At first glance, it may seem unclear why resurgent world power Russia, flush with success after restoring its regional foothold in Syria, would show much interest in Lebanon.

The tiny country on the eastern Mediterranean, once a vassal state of its far more powerful neighbor Syria, a former Soviet client, is grappling with a long list of political and economic woes.

It has a tangled sectarian political system that often throttles progress; it hosts some 1.5 million Syrian refugees, the highest per capita refugee population in the world; it suffers from a stagnant economy; and it is saddled with crippling debt. In addition, Lebanon seems forever perched on the edge of a potentially catastrophic war between Israel and the Iran-backed Hezbollah organization, the dominant political force in the country.

But as the United States and Russia give growing indications of squaring off in Syria, where the seven-year civil war is entering a more complicated multinational phase, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's main backer Moscow appears to be calculating that it can expand its leverage against Washington by stepping up its influence in Lebanon.

In what is being described here as a political shift by Moscow in its policy toward Lebanon, Russia is offering it a $1 billion arms package and reportedly seeking a military cooperation agreement. The maneuver could threaten to undermine an existing US military assistance program that has seen more than $1.6 billion in weapons, training, and equipment delivered to the Lebanese Army since 2006.

And, depending on how Lebanon responds, analysts say, the move could also subject the country to US sanctions and even treatment as a pariah by the same Western and Gulf Arab countries that have supported it.

International donor countries are scheduled to meet in Rome Thursday in a demonstration of support for the Lebanese Army and police.

Lebanon and Russia have been discussing potential arms deals since 2009, but it is only recently that Moscow has shown any willingness to subsidize a major armaments package. The $1 billion credit line, which includes a 15-year repayment term at zero percent interest, may have less to do with selling Russian weapons to Lebanon and more to do with building up its influence in the tiny country given the growing competition with the US in Syria, analysts and Lebanese politicians say.

“This offer signals a political shift by Russia toward Lebanon,” says a Lebanese parliamentarian familiar with the deal. “At one point there was no interest from Russia in bankrolling an arms deal. But the more discord there is in Syria with the Americans, the more the Russians show interest here. That’s what has got the [US and British] sponsors [of the Lebanese Army] nervous.”

Dmitry Astakhov/Sputnik/Reuters

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev (r.) and his Lebanese counterpart, Saad al-Hariri, attend a signing ceremony outside Moscow, Sept. 12, 2017.

What Lebanon risks

The US and Britain, which also supports the Lebanese Army, have signaled to the Lebanese government that the military assistance programs could be threatened if Beirut accepts the Russian offer, according to several Lebanese politicians, analysts, and foreign diplomats in Beirut.

Furthermore, analysts warn that Lebanon could even face US sanctions if it deals with Russian arms companies that have been blacklisted by the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), which was adopted last summer and targets Russia, North Korea, and Iran.

“Sanctions by association under CAATSA run the risk of making Lebanon a regional pariah with uncertain long-term effects on the stability of Lebanon,” says Aram Nerguizian, CEO of The Mortons Group, a Washington-based strategy consultancy. “Ultimately the Lebanese need to understand that while the Trump administration may appear to seek new ways to engage Russia in areas of common interest, engagements by countries like Lebanon with Russia continue to be regarded with extreme hostility by the executive and legislative branches of the US government.”

Sources close to the Lebanese government deny having received any warnings from the US or UK and note that the Russian offer has yet to be accepted. In such cases, says one of the sources, the Lebanese government asks the army to assess whether the offer suits its requirements and capabilities.

“This has not been answered yet,” says the source, speaking on condition of anonymity. “In all cases, the government and Lebanese Army will not endanger existing strategic relationships. They are both adults and don’t need warnings.”

However, the Lebanese government has been eager to pursue closer ties to Russia, perhaps in recognition of Moscow’s growing sway in Lebanon’s immediate neighborhood. Last September, Prime Minister Saad Hariri paid a visit to Russia, where he sought bilateral economic and military cooperation and discussed with Russian President Vladimir Putin “Russia’s military assistance and ways to develop this relation.”

Russian news outlets reported last month that Moscow wants to begin negotiating a military cooperation agreement with Lebanon. The mooted agreement would permit Russia to use Lebanese ports and airports as well as have Russia train the Lebanese Army and hold joint military exercises, the reports said.

Russian companies also are bidding for oil and gas exploration rights in Lebanon’s coastal waters, and both countries are looking to boost their cultural exchanges – Russia has plans to open a Russian language school in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley.

Competition in Syria

But many diplomats and analysts say the main motivation for Russia’s newfound interest in Lebanon is related to the competition with the US over Syria and the Middle East more generally.

“Russia sees Lebanon as another arena where it can erode US influence,” says a European diplomat in Beirut. “The last really tangible influence the US has in Lebanon is the relationship with the Lebanese Army. It gives Washington a seat at the table.”

