachers about that, if you make the state testing requirements as clean and as easy as possible, and then you boost teacher pay, you will have teachers who will say, you know what? Yes, that two weeks that we're testing in the spring is going to be painful or whatever the amount of time is. But I'm willing to stick this out because I'm being compensated because I care about my kids and because I want my community to do well. I think that goes a long way if we continue boosting teacher pay.

Grant Callen: So let's talk about school choice. You mentioned charters. Charter schools are public and they're really one of kind of three types of school choice, that I think of. So you have school choice is the umbrella term. And under that, you have charters because kids get to choose to go to a charter. Charters are independent public schools. They're not under the local district, but they're free for parents to attend. The second type is open enrollment or district transfers, where you can choose a different public school than maybe the one you're zoned for or your school district. So you might live in one town and decide a school in a neighboring town is really a better fit. The third type. Is private choice, or in Mississippi, it's often talked about as Education Savings Accounts ESA's where you could direct usually the state portion of your child's education dollars, that parents would control, and you could take that and shop around and find a private school that meets your needs. So when you think about those, you mentioned charters. Do you support school choice and what role do you think choice plays in the overall outcome of kids?

Shad White: I'm a big proponent of empowering parents and making sure that they're able to make these decisions for their kids because parents understand better than anybody. Where their kids need to be in school and the specific needs of their child. Let's start with charter schools, I think the charter school movement has had good success here in Mississippi over the course of the last few years, one of the frustrations is that charters, based on my conversations with folks in that space, have a hard time figuring out how to get approved by our authorizer board. So I think the authorizer board needs to do a better job of helping escort those charters through the process, their goal needs to be to get more charters successfully through the process so that they can serve kids. And then I think that will open up the whole process and we'll get more applicants, you'll get more charter schools in Mississippi, you'll get more options for parents, which is a really good thing. I love our ESAs and I think they need to be expanded. I think parents need more options and more kinds of parents need options not just students who may have a disability. And really that, again, is going to go a long way to making sure that kids are in the ideal educational environment.

You hear a lot of stories of, oh if you do that's going to bleed money out of the schools. Where is it bleeding the money to? It's bleeding the money to the kids education. I thought that's what we were supposed to be focused on. We're not focused on funding buildings or systems. We're focused on funding kids. Kids education. That's the whole idea behind taxing people and then putting it in a big pool and saying, we're going to give some of your money to a different child over here so they get educated. We focus on the kid because we think that person is going to grow up and give back to our community, and that's going to be a good thing, so that's where we need to keep our focus, not on funding institutions, buildings, or specific districts, but on kids, focusing on kids. And, the other big pushback that I hear is the money that goes out and follows that kid, it's going to hurt individual school districts. You pointed out most of the ESAs that I know of move state money. With the kid over to their new school and the local money and sometimes the federal money stays, so you could actually end up with a situation where the school district that the kid has left now has more money per student than they did before because they've lost a student but they haven't lost the full dollar amount that should go with that student. This is really a win for a lot of people. Most importantly, it's a win for parents. And that's what we should be focused on, we shouldn't be focused on, are we doing right by this school district and their administration? I'm not concerned about the adults as much as I am about the kids. I had a conversation with a buddy of mine. This is back in law school and he was studying for his economics PhD and I asked him, what have you learned from this econ PhD when you read social science? When you look at the best interventions that are out there to make society better, the best government investments, what have you learned? And he said, you want to know the biggest takeaway from a big read of all the papers that I've read in the last two or three years is that investments in kids go a really long way. And investments in adults, frankly, just don't go that far. So he asked me, he said, let me ask you a political question now, why don't more people in policymaking positions focus on what's good for kids as opposed to adults? And I told him it's because kids don't vote. Kids don't vote that's the whole problem. Is that kids don't vote and kids shouldn't vote because they're not mentally prepared to, but we as adults who do vote, who are in policymaking positions, we should acknowledge that our focus should be on helping these children and if we do that, our society is going to be better in the long run. If we endlessly focus on is this going to be good for the administration of that school district? Then we're not. We're not going to solve our problems.

