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After Amazon: Establishing Our Local Pipeline for Future Opportunities


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(photo: LaGuardia Community College, CUNY)


With Amazon’s pronouncement to put the brakes on its plan to bring part of its new headquarters to Long Island City, it’s time to make lemonade out of the many lemons left in the wake.

Amazon’s decision to locate here centered on our city’s ability to get the company the talent it needs to grow. It’s what every company, large and small, needs to thrive.

When Amazon first announced it was coming, one of the first questions raised was: who will benefit? Would the 25,000 jobs help our local community, including the residents of Queensbridge Houses, the nation’s largest public housing complex, and LaGuardia Community College, where more than 70% of students come from households with incomes of less than $30,000? What kinds of jobs would be open to someone with just a high school diploma, an associate’s, a bachelor’s? Would it be New Yorkers who benefitted, or people recruited from elsewhere in the country and the world?

In my engagement with City, State, and Amazon representatives, it became clear to me that New York (and conceivably many localities) needs a stronger, integrated system that links private and public spheres to educate future employees. Amazon’s proposed campus in Long Island City highlighted the need for that more robust, sustained development of talent pipelines in the fundamental field of tech, especially for people in low-income communities.

The first step is more employers willing to establish long-term partnerships with local colleges and universities so there’s clear understanding of the technical, intellectual, and practical skills needed for job-openings. Without strong employer partnerships, we can’t be certain that our students will be job-ready upon graduation.

We need more companies, especially tech companies, willing to invest in developing local talent by providing paid internships and mentorship opportunities for nontraditional and traditional students alike. We need more collaborations to create job-specific training programs, like one we have with Google to provide training in IT support.

Without far-reaching programs that connect students who are older, poor, or speak English less than well, tech employers will continue relying on the same private and elite-college networks for hiring.

Fledgling progress was being made with Amazon to create pathways to jobs. At the end of January, Amazon announced a collaboration with LaGuardia Community College, CUNY, and SUNY to create a program to train people (with at least a high school diploma) for jobs in cloud computing.

But more than programs, public officials, employers, and educators must convene and nurture the building of an ecosystem that connects the many assets a community can use to establish a collaborative approach. If a community can encircle a potential employee with support and education, and companies can create bona fide paths to employment, there is no limit to the amount of social mobility and community vibrancy that can be created.

LaGuardia Community College knows how well employer-education partnerships can work when it all comes together. Queens resident Matt O’Connor was working full-time packing boxes at a nearby delivery service when he came to LaGuardia to channel his passion for coding. He was offered internship opportunities that grounded his classroom work. Matt first interned at the tech accelerator Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, where he worked with small tech start-ups. His next paid software development internship was at Place Pixel, a company that creates next-generation mapping experiences. It went so well that he was offered a full-time job with an equity share in the company. Matt said it felt miraculous when he was able to quit the package delivery company. Today, he’s a full-time software engineer at the company SevenFifty.

But with better and more targeted resources, we can do even more. We need elected officials to step up and increase the investment in our public colleges: to give us the resources to re-imagine what and how we teach. We need to be able to hire and support full-time faculty who can effectively teach complex material, particularly to a diverse student body. We need the funding to support the collaboration across organizational silos. It’s not just the funding for expanding holistic support like child care, and philanthropy to support transportation, emergency funds, and an on-campus food pantry. It’s also dedicated funding to link the path from the housing projects to training, and from training to college.

Over the coming weeks and months, there will be much analysis of what went right or wrong with the Amazon deal. No matter who declares victory, what Long Island City is left with does little for the low-income and aspiring New Yorkers who remain on the sidelines. Let’s not lose a moment in getting our talent prepared for whatever happens next, whether it’s the next Amazon wanting to locate here or the start-up just beginning to get launched.

Whether you are cheering or bemoaning the crumbling of the agreement, we can all agree those who’ve been historically locked out of job opportunities in the fastest growing industries need more pathways to these good, steady jobs that enable them to provide for themselves and their families.

