Author: Matt Davis

Too often across county government there are siloes between efforts to reduce jail incarceration and efforts to house people. But a recent report by the Urban Institute funded by the Safety and Justice Challenge shows how cross-governmental collaboration can break down these siloes and address historic injustice which has contributed to the jail-homelessness cycle.

The report is based on learnings from three private roundtables we held in 2020 with practitioners, people with lived experience of jail incarceration, and subject matter experts across housing, behavioral health, and criminal justice. The purpose of the roundtables was to understand how gaps and lack of coordination prevent large-scale systems change in these areas. Specifically, conversation focused on analyzing how existing funding streams limit housing options for people with criminal justice involvement.

It is important for counties to understand the background of structural and institutional racism that connects housing and criminal justice challenges. Decades of disinvestment and exclusionary zoning have created barriers for people of color to live in some upper and middle-class neighborhoods. Even when affordable housing is created it often ends up in distressed and under-resourced areas. Disparate racial outcomes in our housing and criminal justice systems persist in part because solutions to racist histories are often focused either on housing or the criminal justice system, not the relationship between the two.

Counties are in a position to help bridge the housing and justice fields. Housing instability can both be a result and a cause of interaction with the criminal justice system. People with serious mental illness and substance use disorders, people with previous incarceration, and people in moments of transition (such as aging out of foster care)are all more likely to experience housing instability. an This diversity of factors calls for program and policy solutions that can minimize the risk of experiencing the justice system–housing instability cycle. Any effort to improve housing stability and reduce jail use must intentionally align the specific needs of the people being served and the activities pursued.

The report settled on the following four constructive approaches to addressing the cycle:

1. Provide Housing Without (or with few) Conditions

The Housing First approach is an evidence-based concept grounded in the idea that people need housing before they can begin working on other challenges. Housing is a stabilizing platform that helps people overcome challenges in other aspects of their lives (e.g., substance use disorders, lack of employment). Housing First recognizes this and therefore does not condition housing on the achievement of sobriety, treatment, employment, or other milestones. Evidence shows this practice works.

2. Support the Whole Person to Achieve Housing Stability

Housing stability is not just about housing. Supportive services linked to housing can help improve outcomes for people with mental health and substance use disorders, both of which can contribute to and be exacerbated by jail stays. Each year 2 million people with mental illness are booked into jails. Of those 2 million, 75 percent have substance use disorders. In many cases, people receive their first mental illness diagnosis in a correctional facility. Jails should not be substitutes for robust community-based behavioral health services. Instead, counties can shift resources to create housing solutions that provide holistic approaches and services to address underlying challenges such as mental illness and homelessness.

3. Fund Multiple Pathways to Promote Housing Stability

Just as there is no single cause of housing instability, there is no single housing solution that can meet all residents’ needs. Counties should pair structured, clearly defined programs, such as permanent supportive housing, with flexible funds that can be used to solve a wider variety of underlying challenges for people who cycle in and out of jails and housing.

4. Plan for Release before Release

Deflection from the criminal justice system should be the guiding principle for local policymakers, however, no community has eliminated the use of jails. The millions of people released from jail every year, many more than once, face unique challenges and require supports that promote housing stability upon release. Landlords and property owners discriminate against applicants who have any degree of justice-involvement. Public housing authorities may temporarily or permanently exclude people with some types of criminal histories, using their broad discretion when crafting screening and eviction policies. Where deflection and diversion are not successful, counties and local criminal justice and housing actors can embed housing planning at intake or other points before release for those with the highest needs.

Bridging Funding Gaps

To date, housing as jail diversion has attracted limited attention and investment. This is caused partly by the siloed nature of existing traditional funding streams and the inherent risks of experimental and innovative solutions. Strained state and local budgets present another significant barrier to addressing housing as jail diversion entirely within the traditional funding paradigm. However, the pandemic-spurred urgency to reduce jail populations, new federal funding streams, and continued growth and maturity in the innovative funding marketplace have created an opportunity to invest in solutions. We encourage counties to explore opportunities for impact investment to bridge gaps by tapping new funding that is faster, more flexible, and potentially more conducive to testing and scaling innovative solutions like these.

Actionable strategies are needed to improve coordination across the sectors, increase housing options at the point of diversion and reentry, and leverage the investments to make this happen. Counties and cities can help the housing and justice sectors to help people avoid justice system involvement in the first place, support successful returns to their communities, and target resources toward housing stability.