Grant Callen: And the beautiful thing is when you look at the empirical data on school choice. And I'm particularly thinking about the private school choice programs. We don't have to sacrifice our public schools for school choice. School choice is a win for both, for some of the same reason, you mentioned the financial side of it, that they end up having more money per child for the kids that are left behind, which is a win. But the studies show academically traditional public schools do better when you introduce choice into the equation and so, why do you think everybody wants to force, especially politicians. Why do we want to force you guys to choose? I am for public schools or I'm for choice. You're a product of public schools. They're not at odds with each other, right?

Shad White: I don't think they're at odds with each other at all. You're either four kids or you're not four kids. That's the way I think about it. But look, there's some old ideas out there that have been disproven about the money being sucked out of schools, about the benefits, the academic benefits to choice, there are some old ideas out there that are hard to kill. And there are a lot of people whose jobs they think depend on them killing this new research or discussion of this new research, and they apply political pressure. So I'll just tell you a story. I wrote an Op-ed several weeks ago. Where I talked about spending in the public school system, but then I had a one off sentence in there about how we needed more choice and we needed to empower parents. Really was not the point of the Op-ed, but it was one sentence in the Op-ed. I got a call from a lobbyist, who I'm not going to name, and this lobbyist was not lobbying for a public school interest or anything like that, they're the lobbyist for an organization that has nothing to do with education policy. And he threatened me and he said, I am not going to allow my association to donate any more money to your campaign if you continue talking about school choice. And I said, forgive me, but tell me what blank your industry has to do with parent choice. And he said I've just got members who are concerned. I just said no you don't, your parents, your members have never talked to you about this is not something that they that comes up in your association meetings. You just made that up, you just happen to personally believe some of these outdated narratives about what parent choice actually means and you're politically pressuring me to back off of this as a policy topic. And so I just told him, I don't care. Go run back and tell your members that. I actually called his association president after that and asked him, hey, do you have a problem with me talking about parental choice? And he said, what's that? I said, school choice. And he said, what's that? And I said, exactly. So then I explained it in the conversation and I don't think it went well for that lobbyist after he got a call from his association president. But the point is this, there are people out there who want to pressure politicians to back off of this. They don't like it. And for whatever reason, a lot of politicians cave, but look, man I've arrested, I feel like half of Mississippi at this point and made the other half mad, so I've learned a valuable lesson in my time as state auditor. You cannot forsake what you think is good and right and true because of some perceived political pressure. You're better off just standing up and doing what you think is right. And then letting the political chips just fall where they may.

Grant Callen: That's good. So I want to get to one other topic that the other leg to this labor force participation issue, and our state economist, six months ago or so, did a report on the labor force participation problem, the challenge here, and he identified two big areas, the first being our historically broken education system, to your point we've made some progress, and I think there's a real path for more progress. But the other one he mentioned is our criminal justice system. We have the highest prison population as per capita as a percentage of our citizens of any state in the nation. We have so many people behind bars, and then that doesn't even account for the people who have served time who are now out, they've paid their debt to society, and they're trying to rebuild their life, but they have a felony conviction. And his point in his report was that, both education challenges and this oversized, overcrowded prison population feeds into our labor force challenges. Do you accept the premise that we have a justice problem? And what do you think we do about it?