Last August, the Lebanese Army defeated several hundred Islamic State militants and drove them from their mountainous redoubt in northeast Lebanon. The short and decisive campaign demonstrated the improvements to the army’s capabilities over the past decade, largely due to the US and British support programs. However, since then, questions have been raised in Washington over the future of the program. Critics argue that the US is wasting taxpayers’ money by funding a Lebanese Army that they charge colludes with Hezbollah, classified by Washington as a terrorist organization.

“If we have tried to make the [Lebanese Army] a counter-balance to Hezbollah, we have failed,” Elliot Abrams, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Congress In November.

On the other hand, if the US abandons its support program for the army, it will significantly reduce Washington’s influence in Lebanon and allow other players such as Russia and Iran (which also has offered to equip the Lebanese Army) to fill the vacuum, analysts say.

Counterweight to Hezbollah

For some in Lebanon, an increase in Russian influence here could serve as a welcome counterweight to the power exerted by Hezbollah and indirectly by its sponsor Iran.

Iran and Russia are battlefield allies in Syria, where the former’s ground forces and the latter’s air force have brought anti-Assad rebels close to defeat. But the interests of both countries could begin to diverge as the conflict winds down. Russia’s interest is to broaden its influence in the Middle East at the expense of the US and seek commercial opportunities for Russian companies. Iran’s main goal in Syria is to consolidate and expand its anti-Israel alliance. The two agendas could prove incompatible in the longer term.

If Russia and Iran do find themselves at odds over the future direction of Syria, Tehran and its Lebanese ally, Hezbollah, may not welcome an increase in Moscow’s influence in Lebanon.

And for that very reason, Hezbollah’s political opponents in Lebanon may seek to encourage expanded Russian ties, even at the risk of upsetting the US, in order to make life more complicated for Hezbollah.

Mary Altaffer/AP/FILE

The financial crisis that struck in 2008 touched off the worst recession since the Great Depression, wiping out $11 trillion in US household wealth and leaving about 8 million Americans jobless. Now, Congress is trying to ease some of the protections it created to avoid future crises.

The US financial system is safer and more stable than it was a decade ago in the depths of a financial crisis. And big banks are widely profitable.

All this because of – or some say despite – major bank legislation known as the Dodd-Frank Act.

So when the Senate, in a rare showing of bipartisan cooperation, passed a bill Wednesday to roll back portions of Dodd-Frank and to lighten the regulatory burden on community banks, it could have been just another ho-hum legislative revision and update. Instead, the bill drew fire from both the left and right and, as a result, may not pass Congress.

Many Democrats in Congress cast the move as a brazen capitulation to banks. Conservatives say the bill doesn't go far enough to deregulate the industry.

The reality, analysts say, is that this one bill by itself won’t gut the rule book for America’s financial system. The real risk, many say, is if this represents just one step – followed by others – down a slippery slope toward more lax oversight. That could ultimately endanger the health of the financial system on which the rest of the economy depends, from businesses to homeowners.

Banks “should be careful what they wish for,” says Aaron Klein, a Brookings Institution finance expert who, while serving in the Obama administration, helped write the Dodd Frank law. “Sometimes my kids ask me for a lot of candy and then get a stomachache.” 

It's this fear that has many Democrats exercised.

“There’s a long history in Washington of members of both parties teaming up to deregulate banks  –  followed soon after by a financial crisis,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts on March 8, calling the new bill the #BankLobbyistAct.

Conservatives, like Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R) of Texas, are pushing for even more regulatory relief for banks, and saying their proposed changes would beat Dodd Frank at ensuring that future misdeeds of big banks don't result in bailouts or bring down the financial system.

Age-old dilemma

In the House, Hensarling has proposed a so-called Financial CHOICE Act that, he as he put it last year, would promote “faster and healthier economic growth by replacing bailouts with bankruptcy, complexity with simplicity, and bureaucratic micromanagement with free market discipline.”

The two sides are clashing over an age-old thread-a-needle dilemma. On the one hand, banking rules should aim to minimize the risk of disastrous credit booms and busts, and that means not making banks feel bailouts are inevitable in a crisis. On the other hand, the overall economy needs some safeguards against collapse in such a crisis. (Remember TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Program that Congress passed in a hurry as the economy tottered in 2008?)

No one has a perfect answer. Critics of the House Republicans say dramatically lightening bank regulation is unrealistic, while Mr. Hensarling says the existence of Dodd-Frank has pushed up bank fees on consumers while codifying the idea of bailouts.

The new Senate bill includes a host of provisions. Some of the biggest:

• Exempts smaller banks (less than $10 billion in assets) from certain global rules on the level of capital they must hold.

• Lightens “Volcker rule” limits on investment-trading activity for those same smaller commercial banks. Representative Hensarling would eliminate the Volcker rule for all banks.

• Raises the threshold for being regulated as a “systemically important” bank from $50 billion to $250 billion in total assets, and gives the Federal Reserve flexibility to tailor regulations for banks with assets between $100 billion and $250 billion.

On that last provision, Senator Warren says banks with $200 billion in assets are hardly the “community banks” that, she and others agree, deserve some regulatory relief. Mr. Klein says: “Financial stability is not necessarily hinging on this change,” although it does mean lighter regulation for some very large regional banks.