Data analysis in criminal justice reform helps prevent us from acting on unexamined and invalid assumptions. It helps us check whether reforms are having the intended results. A great example of this is recent data analysis by my colleagues and me at the Center for Court Innovation. We looked at Population Review Teams (PRTs) in three sites supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge: Lucas County, Ohio; Pima County, Arizona; and St. Louis County, Missouri.

The PRTs generated good will at these SJC sites. They bring diverse stakeholders together and engage them in conversations they would not otherwise have. But digging into the numbers shows a more complicated story. In fact, PRTs do not substantially reduce jail populations on their own. Indeed, while they do help release some people, in some instances they release a disproportionate number of White people.

But the PRTs also foster deeper conversations. Those conversations focus on other ways stakeholders can change the justice system, and this is where teams can unlock more significant long-term value. The value of these conversations became clearer during COVID-19, for example. Jurisdictions were able to use the PRT structure to make quicker decisions about whom to release. As a result, there were fewer people in the jails during a dangerous time.

More detail on the numbers 

The PRTs we examined resulted in the release of a small proportion of the total jail population (0.4% of the total jail population in Lucas County, 1.2% in Pima County, and 0.3% in St. Louis County). The PRTs have a larger impact once a case is chosen for review. For people that make it to this threshold, about half are released: 46% of reviewed cases are released in Lucas County, 48% in Pima County, and 47% in St. Louis County.

In addition, PRTs may have the unintended effect of increasing racial disparities. In St. Louis County, White individuals are 1.5 times more likely than Black individuals to get out of jail through the PRT process. White people are more likely to be eligible for and recommended by the PRT in the first place and then ultimately more likely to get out of jail. We also found that reducing racial disparities at early stages of the process is not enough to reduce disparities in who is released. In Lucas and Pima counties, Black individuals were more likely than White individuals to be eligible for review, but these differences disappeared after the initial eligibility stage. In other words, Black individuals were no more or less likely to be released.

Broader impacts and recommendations

Our findings spotlight the problem of expecting initiatives to reduce racial disparities when they are not explicitly designed to do so. PRTs need to overtly consider race during their development and adopt policies and practices that incorporate race.

Feedback from the sites also suggests that the current PRTs supplement and drive broad policy change. The PRTs engage stakeholders in meaningful collaboration and foster conversations about over-reliance on jail. And in Lucas and St. Louis counties the goals of the PRT are not limited to pretrial release; they also aim to move cases along by helping connect clients to attorneys and working out plea deals. These are valuable achievements that are not captured when we look exclusively at the number of releases.

We recommend jurisdictions draw on PRTs as a foundation for collaboration, collective problem solving, and informed decision making. They can also use the data to explore avenues for innovation, as happened during COVID-19. In addition, we recommend that jurisdictions reconsider who is eligible for PRT review, including explicit consideration of race and potentially expanding eligible charges.

Understanding that all sites have limitations to capacity and resources, we believe that transparent and intentional selection criteria are crucial to establishing a fair process. To this end, we recommend sites seek to improve the transparency of PRTs. Systematizing the steps involved in selecting people for review can help to reduce the influence of bias or excessive subjectivity and improve fairness.

We recommend increasing the number of people reviewed for release. One mechanism to do this is expanded eligibility criteria. St. Louis and Pima Counties are already considering such changes by expanding to include more charges, like people held on a violent charge or a probation violation. We also recommend using the PRT process to drive policy change. If PRT members, for example, see that a specific charge often results in a release, they could recommend pretrial supervision for such a charge as a de facto policy. This would keep more people out of jail and reserve PRT resources for more complex cases. Ongoing data review can help inform such policymaking.

PRTs are a first step, but the data suggests the teams can go further. Sites should use the data to inform PRT changes and the potential is there for broader impact.

There is new hope in St. Louis County for people afraid to move on with their lives or engage with the criminal justice system because of unresolved warrants, municipal code violations, or having missed a court date.

The center, which is part of a national effort to lower jail populations in jurisdictions across the country as part of the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC), aids in responding to concerns raised by the Department of Justice (DOJ) about racial injustice related to municipal court practices in its 2015 investigation into the Ferguson Police Department—which is located in the northern part of St. Louis County.