Shad White: I don't think that what he's saying proves that we have a justice problem. And I'll just throw one counter statistic out there. We have a ton of people in prison per capita. We also have a ton of homicides per capita. In fact, the CDC says Mississippi ranks number one and has ranked number one for several years in homicides per capita. Let's just take homicides, if you got a murderer and you catch him, you throw him in jail, guess what we're going to have more murderers in jail per capita than every other state? But you gotta throw them in jail, right? Because they're a murderer. So my point in rebuttal to the economist is, you got to look at how many crimes are being committed. You have to look at how many crimes are being committed and then ask the question, are we imprisoning more people than there were crimes? And do we have a problem where we're throwing folks in jail at the smallest slip up, or, it could be the opposite actually, it could be what we got a ton of crimes being committed in. And frankly we're not putting enough people in jail, even though we're number one in per capita crimes. So I don't think that just the one stat, we have more people per capita in prison proves what's going on. So what I would say is this we need to have better data in our criminal justice system to understand the real issues, and this has been a big push from both the right and the left, I think nationally. We don't have a consistent way of tracking what crimes have been committed around the state, and I think there ought to be a system where localities are given funding, and also funding is stipulated on the premise that you gotta keep your data in a consistent way with everybody else in maybe a single system, and then we'll have more information about, how many crimes are being committed, how many people are in prison.

Here's another thing that makes me a bit skeptical of the idea that, oh, we got a bunch of people in prison and therefore that's proof that there's a justice problem. If you look nationwide, the average person who is in prison has been arrested more than 10 times. And this is according to research from Raphael Mangual, at the Manhattan Institute. I don't know what that number is specifically in Mississippi, but this is the nationwide average. So some folks have told me, gosh, we just got to let more people out of prison because they deserve a second chance. The truth is most of them got a second chance and a third and a fourth and a fifth. And most of them on average are on their 11th 12th 13th chance. So really, you've got to acknowledge that, we have structures in place in our justice system that are allowed, and have shown mercy to people and said, all right this is your first slip up or we can't prove this case and we got to let you out. There are structures in place to prevent imprisoning somebody who's not actually guilty. But unfortunately, we've got a bunch of people in prison still. And my contention is, it's really highly likely that the reason that's so is that we've got a bunch of people committing crimes. Let's go back to the original stat that we talked about earlier. We lead the nation in single parent homes. And then, look down the stream in somebody's life, a person growing up without an engaged father, 20 times more likely to end up in prison. There is cause to believe that we have a crime problem in Mississippi, not a justice problem at the outset, that's what I would say.

Grant Callen: But wouldn't it stand to reason that if we as a percentage of our population have more people behind bars than any other state in the country, and frankly, any other place on the planet, because the U. S. locks up more people than any other country per capita. Wouldn't it stand to reason that we would be the safest place in the country, because we have relied on incarceration so much and the data certainly doesn't show you're right, we have a homicide problem and we don't have the worst crime in the country, but we certainly don't have the best crime, or the least amount of crap.

Shad White: Yeah, I do think that there's ample research to suggest that if you get people off the streets who are committing especially violent crime that it makes their neighborhoods safer, but what we're unfortunately seeing in Mississippi is an endless stream of people who have criminal behavior, or have a tendency toward criminal behavior. Again, we lock up a ton of folks, but we continue to lead the nation in homicides per capita. We lock up a ton of folks, but our state capital is number one in homicides per capita for any city bigger than 100, 000 folks.

Grant Callen: Then you say what do we do?

Shad White: You can't let the murderers out, you can't say, Oh the solution then I guess if this isn't working is just to start letting people out. I don't think you can do that. I think you have to acknowledge the vast body of research that says more police and incapacitation, meaning taking especially violent criminals off the street and putting them in prison. That equals, less crime, I don't know if you read Richard Lasser's work he has a book called the rise and fall of violent crime in America, it's considered the canonical work of criminology in the United States. And the basic point is to save you from reading 400 pages, the basic point is the more young males who have exhibited violent or sociopathic behavior you take off the streets, the less crime you get. We have to continue arresting and putting people in jail who are terrorizing their communities, there's no way around it. But we also have to acknowledge, alright, maybe we need to get at these kids a little bit earlier so that they don't end up feeding this endless stream of people who become criminals later on in life. I think that's the way to approach the question.

Grant Callen: And I would agree 100 percent. Violent people, dangerous people need to be caught and they need to be caught swiftly.

Shad White: Yep.

Grant Callen: One of the principles of criminology that folks on the left and right have come to agree, because the research supports it, is that the certainty of apprehension matters a lot more than the severity of the sentence.