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Gail O. Mellow is President of LaGuardia Community College. On Twitter @LaGuardiaCC.

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The Right Way to Legalize Surrogacy in New York


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Sital Kalantry, the author (photo: Cornell Law School)


New York State is on the brink of replacing an outdated and prohibitive law that criminalizes the practice of compensated surrogacy, one of only two states that does so. Legislation to reverse the law has been introduced in both houses of the state Legislature, and Governor Cuomo has demonstrated support for it by including it in his Executive Budget.

As a law professor who focuses on gender equity, I’ve taken great interest in issues related to surrogacy in the United States and abroad. I’ve closely reviewed laws in multiple states as well as internationally, and I support New York’s legalization of surrogacy.

When a woman chooses to support a couple or individual by serving as a gestational surrogate (where she is not genetically connected to the child because she did not contribute her egg), I believe she must have the autonomy to do so – provided she is protected by the law to ensure that any power imbalance between her, on the one hand, and the intended parents, surrogacy agencies and doctors, on the other hand, is mitigated.

The proposal the New York Legislature is considering and that Governor Cuomo is advancing, the Child-Parent Security Act, does protect surrogates in many ways. While the bill clarifies the parentage of all children born through third-party reproduction, here I focus only on how it legalizes and regulates gestational surrogacy arrangements.

Protections provided by the bill include: giving the surrogate the sole right to make decisions regarding her own health or that of the fetus or embryo she is carrying; giving the surrogate the sole right to terminate the pregnancy; and ensuring that the surrogate is represented by her own legal counsel. These types of commonsense protections are critical to creating a successful and effective program. If the New York Legislature passed the Child-Parent Security Act, New York’s law would be more protective of women who choose to be surrogates than laws in many other states.

Reexamining current law is long past due as technological advances and changes in acceptance of various family structures have made surrogacy much more commonplace. When lawmakers first implemented a ban on surrogacy in New York in 1992, they did so for several reasons that are less relevant today.

For example, when the restrictive New York law was enacted, there were ethical concerns about what was then nascent medical treatment -- in vitro fertilization (IVF). Today, IVF is commonly-accepted as treatment for infertility and is also used in the gestational surrogacy process.

Despite the ban, today New Yorkers do work with surrogates to build families. They are just required to employ surrogates living in other states. This results in legal challenges, risks, and costs for the intended parents, including confusion regarding what laws are applicable to the situation.   

It’s past time for New York to modernize its laws so that intended parents in New York can work with surrogates in their own state, with laws supporting and protecting both, and for surrogates who want to help intended parents start their family to be able to do so. Just last year New Jersey legalized gestational surrogacy moving beyond the restrictive approach to surrogacy that was articulated in its famous Baby Mcase in 1988. I wholeheartedly encourage the New York Legislature and Governor to approve this important measure this year.

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Sital Kalantry is a Clinical Professor of Law, Director of the International Human Rights Policy Advocacy Clinic, and Co-Director of the Migration and Human Rights Program at Cornell Law School. On Twitter @skalantry.

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Criminal Justice Reforms Will Not Make Enough Progress If We Don’t Also Change the Criminal Court


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(photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)


While momentum is building for the New York State Legislature to pass long-overdue bills directed at bail, discovery, and speedy trial reforms that promise to make the Criminal Court fairer, will these pieces of legislation do more than make a brutal, racist machine slightly less brutal?

New York’s insidious reliance on money bail is now widely condemned and proposals for reform abound. Some have suggested eliminating cash bail except for certain designated charges. In other words, pre-trial freedom should not depend on the size of your bank account, that is unless you are charged with certain crimes. Others want to eliminate cash bail but allow for preventive detention so that in certain situations a person could be remanded -- held without even the possibility of posting bail -- based on predictions of future dangerousness.