Not just for banks

The bill also includes a raft of new consumer protections (such as unlimited free credit freezes and unfreezes per year, an issue thrust into the spotlight by the data breach at credit-reporting firm Equifax). Critics say these efforts don’t go far enough.

And the legislation seeks to make it easier for small lenders to make mortgage loans. Critics warn that, in the process, important data-gathering for tracking racial discrimination would be reduced.

The bipartisan Senate support may reflect both the clout of the financial industry and the electoral vulnerability of purple- or red-state Democratic incumbents who don’t want the image of party-line liberals. It also reflects something that’s become rare on Capitol Hill: efforts by Banking Committee Chairman Mike Crapo (R) to include Democrats and follow “regular order” in crafting the bill.

Now the legislative action shifts to the House, where a bill can be passed on Republican votes alone. If Hensarling and his colleagues try more aggressive deregulation, it could imperil the chances of any Senate-House compromise being reached. That's because the Senate leadership needs Democrats to pass a filibuster-proof bill, and the latter are unlikely to back more deregulation.

So, even if new legislation ultimately passes, it appears that core elements of Dodd-Frank will remain, including heightened oversight of the largest banks, and requirements for those systemically important banks to have “living wills” to prepare them for possible liquidation should they fail.

In the end, Klein says that, as important as the details of law are, another key is the tone set by front-line regulators, those at agencies like the Treasury and Federal Reserve tasked with monitoring compliance and potential emerging risks. For now, everyone from Congress to Trump administration officials and banks themselves is pushing generally in the direction of a lighter touch.

“The legal framework can be strong, but if the regulators don't act, the system can run into significant problems,” Klein says.

In 2009, both Tahiesha Howard and the state of Kentucky were looking for a fresh start.

Ms. Howard’s childhood was such a blur of dysfunction and addiction she says she couldn’t remember her first drink of alcohol. By her 30s, one judge labeled the mother a “menace to society.”

Kentucky, meanwhile, had become a poster child for ineffective and unsustainable mass incarceration – its prison system growing at quadruple the national average despite a consistently low crime rate.

Howard bought a one-way ticket to Louisville and began trying to conquer a drug addiction. Two years later, the Kentucky legislature passed a landmark law aimed at lowering the state’s prison population. For several years, things went well, for Howard and Kentucky. The inmate population dropped, while Howard stayed clean. She completed an in-patient drug treatment program, found a $16-an-hour job, and was saving to buy a house.

Then, as Howard describes it, “stuff happened” – and not just for her. She relapsed, losing her job and her home – eventually returning to the same treatment center she’d graduated from in 2011. Meanwhile, Kentucky struggled in the grip of the opioid crisis. Desperate to respond, the state legislature toughened sentences on heroin and fentanyl trafficking. For this and other reasons, experts in the state say, the prison population began to explode. Again.

Today, Howard is clean again. On an icy morning last month, she is sitting in the basement cafeteria in the state Capitol, her dyed-red dreadlocks and leopard-print vest standing out in a sea of suits. She, along with a half-dozen other recovering addicts sporting “Kentucky Smart on Crime” badges, are here to try and convince legislators to engineer a similar recovery for the state’s criminal justice system.

Henry Gass/The Christian Science Monitor

Tahiesha Howard (l.) and Katie Janes, both of whom have overcome drug addictions, wait to meet with a state legislator to discuss criminal justice reforms. Kentucky has been working to reform its criminal justice system since 2011, but has struggled of late with reducing its prison population.

“I’m about to cry,” she says. “I never thought that I would be around people like this.”

“I’m excited to be able to tell my story,” she adds, “so that these people can understand what we as addicts deal with.”

After decades of tough-on-crime policies that swelled prison populations, the US justice system has been recalibrating. Since 2007, 35 states have reformed their sentencing and corrections policies, according to Pew, and states like Kentucky have been at the forefront.

The process has been slow and difficult in the Bluegrass State, however. The notion that more prisons don’t equal less crime now taking hold around the country is already firmly in place here. From prosecutors and public defenders to judges, legislators, and the conservative governor, nobody wants to build more prisons. But getting all those stakeholders to agree on what to do instead is proving just as challenging. As justice reforms unfold around the country, it is a challenge other states will surely face as well.

“There is certainly resistance from many stakeholders in the criminal justice community, and it’s understandable,” says John Tilley, the state justice secretary and a former Democratic state legislator who helped drive reform efforts here in 2011.

The state is on track to fill every single prison bed in the state by May 2019, despite a contingency plan to reopen three shuttered private prisons. If no significant changes are made, the prison population is projected to grow by 19 percent over the next decade at a cost of $600 million, according to a recent report from a working group (CJPAC) organized by Republican Gov. Matt Bevin.

“We’ve got to think of ways to mitigate that kind of damage,” adds Secretary Tilley. “We have to give the legislature policy options to begin down this path again.”