Shad White: Yeah.

Grant Callen: Meaning, for somebody who is maybe contemplating a crime. If they know, they are very likely to be caught and put behind bars very quickly. They are much less likely to go on and act on that and do the crime, rather than thinking some down the road about this is a 20 year sentence rather than a 10 year sentence. One of our principles and approaches to justice reform at Empower is particularly for nonviolent offenses. Maybe where somebody has an addiction issue. Again I'm not talking about people that are dangerous, but people that have brokenness and addiction issues, a lot of times we lean on incarceration as the first way to handle that instead of a last resort. And it's my belief that for people with an addiction issue, a lot of times incarceration is not going to help them, it's going to make their addiction worse because there's more drugs in prison than out. They're not going to be able to rebuild their life whereas drug court or treatment is a better approach. And then the second principle is just that we got to be smart about sentences. Both for taxpayers, communities, and families. If a five year sentence is statistically and empirically going to help that person pay for their crime and rebuild their life, why throw the book at them for a 15 or 20 year sentence? When five years would have done it.

Shad White: Yeah I think your first sentence is well taken on the research around speed of justice versus the prison sentence, but what you're talking about in that sentence is deterrence, right? You're talking about what sort of prison sentence or operation of the justice system is going to deter other folks from committing crimes. So I agree that's only one reason that you would lock somebody up, another reason you would lock somebody up is incapacitation. We want to get this violent dude off because generally it's men. We want to get this violent guy off the streets, out of his community. We do not really care if it deters other people from committing similar crimes, we just know that he is a violent sociopath who is terrorizing this community and we're going to get him off the streets for 20 years to let that community heal, so that he's not terrorizing the kids and the mamas and the grandmas around there. I think you have to bear that in mind too when you're looking at devising a system of prison sentences. You got to also think about, all right, not only do we think about what is this going to do to this individual who we're imprisoning, what about all the people who live near his house and what are they going to think if we let him out in five years and he's back doing the same thing he was doing? The sad truth of rehabilitation in our prison system, if you look at the data around that, is that rehabilitation is very difficult. It's very difficult to put somebody, put an adult on the right path once they've exhibited violent behavior. In fact again going back to the Mangual research that's really good on this. An alarming number of our prisoners exhibit sociopathic behavior if you look at the studies on the psychological studies on prisoners. Those are folks who, bottom line, you just got to get them off the streets. For the sake of kids, moms and grandmas, you've got to get them off the streets.

So I think that's a part of what we have to think about when we're thinking about prison sentences. And then on the drug situation, I totally agree with you there's tons of folks who are just facing addiction, who are using drugs and prison maybe isn't the best first solution for them. There's this inverse thing though that goes on where people will say yeah, okay, lock up all the violent folks, but we've got too many people in prison for drug related crimes. Some of those folks may be in prison for drug related crimes because they're just addicted and they would be better off in some sort of institution and not in prison to help them get over this addiction. But let's be honest too, some of those folks who are in for drug related crimes are dealing drugs. They are exposing their communities to violence because they are dealing in drugs that kill people, especially with the rise of fentanyl in the United States and they're doing so outside the bounds of the law, which usually means they got guns on them and all kinds of stuff. Really, I don't accept the premise that all drug related crimes, as they are reported in our prison statistics, are people who are, by their nature, non violent and should be given a chance at some sort of outside of prison solution, some of those folks need to go to prison, some of those folks need to be off the streets so that they are not dealing drugs in their communities and so they're not bringing violence to their communities, even if they haven't been convicted of murder.

Grant Callen: I guess I come back to, if simply locking people up and locking more people up were the solution, we would be the safest state.

Shad White: But we're not though, because we have an endless stream of people coming into the criminal system. So I'd go back to the research again, I read Richard Latzer. This is the biggest and most robust summary of FBI statistics. The number one takeaway is, If you get people, especially violent people, off the streets, the world gets safer. It just is.