Usually in the legislative mix is a risk assessment tool that most people believe has racial bias baked into its core no matter how hard proponents try to disaggregate. And in place of release on one’s own recognizance -- simply being released and told to return to court on another day -- is a menu of supervised release, GPS monitoring, and other types of surveillance that expand the net of governmental control and intrusion over those hauled into Criminal Court for charges minor and serious alike.    

New York’s ironically named discovery laws have rightfully been compared to a blindfold. Stories are legion of people forced to engage in plea bargaining and the crucial decision of whether to run the risk of a trial without knowing the evidence against them. Proposed reforms all dictate that the accused must have access to discovery much earlier in the process.

However, the crisis of discovery is not limited to when documents are provided to the defense. It is also a matter of what documents are provided. Some jurisdictions allow for the defense to depose the prosecution’s witnesses. In New York, the accused gets reports filled out by police officers that merely summarize what witnesses had to say. Some jurisdictions require that the complaint that informs the accused of the nature of the charges must specify the facts that support the legality of the stop and arrest, as well as facts that detail evidence of guilt.

In New York, the complaint is a template usually devoid of any details. One critical piece of discovery is the initial interview between prosecutor and arresting officer that takes place within hours of the arrest. In New York, the defense is entitled to the prosecutor’s de minimis notes from that interview. That interview should be taped, with the officer under oath, and provided to the defense at the accused’s initial appearance before a judge.  

Yet even if the new laws addressed all the concerns raised above, what needs to change is the Criminal Court itself, a heretofore intractable behemoth that grinds up everything and everyone in its path. Much as prison abolition has moved from the impossible to the imaginable, so, too, should talk of abolishing the present incarnation of the Criminal Court.

The New York City Criminal Court has proven impervious to change. During the 1980s crack-cocaine epidemic, tens of thousands of drug-related arrests flooded the court. The court absorbed them all without as much as a hiccup. More recently, with Broken Windows, or quality-of-life, policing, the courts have been inundated with hundreds of thousands of misdemeanor cases. Again, the court took them all in without missing a beat.  

No matter what the input, or whatever legislative reforms are enacted, the Criminal Court continues to do exactly what it is designed to do -- push cases, get pleas, and move the calendar with scant concern about the constitutionality of the arrest or the sufficiency of the evidence of guilt.  

While no one can or should gainsay the importance of the proposed reforms to bail, discovery, and speedy trial, it is the Criminal Court itself that needs reform.

The court’s method, or lack thereof, of adjudicating cases has not changed since its current incarnation in 1962. It has long been appropriately referred to as an assembly line marked by a lack of adversarial litigation, as people are processed in ways that more resemble the Department of Motor Vehicles than anyone’s conception of a court.  

All the discovery in the world may not stop judges from threatening the accused with a maximum sentence if they have the temerity to insist on their right to a trial, or prosecutors from making “one time only” plea offers, or revoking offers if the accused seeks to challenge the lawfulness of their arrest.

It is about time for the Criminal Court to be evaluated on how well it enforces constitutional rights.

The stop-and-frisk federal class action in Floyd v. City of New York exposed rampant search and seizure violations. How has the Criminal Court addressed that reality? The court in Floyd also found an equal protection violation as stop-and-frisk was disproportionately inflicted on people of color. Spend just a few hours in any of the city’s criminal courts and you will see the unabashed manifestation of similarly race-based policing as 95% of defendants are people of color. What is the Criminal Court response to that reality?

There is as well the accused’s right to due process, to basic, fundamental fairness. Due process is hardly the phrase that comes to mind when you spend any time in the Criminal Court.

To be clear, bail, discovery, and speedy trial laws must be reformed. Fewer people will be held in pretrial detention, fewer people will remain in the dark about the nature of the evidence they face, and fewer people will have an interminable wait for a trial. What remains to be seen is whether these changes will transform the Criminal Court from a guardian of assembly-line justice to an enforcer of constitutional rights.

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Steven Zeidman is a professor of law at CUNY School of Law. On Twitter @SteveZeidman.

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