Early steps

When Ernie Lewis first began practicing law in Kentucky in the late 1970s, the state had about 3,000 people in prison. Over the next 30 years, as a defense attorney in trial court, he watched that number rise to about 22,000 people – despite the local crime rate staying relatively flat.

Until 2011, “we’d been almost totally averse to the reclassification of a crime downward,” adds Mr. Lewis, now the executive director for the National Association of Public Defense and the former head of the Department of Public Advocacy (DPA), Kentucky’s public defender agency.

The solution was House Bill 463, legislation authored by Tilley that aimed to lower the prison population by encouraging deferred prosecution and probation for some nonviolent offenses. But it was “much too timid,” says Lewis.

Crucially, experts say, many of the changes in the bill were left to the discretion of judges and prosecutors.

“That was seminal legislation for the time,” says Len Engel, director of policy and campaigns for the Crime and Justice Institute, which has partnered with Kentucky to research ways to improve its justice system. “The problem was it was not required.”

Prosecutors and judges, for example, were encouraged to use alternatives to a conviction for drug possession – such as diversion to a treatment program or a supervised release. However, between 2013 and 2016 drug possession convictions increased by 71 percent and prison admissions for drug possession increased by 102 percent, the CJPAC work group found.

The bill was not a failure, experts say. Kentucky’s prison population did decline for a few years, and it would be even higher today if the bill had not passed. But lessons have clearly been learned from the experience.

A reforms package state legislators are considering right now would afford much less discretion to prosecutors and judges. It would reclassify first degree drug possession from a felony to a misdemeanor, for example, and increase the threshold for a felony theft offense from $500 to $2,000. (Most states have raised their threshold to at least $1,000 to account for inflation.)

“We’re not trying to take away legitimate discretion,” says Republican state Rep. Jason Nemes, a co-sponsor of that bill, House Bill 396. “But when you’re talking about a drug possessor, not a robber or someone who committed a violent offense … there’s no [need for] discretion there. They just need treatment.”

If not prison, where?

“Most [cases] seemed to start in a bar,” says Will Collins, describing his years as a state prosecutor in the 1990s. “None of them ever start in a bar anymore.”

Mr. Collins now works as a public defender in Hazard, in impoverished eastern Kentucky, and most of his clients are charged with low-level drug possession or theft, usually to support their addiction.

“Poverty has been the immutable constant of Appalachia,” he says – and for generations addiction has been the balm.

What keeps changing – at a pace the criminal justice system always seems to lag behind – is the substances people are addicted to. In the 1990s, it was alcohol, then it was prescription painkillers. Now meth and heroin are emerging.

“We have poor people who were perhaps raised by people who were themselves soothing their anguish with drugs or alcohol,” he says. “The kinds of substances people are using [now], they’re just much more devastating than they once were.”

“Prison, you know, doesn’t stymie this,” he adds. “A five-year prison sentence or a 20-year prison sentence, the difference between that doesn’t, I think, impact the behavior of folks in that business or under that addiction.”

Henry Gass/The Christian Science Monitor

Will Collins, a public defender in eastern Kentucky, at the Department of Public Advocacy trial office he leads. Many of his clients are the nonviolent drug and theft offenders who now have almost every prison and county jail in the state at capacity. After years of reform efforts, state legislators are struggling to agree on how to lower the population safely.

The prosecutors he works with have become more reasonable on bonds for his clients, and some judges are more open to ordering treatment instead of a prison sentence, he says.

In Paintsville, a small town of 4,000 people in eastern Kentucky, the local detention center is at 200 percent capacity. Roughly two-thirds of that population are people serving out their sentences for Class D drug possessions, says Kevin Holbrook, a local district judge who was a member of the governor’s CJPAC work group. Kentucky is one of a few states that pays local county jails to hold certain nonviolent offenders after a conviction, in addition to pretrial defendants unable to post bail, and so another reform being considered would restrict the use of monetary bail to certain high-risk defendants.

Judge Holbrook supports the idea, but he understands why “some judges have issues with their discretion being taken away” in that manner.

“If they’re [found to be] low- or moderate-risk, judges are concerned about releasing that person, especially if they’re an addict,” he adds, saying that the concern is if they don't receive treatment, they might hurt themselves – or someone else.

“All prosecutors and all judges have to be worried about public safety,” says Thomas Wine, the Commonwealth’s Attorney for Jefferson County, which includes all of Louisville.

And that concern for public safety means that some prosecutors want to know there are enough treatment facilities to handle all the low-level drug offenders that HB396 would divert from prison.

“Prosecutors [need to be] comfortable they’re going to get treatment, so the community is safe, and [the person] is safe, getting treatment and not out on the street,” adds Mr. Wine, “but that requires money upfront.”

His experience with previous reforms has made David Tapp, a judge in Kentucky’s 28th Judicial Circuit, south of Lexington, more cautious.

“If there is a rush to do something just to say we did something, I’m afraid we’re going to be in the same situation that the legislation in 2011 was intended to rectify but did not do so,” he says.