Grant Callen: So I guess my question would be, are there solutions that would make us safer and would reduce the number of people behind bars that you like? And I guess the second part of that is. Is the number of people in prison a problem to be solved? Or do you think that's just a it's just a necessity? We should be focused on other problems and having the largest prison population in the country is not a problem to be solved.

Shad White: To the second question first, I don't think it's been proven that having the largest number of people in prison per capita is a problem to be solved, until you prove that we also don't have a violent crime problem. So you've got to show that these folks are being unfairly prison, imprisoned, or they're being imprisoned at a rate that is greater than what is necessary, given the amount of crime that's actually happening. And unfortunately, we know there's a good deal of crime happening, violent crime, in the state of Mississippi. The homicide statistic is the example. The first question that you asked is a really good one, so for folks like me who are skeptical of letting more people out of prison and folks who say, no, we've got too big a prison population. We got to get some folks out of there to benefit the taxpayer and it's not the right fit for some people. Where's the overlap in the Venn diagram, right? What are the policy solutions that you can agree to? I do think that drug courts are a great example. The more emphasis that we have on analyzing individual prisoners and what they've been through, especially when it relates to drugs is really important because it's easy to get into a world where you say these two guys had this amount of dope on them, throw them both in prison for the same amount of time. Whereas the more granular and correct answer might be. This guy's strung out and he's addicted. This guy's got a ton of dope on him but he's not strung out. He's clearly selling. He had a ton of firearms on him at the same time. He's a part of a criminal enterprise as best we can tell based on our investigation.

Grant Callen: Which is where judges have to have some kind of discretion to see the humanity and see the differences in their case, even if on paper, they look the same.

Shad White: Not only that but you have to have judges with expertise in that space, which is why I think drug courts are a good solution for problems like that. Let me go back to one other thing though putting aside, drugs and violent crime. I deal every day in white collar crime. So when we arrest somebody, it's always for a non violent offense it's always for embezzlement, it's for fraud, it's for, tons of stuff that relates to financial transactions, but it's not violent inherently. And, I'll be honest, I think those folks ought to go to prison. I really do, if you're going to steal, you ought to go to prison. Now, this raises the question, why should they go to prison? Again to your point about deterrence, maybe it doesn't deter anybody. Maybe a long prison sentence doesn't deter anybody. Can we rehabilitate them? The research according to Eugene Soltis at Harvard Business School around white collar crime is that most people who go to prison for white collar crime think they never did anything wrong at all. So your odds of rehabilitating some of these people, like Dickie Struggs, it's actually fairly small because people go to prison without thinking they did anything wrong. Is it incapacitation? Yeah maybe we don't want that person going around to another school district and stealing another 100, 000 dollars because they did it at the last one, so incapacitation is on the table as a reason. But another reason we imprison people is punitive. We want to send a message to the community, this is not appropriate behavior. You cannot steal from taxpayers. We don't want this to happen. It is against our values. And so I do think that there are examples of nonviolent criminals who need to be imprisoned for that very reason to signal to the community, this is against our values. And so the big question here is how do we make sure that we're punishing behavior that is antithetical to our values as a community? But not in a way that strains taxpayer resources beyond what is necessary to achieve those four goals. And there's not a perfect answer, right? I think that's another thing everybody agrees on is there's not a perfect answer here, it's a matter of talking this through an iterative process of trying policy, seeing what works and what doesn't and then, continuing.

Grant Callen: So I guess last question on this, I see a connection and all these issues are interconnected in different ways, but I see a direct connection between a broken justice system or an overcrowded justice system in my view, and the fatherlessness problem where you've got kids, more kids in Mississippi born to unwed mothers and then growing up without a father and sometimes it's a mother but statistics show it's often father, they're growing up in homes without a father because the fathers are in prison. We know kids do better with two parents in the home and yet they're often in prison so do you see a connection? Is there anything we can do to basically negate some of the negative consequences of our prison system on families?