“We [should] slow down a little bit, perhaps look at refining some of the legislation, and be better prepared [to pass it in the next legislative session] in 2019,” he adds.

There is some skepticism over the validity of these concerns, however, not least from Van Ingram, executive director of Kentucky’s Office of Drug Control Policy, which manages the state’s drug treatment infrastructure. While he admits that 'no state' has enough of that infrastructure, Kentucky 'is getting better all the time.' "

“I don’t know when you pick a day when you say, ‘Now we’re there’ ” and have enough treatment facilities, he says.

And some reform advocates are concerned that, in an intensely political justice system – legislators, judges, prosecutors, and county jailers are all elected – more tough-on-crime policies may be difficult to resist.

“It has to be a factor,” says Tilley of the number of elected officials in the justice system. “When you’re accountable to an electorate and you have constituents it’s difficult,” he adds. “The safer route is often to lock somebody up.”

Take a bill Kentucky lawmakers passed last year. In an effort to fight the opioid epidemic, House Bill 333 increased penalties for the trafficking of “any amount” of heroin and fentanyl. The legislation eliminated a feature of the 2011 reforms that distinguished “between low-level addict dealers and high-level traffickers,” the CJPAC report said, calculating it will be responsible for approximately 40 percent of the state’s projected inmate growth over the next decade.

This session, the legislature has authorized $71 million in emergency funding to reopen three private prisons. The state Senate also removed from a bill – primarily aimed at improving a prison system that incarcerates more women than any other state bar Oklahoma – provisions to increase the felony theft threshold from $500 to $1,000 for some crimes, and to allow pretrial administrative release for certain misdemeanor defendants.

'It’s never-ending'

Kentucky is facing a significant time and inmate population crunch, however. Prison admissions for low-level drug possession charges increased by 102 percent here between 2012 and 2016. If nothing is done before this legislative session ends in mid-April, “the circumstances of the crisis are not going to be any better,” says Engel, from the Criminal Justice Institute, “and the politics of what needs to get done aren’t going to be any better.”

“You have lives behind all these decisions as well,” he adds. “Women who have trauma driving their decisions, who aren’t locked up now, will be locked up then.”

Some of the people who accounted for that 102 percent admissions increase are the women who joined Howard in Frankfort last month – all invited here by the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky to tell legislators how treatment, not long prison sentences, has changed their lives.

As they tour the Capitol building, Sabrina Bindner is the one telling jokes, the one organizing group photos, the one telling others to rub the toe of an Abraham Lincoln statue for good luck. She grew up in a stable, middle-class family, she played softball in high school. Touring the capitol rotunda, she looks like a stable, middle-class Kentuckian.

But in the decade or so between losing her best friend in a high school car accident and being court-ordered to the Healing Place, she became addicted to heroin, had two children, had them taken away, spent two years homeless, and accumulated 26 Class D felonies.

“All the cops knew me,” she says. “I really didn’t care what people thought of me anymore, because they couldn’t think worse of me than I already thought of myself.”

“The most beautiful thing I had was the love for my daughter and my son at that time, so I figured that if that love couldn’t keep me from messing up then I wasn’t really worthy of anything,” she adds. “If my judge didn’t make the decision to send me to treatment, I would have went to prison and I wouldn’t have changed nothing about myself.”

Treatment “instills in you those small things that society has lost, that love, just to generate positivity, to smile in every interaction with every human being you meet,” she continues. “That’s possible for other people too if they were just given the opportunity.”

In her photo with the Lincoln statue, Howard hugs it. While she agrees that drug treatment needs to be more accessible in the state, she tells every legislator she meets why she would like Class D felonies to be reclassified as misdemeanors.

“I could pursue college, I could get a masters degree … but I can’t do anything with it: I have felonies. I can’t even live in a decent neighborhood, even if I can afford it,” she says. “I’m stuck in a rut, and I’m not a part of that rut [anymore] and it’s scary for me.”

“I paid for my mistakes; I’ve been drug through the mud for my mistakes; I live my mistakes every day,” she adds. “Where do I get to see the light?”

As challenging as this new reform effort has been in Kentucky, there are signs that it could ultimately be successful.

For one, it is a deeply personal effort, from Howard to Tilley and everyone in between.

Tilley’s 2011 bill led to the closure of three private prisons in the state. A year later, the state ended three decades of private prison use in 2012 amid allegations ranging from riots to sexual abuse of female inmates.

For another, law enforcement is urging legislators to do something. The Kentucky State Police currently has an underfunded Internet Crime Unit, Nemes says, and can’t afford to buy new cruisers. Alex Payne, the agency’s deputy commissioner, testified in support of HB396 last month. Wayne Turner – a police chief in northern Kentucky and state’s police chief of the year in 2017 – wrote in a January op-ed that “while this [tough-on-crime] sentiment, which has largely been our criminal justice approach for the last 35 years, may sound good and tough it is, in fact, expensive and ineffective.”