Shad White: I'd go back to the first principle I do think it is proven that having a good father in the home is beneficial for kids, common sense would tell us if you have an abusive father, you have a father who's doing drugs, that's not good for the kids. So you don't want that father in the home in fact, the kids may be better off without that daddy in the home. So that I think is a basic takeaway both from common sense and just looking at the data too. So then this goes back to the question of all we got a bunch of men, overwhelmingly men, in our prison system will we be better off, would the families be better off letting those men out and going home and raising their kids? Mangual actually has a good piece, a section in his book, Criminal Injustice, on this very argument. And he goes back to the statistics on sociopathic behavior. If you look at the prison population, particularly men, a crazy percentage of those, and I won't quote it because I'll get it wrong, but a crazy percentage of those men in prison exhibit sociopathic behavior. And this is behavior generally that means can't understand human empathy, can't see somebody in pain or hurting and react the way we normally would and is prone to violence. So the question then is, alright, if you've got a big percentage of men in prison who have that predisposition, do you want them to go home to their kids? And the answer is no. The answer is you do not want those daddies going home to their kids, even if there's this data about two parent households. What that data means to me is that good daddies in the household yield good outcomes for kids.

Really, this all comes back to, one, you've got to encourage people to make good decisions earlier in their life so that you get men who can be good upstanding fathers into their kids lives. And then, you have to acknowledge the fact that some men are just not. Some men are going to go off on the wrong path, and they're going to commit a violent crime, and it doesn't matter. They're leaving kids behind, maybe it's better that we take them out of that environment so the kids can grow up without a corrosive father in the household and put that dude in prison. I mean both of those things can be true at the same time.

Grant Callen: So let's shift gears a little bit. The legislature's back in town. They are working on, there's going to be bills in a lot of different areas of things we've talked about. As state auditor, you have an agenda or things that you would like them to consider this year?

Shad White: I do. Yeah, always. Always something fun to work on. One thing that I'm focusing on this year is what we call the Whistleblower Reward Act. and the idea,

Grant Callen: Say that three times that.

Shad White: That's right. That's the one time I'll get it out, and I didn't do it particularly well just then. The Whistleblower Reward Act, and the idea here is very simple. We wanted to create a system where if you're a whistleblower and you see a public official stealing, you can come in, you can give that information confidentially to the auditor's office. If we look at it, we investigate it, and you're proven right. Meaning, we take it to a prosecutor says yes, this is correct. They take it to a grand jury, the person's indicted, and then the person's convicted by a jury of their peers, and then we recover that money, you as the whistleblower would be eligible to receive a percentage of what we recover. And the idea is that this would encourage people to come forward with information. I think this could be a game changer in our fight against public corruption in Mississippi. Principles like this already exist in federal law, so multiple federal agencies have whistleblower reward programs, but we don't have anything like that in Mississippi for theft of state or local dollars. So we've drawn up a statute that looks very similar to the federal statutes, and we're proposing that this year, I'm excited about it I think there's good buy in on both sides and I'm hoping that gets done because I think it will make a big difference and generate a lot of new information coming to my office. Something else that we're working on the Open Meetings Act. The Open Meetings Act requires that public bodies have open meetings in front of the taxpayers, in front of the citizens when they're making decisions. And this is a crazy wrinkle in the law that I learned back when I was a baby lawyer before I was state auditor. If you say have a city council, who breaks the open meetings law, they go into a secret closed door meeting and they make a decision. Let's say they decide on who's going to get the garbage contract and then they come out and they announce the winner without showing the public how they reached that decision. The Ethics Commission could find that they violated the Open Meetings Act. they could say, yeah, y'all can't do that, that's not right. But the decision that they made behind closed doors still stands. And that makes no sense at all to me. The reason this came up is I had a case exactly like this with the City of Natchez when I was a baby lawyer, I represented some Natchez citizens for free in a case very similar to this. I've argued that if you're a public body and you go into an illegal closed door meeting and you make a decision, you spend some money that you shouldn't spend in that way, that decision and minimum that decision should be struck down and you should have to do these proceedings out in the open, so that's another big one that we'll push. A couple of other ideas, I've talked a lot about the need to rethink how we spend money in higher education. I think more money needs to be going to college majors that actually prepare students for a job in our economy, Mississippi's economy, and less money should be going to degree programs that frankly either aren't that useful period, or prepare students to do jobs that just simply don't exist in Mississippi. I'm sure there are great anthropologists out there. Anthropology is probably a very neat field. We don't have a ton of anthropologist job openings in the state of Mississippi. By and large, those students leave according to the research that we've done. And so that's another big thing that we'll be pushing, and then finally going back to this whole conversation that we've had about fatherlessness and single parent homes and mentors. We've seen data that suggests that there are mentorship programs that really make a difference in kids lives and can turn their lives around, even when they grow up in an environment where maybe they're being raised by their mom or their grandma and one of those programs is the high school military program, JROTC. It's an incredible success in the Jackson public school system. You look at the stats around it. They have a 100 percent high school graduation rate. If you go through that military program. Compared to a much lower percentage among the rest of the population of Jackson Public Schools, they have a 95 percent school attendance rate compared to 55, 56 ish percent school attendance rate among the rest of Jackson Public Schools. They score on average three points higher or so on the ACT than the rest of Jackson Public Schools. So we're seeing these mentors, these military veterans, make a huge difference in kids lives, they often become surrogate parents to a lot of these kids. So what I've said is, all right, look, if we want to incentivize students to get into a program like this, let's say if you go all the way through your JROTC program and you finish up and you're a graduate, you're guaranteed free community college at the end of it. We put the numbers together and the cost is actually pretty cheap for the state to do that because a lot of these kids, they come through the program and they're doing really well so they get a lot of other scholarships. This would be what's called a last dollar scholarship so you got whatever scholarships you're going to get and then if you still can't pay for community college, we'll tack on a little extra and get you all the way there. So it's a pretty cheap solution to encourage kids to get into that program. Those are the big four that we're pushing for this year.

Grant Callen: Love it. I am a big fan of JROTC and have seen the impact, particularly in Jackson. Last question. You got a book coming out.

Shad White: Yeah.

Grant Callen: Tell us about what your book's about. When is it coming out?

Shad White: Sure yeah, the book is coming out in August of 2024, and it's about this large welfare fraud case that we had in the state of Mississippi unfortunately, just five second background on it. Back in 2019, we got a tip that maybe there was a kickback going to the head of the Department of Human Services and in Mississippi, which is the agency that handles welfare funds. We took that one piece of information and investigated for months. Ultimately, based on our investigative work in the auditor's office, the DA of Hines County arrested six individuals or indicted six individuals and then we arrested them. Now, fast forward four years, six folks have pleaded guilty to either state or federal charges in this big case, and the state is suing a ton of people to try to collect as much of that money back as possible. If you step back and look at the big picture numbers, our best estimate is that, roughly 100 million dollars of welfare money got misspent in the state of Mississippi and makes it the largest public fraud scheme in the history of the state. And so it's a tragedy on that level, but at the same time, I've gone around the state and I've answered questions to anybody who will ask them or who will listen about this case and how it came about. And over time, I started to realize that this case is not only very important, but it's fairly complex and there are a lot of moving parts and a lot of personalities. And so I wanted taxpayers to have an explanation of the case and what drove my intuitions on the case and how we handled it all in one place and there's a little bit about my life in jones county and they're mixed in too, so I decided to write something about it and it's called mississippi swindle and comes out in august so you can check it out.

Grant Callen: Maybe I'll have you back on and we can do a deep dive into your book.

Shad White: Sounds great.

Grant Callen: Shad, thank you for the work you do for Mississippi and thank you for joining us for this conversation. This was great.

Shad White: Thanks man. I had fun.

Grant Callen: Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of the Empower Podcast. To learn more about how you can get involved, and we can work together to make Mississippi a place where everyone can rise. Go to our website at empowerms.org. Please or subscribe on your favorite podcast app so you'll be notified of future episodes.