The gains could be erased over the coming years, however. If no significant reforms are implemented this session or the next, the state will be required to spend $71 million to reopen two more private prisons to handle the increased prison population.

“I don’t want anyone to get the misperception that this is a ‘want to.’ This is a ‘has to,’ ” says Tilley. “I have begrudgingly embraced the reality that we have no place to put the inmates being sent to us.”

For Nemes, the criminal justice system has been no help to his sister – who has struggled with addiction for more than a decade – and her three sons.

“The system as it is does not work. It’s terrible for families,” he says. “We have to identify problems that we need to solve.”

Legislators in Kentucky have been trying to do that for years, of course, and Nemes doesn’t think they’re getting closer to the finish line. He doesn’t think there is a finish line.

“The criminal justice system, because it’s such a big part of every state, [reforms] will never end,” he adds. “It’s a never-ending thing you have to look at to make sure you’re doing the right thing.”

Courtesy of HEC Paris

Hafida Guebli, creator of mobile app NEYB’S, speaks at an event hosted by HEC Paris business school in Paris.

Weaving through her childhood cité – or social housing block – in the Parisian suburb of Villemomble, Hafida Guebli passes a gaping hole where the library used to be. It burned down during the 2005 riots that spilled over from nearby Clichy-sous-Bois and left numerous Paris banlieues in ruin.

Ms. Guebli remembers the violence, police brutality, and skepticism of those days.

“A lot of people I grew up with here just assumed they’d end up unemployed or in prison,” she says, pointing up to her childhood bedroom on the 10th floor of her cité, which butts up against the train tracks. “So it didn’t matter if they stole stuff or did this or that … the end result was the same.”

Now Guebli lives practically next door, in the suburb, or banlieue, of Roumainville. And today, raising an 18-month-old son with her husband, she sees the close-knit community of the banlieue – even one on the state's “high priority” list in need of extra aid to build housing and services – as critical.

“The banlieues are one big family,” she says. “There’s a sense of solidarity and so many good things about growing up in this environment.... But everyone wants to get out of here.”

Guebli didn't leave, however, and now she's one of a growing number of women from France’s most deprived banlieues who are throwing themselves into entrepreneurship. Every morning, she crosses the physical and psychological divide between her apartment in Roumainville and Station F, the giant startup campus in central Paris created by tech billionaire Xavier Niel. That's where she's developing an app to help tenants and landlords overcome language barriers – a key issue in the banlieues.

Her project is part of a larger French effort that takes its cues from President Emmanuel Macron. The aim is to get more women to create small businesses from within the country’s most economically and socially stagnant districts. The move is not only allowing more women to become self-sufficient and contribute to the economy, but it’s also helping revitalize the negative and often inaccurate image of banlieues.

“I’m optimistic that France can work toward more social cohesion, but the truth is, people from disadvantaged banlieues generally have more difficulty getting their diplomas and finding jobs,” says Louis Maurin, the director of the French Observatory of Inequalities. “There is a big difference between what the state aspires to in terms of equality and the reality of the situation.”

Joe Penney/Reuters

Apartment buildings are seen in the Cite Raymond Queneau, a banlieue in Bobigny, France, Sep. 4, 2016.

‘Figuring things out on my own’

The French still broadly view the banlieues in a negative light. A study by Odoxa-Le Parisien-Aujourd’hui en France in 2015 found that perceptions of banlieues residents had not changed much in the decade since the riots. Seventy-nine percent of those polled said les banlieusards were poor and dangerous, while 61 percent said they behaved worse than other young people.

But more recent polls indicate that just as many French people believe that promoting entrepreneurship in disadvantaged banlieues is a way to revive economic activity there, and that women from the banlieues have something to contribute to entrepreneurship.

That’s why organizations like 100,000 Entrepreneurs are trying to reach women early, to get them thinking about entrepreneurship as a serious career path. The nonprofit recently launched a two-week awareness campaign in which 600 women small business owners will visit schools and youth groups across the country to boost a stagnating entrepreneurship rate among women. Of all French entrepreneurs, only 30 percent are women. And in disadvantaged districts, just 2 percent of working women are entrepreneurs.

“The obstacles women in general face to start their own business are compounded for those coming from impoverished neighborhoods,” says Béatrice Viannay-Galvani, CEO of 100,000 Entrepreneurs. “Some have families who say they don’t have the right to work, while others lack the confidence to get started or think running a business is too complicated.”

Guebli could have become a statistic, growing up within a second-generation Moroccan family with non-French-speaking, illiterate parents. While France’s unemployment rate has hovered around 10 percent for about a decade, the rate for those from “high priority” zones is more than 26 percent, according to the National Observatory for Urban Policy (ONPV). Those numbers rise to 29 percent for children of immigrants.

For those facing discrimination or who haven’t followed traditional career paths, entrepreneurship is an increasingly attractive option. For Guebli, it was a move to London at 20 – something her parents assumed would be just a two-week trip – that was a life-changer.

“Companies in London gave me a chance and were open to seeing my potential,” says Guebli, who found a job, apartment, and English school in her first 10 days in the city and ended up staying a year. “But my return to France was disastrous, and I didn’t understand why I couldn’t get a job. Employers weren't looking at me as a whole person, just a resume. So I thought, I’ve figured things out on my own before, I can do it again.”

Guebli opened an organic teashop, but was forced to shut down after two years in 2015, when terrorists attacked the Charlie Hebdo offices – and a Jewish grocery store that was on the same street as her shop. Soon, she was meeting with developers to create NEYB’S.

The app – short for “neighbors” – uses a series of pictograms to help those with language barriers communicate with their landlords on everything from a leaky sink to construction next door. It’s a testament of what can happen when a woman from the banlieue launches a business that benefits her community.

“Information simply doesn’t reach banlieues like mine, particularly for those who don’t speak French,” says Guebli, most of whose childhood friends had parents who were illiterate or didn't speak French. “Unless they see a bill in the mail, they’re not going to read it because they don’t understand.”

Places where positive things happen

Drive, ambition, and innovative ideas are key to entrepreneurship, but experts insist that support is what's essential to women from disadvantaged banlieues. Guebli says she never would have made it without programs like HEC business school’s “Stand-Up,” which supports motivated women entrepreneurs.

Within the program, Guebli works from Station F. She is able to meet investors, clients, and other start-up workers. She has 18 months to get her project off the ground. The timeline is key for people like Guebli, who don’t have family money to cushion the blow. Women, in general, often struggle to start their businesses due to systemic discrimination. A 2017 study by Opinion Way showed that 35 percent of women entrepreneurs need financial support. Yet women in France historically receive fewer bank loans than men. The difficulties are compounded for racial minorities.

“I sold my car and asked people in my cité for financial help to get my business off the ground,” says Guebli. “That’s one advantage of growing up in a close-knit community.”

As French organizations – and women entrepreneurs – work to erase the social stigma of coming from les banlieues, and encourage women there to think bigger, many hope France can attain its goal of getting 40 percent of women into entrepreneurship. If it can succeed, the benefits will be two-fold.

“Women from impoverished neighborhoods have overcome so many obstacles, so when they finally decide to go into business for themselves, they really drive themselves forward and end up going further than anyone,” says Viannay-Galvani. “And when they succeed, it shows that the suburbs are not just places of violence, but places where really positive things happen.”

Those are words to live by for Guebli, who hopes that once her phone app is officially up and running, she will have a product that makes her family and community proud.

“A lot of people I grew up with see me as a UFO, like wow, you ‘made it,’ ” says Guebli. “I think the difference is that I never labeled myself or thought I couldn’t do something because of where I came from. And when I want something, I go for it.”

Mark Lennihan/AP/File

Fitbit's Alta HR device is displayed in New York in March 2017. Some 8 percent of employee wellness plans offer wearable fitness trackers to workers.

In some ways, the nine-day West Virginia teachers’ strike that ended March 6 echoed the momentous labor actions that have marked the Mountain State’s history. But the story also contained a plot device straight out of a cyberpunk future. 

A proposed change to West Virginia’s public worker health plan would have asked teachers to download a mobile fitness app called Go365 and earn points on it by using a  Fitbit or other fitness tracker designed to monitor the users's steps taken, heart rate, or other metrics. Those who declined, or who complied but failed to earn enough points, would face a penalty of $500 each year. 

The state scrapped the proposal, but it remains a sign of the times: As employers aim to trim costs and boost productivity, workers face increasing encouragement to purchase and use mobile devices, don wearables, and even accept electronic implants, all while being assured that the new tools are serving their best interests. The growing adoption of technology that some see as invasive raises questions of what exactly constitutes voluntary behavior in a wage economy.

“Very few things in the workplace are voluntary,” says attorney Paula Brantner, a senior advisor at Workplace Fairness, a nonprofit in Silver Spring, Md., that promotes employee rights. “You have an incentive to keep your job, to make your employer happy, to be on track for raises and promotions. There’s every incentive to cooperate with your employer and there’s a real disincentive to be viewed as uncooperative.”

Employers have long taken keen interest in the minute details of how workers conduct themselves, both on and off the clock. Beginning with Frederick Taylor at the turn of the 20th century, management consultants have boosted output by analyzing and standardizing the most minute movements of their workers. Around the same time, Henry Ford went as far as sending investigators into workers’ homes to inspect their health and hygiene habits. 

“The idea is old, but the technology is new,” says University of Michigan philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, author of the 2017 book “Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It).” “That enables far more intensive and precise monitoring and control than was possible in the pre-computer era.”

Beyond fitness

Currently just 8 percent of employer-sponsored wellness plans provide fitness-tracking bands, but they can be used for more than just ensuring workers stay active. And other potentially intrusive devices have started to pop up as well.

These trackers contribute data to what human resource managers call “people analytics,” an approach that big data and analytics bring to bear on decisions involving hiring, firing, and productivity.

It’s this sort of fine-grained analytics that Amazon was pursuing in 2016 when it filed two patents for wristbands that use ultrasonic pulses and radio transmissions to monitor the locations of employees’ hands relative to inventory bins, so that employers can “monitor performance of assigned tasks.”

Other companies are going deeper with electronic trackers, literally. Last summer, the Wisconsin-based vending-kiosk company Three Square Market announced that it would be offering its workers the opportunity to have radio-frequency identification chips implanted into their hands. According to the company, the rice-grain-sized chip would be injected between the thumb and forefinger, where it can be used to unlock doors, log in to computers, run photocopiers, and purchase snacks from break-room vending machines. More than 50 out of 80 workers at the company’s headquarters initially volunteered. 

But was the choice to accept the implants truly voluntary? “What we really need to do is recognize that the fact that you made a choice within a set of options cannot justify the set of options that is presented to you,” says Dr. Anderson. “Workers should have access to a lot of goods without having to cede overwhelming authority to their employers.”

“There needs to be just a broader acknowledgement of the necessity of these things in people’s lives, not just as the superficial social technologies but increasingly as the mundane ways that we get stuff done in our everyday lives,” says Julia Ticona, a postdoctoral researcher at the Data & Society Research Institute in New York. “[We need] to really treat them instead of purely individual consumer devices, to treat them as a part of public infrastructure.”

Dr. Ticona helped draft an amicus curiae brief to the US Supreme Court in Carpenter v. United States, a pending case that will determine whether historical location data gathered by cell towers is protected under the Fourth Amendment. The brief argues that cell phones are no longer “meaningfully voluntary” in modern life. 

Ticona’s research focuses on low-income and contingent workers, who rely on mobile phones to find and schedule work, trade shifts, and access government assistance. “For these folks, it’s where we really see the rubber hitting the road of this question between voluntary and mandatory, because of the economic coercion,” says Ticona. 

Ticona argues that government efforts to extend home broadband internet access to all Americans should more fully take mobile technology into account. “We don’t just sit at home at our desks and do homework on our laptop,” she says “It’s out in the world and it needs to travel with us.” 

For Dr. Anderson, one big step in curbing employers’ invasiveness is to decouple health insurance from employment, thereby removing much of the interest our bosses may have in our heart rates and waistlines. “We should recognize that employers have their own business and not try to corral them to be nannies for their employees,” she says.

Ms. Brantner agrees, seeing penalties for refusing fitness trackers as “a huge argument for single-payer health care.”

“Why should your health be the employer’s business?” she asks. “Well, the answer right now is because they’re footing the bill.”

[Editor's note: This story has been updated to clarify that several fitness tracking options were named in the state's original proposal.]

AP Photo

People attend meetings at the world's biggest start-up incubator, Station F, in Paris, Jan. 31. For a glimpse at President Emmanuel Macron's vision for the new French economy, look no farther than Station F. Entrepreneurs don virtual reality goggles and share ideas with business angels in this old Paris train station-turned-start­up incubator.

 One way to gauge the world’s pace of innovation is to measure how many people fear failure in business. In a just-released survey of 44 countries by Amway, about half of 50,000 people interviewed said they would be willing to risk failure if they were to start a business.

Where do so many people get so much confidence in even thinking about being an entrepreneur?

One answer may lie in another of the survey’s findings. Over half said they are capable of developing new business ideas.

In other words, risking failure in a start-up may rely on a person’s faith in eventually finding the right idea for success. Failure is not personal; it is merely a necessary eye-opener on where to better place one’s hopes and resources. The arc of innovation may be long. But it bends toward those who learn from blunders rather than fear them.

That’s a hard lesson in countries with cultural taboos against business failures. The potential for shame can discourage an entrepreneur. Breaking that taboo requires a big cultural shift. One place where that is now happening is Europe. Its leaders wonder why the Continent has failed to produce its own versions of Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google (or the Chinese equivalents).

In the Amway survey, only 19 percent of Germans said they were willing to risk failure in starting a business. In Britain, it is 33 percent. For France, 36 percent.

By comparison, the figure in the United States is 74 percent. And for China it is 86 percent. In those countries, a high tolerance for uncertainty in starting a business allows for failure. The reward is more innovation and more economic growth.

To change Europe’s culture, French President Emmanuel Macron is not only pushing reforms in his own country, such as cutting red tape and taxes, but within the European Union. He wants “breakthrough innovation” that relies on “failure-tolerant” policies toward business.

One example of this culture shift, as reported by the BBC, are weekly meetings of young techies in Berlin. They gather to learn from each other’s mistakes. The meetings, called “Failure Nights,” are part of a worldwide movement to challenge each country’s peculiar fears of failure. A similar movement is an enterprise called Startupbootcamp. It began in the Netherlands and helps people find resources for new high-tech ventures.

This rising celebration of business failures is even being measured. The Failure Institute, based in Mexico, issued a report last year on “failure trends” around the world. The report does more than simply show where firms are closing. It also makes a point of explaining why.

And that is just the kind of discovery for good ideas that can turn fear into hope for the world’s would-be entrepreneurs.