The DOJ commissioned a report in the wake of the 2015 police killing of Michael Brown, which spawned a series of racial justice protests in Ferguson, attracting international attention. The report found that police practices were often unconstitutional and that municipal court practices imposed substantial barriers to the challenge or resolution of municipal code violations. The court also imposed “unduly harsh penalties for missed payments or appearances,” the report said. It also said the law enforcement practices in Ferguson were driven in part by racial bias and that they disproportionately harmed African American residents. So, it is evident that in St. Louis County any efforts to lower the jail population must go hand in hand with intentional efforts towards racial equity.

Minor legal issues are often part of the reason people “tap out” of trusting the criminal justice system. They stop people feeling proactively and collectively engaged with their community’s safety and security. But the new “Tap In Center” aims to rebuild trust between community members and the criminal justice system, with racial equity at its core. The goal is to help people to have a brief conversation and to help them re-engage with court cases and, more importantly, legal assistance.

Data helped with identifying the location for Tap In. It is taking place in the zip code where most African American people in the county’s jail system live. It is also located in a neighborhood that has historically been underserved in transit access, social services, and community supports. The center aims to take a humanitarian approach to the issues that people face when they must go to a court date every month, often for an extended period of time, until their case might be resolved.

The “Tap In Center” is more than just a place for people to resolve warrants. People can also meet with an attorney, learn their case status, apply for help from a public defender, or even access a cellphone. The center also connects people with other wrap-around services to help them with various challenges in their lives, from temporary housing to clothing to help with food.

Residents have spoken positively about their experience with the center, saying it allows them to continue their lives without fear of bench warrants or fear of arrest for this. Wakesha Cook told St. Louis Public Radio that after getting connected with a public defender and setting up a new court date, “I feel free.”

“When I first got to the center, I was a little nervous since I had this warrant on me, but when I started talking with the people, I was relieved,” said Earnest Holt, another person who visited the center, in an interview with the St. Louis American.

The Tap In Center is a community-based space in a public library. It’s located in a safe, neutral, calm, welcoming spot and is designed to remove barriers and worries that a person might have about going into a courthouse. It welcomes people who come in with warrant issues—people who have historically been wary about engaging with the justice system because they are afraid of, for example, serving jail time.

The center is the result of a partnership between the St. Louis County Library system, The Bail Project, the Missouri State Public Defender, and the St. Louis County Prosecutor, with support from the St. Louis County Courts 21^st Judicial Circuit.

Criminal Justice reform strategies in St. Louis County go beyond the Tap In Center. They have focused on systemic case processing, including a population review team, enhanced pretrial reform, pretrial assessment, legal representation, and expedited probation handling. Each of the county’s reform strategies is meant to decrease the disproportionate burden that people of color face in the criminal justice system. St. Louis County is also advised by its own Ethnic and Racial Disparities committee, made up of criminal justice stakeholders, representatives from community advocacy groups, and individuals with lived experiences.

At the time of writing, St. Louis County had reduced the average daily population of its jail by 24% since joining the Safety and Justice Challenge in 2016. Nevertheless, racial disparities do persist. The average daily population of Black people in the jail has reduced by 15% from 2016 to 2021, according to the numbers, and the average daily population of White people has reduced by 41%. Length of stay has reduced for Black individuals who are seeing a 44% decline in the length of stay compared with 41% for White individuals. COVID has slowed progress because of court closures and other related delays. Now that things are reopening, the county is ready to continue its work.

The Tap In Center represents progress and provides motivation for the continued work to be done to address long-standing issues. We hope that other communities across the country will learn from the Tap In Center as they attempt to address their own racial equity issues and more.

Members of the Safety and Justice Challenge grappled with questions about how mass incarceration is linked to Black history at a recent fireside chat during the annual convening of SJC network members.

Bria L. Gillum, Senior Program Officer, Criminal Justice with the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation hosted the conversation with Kelly Lytle Hernandez, a professor of History and African American Studies at University of California, Los Angeles. She is also a member of the SJC Advisory Council and a MacArthur Fellow.

Bria asked Kelly how she uses her journey as a historian and professor to think about mass incarceration. Kelly began by acknowledging that the land she was dialing in from in Los Angeles was historically colonized. She talked about the Tongva Basin in Los Angeles, home to the Chumash and Gabrielino peoples. Mass incarceration, Kelly said, is “the current chapter in a long book of inequity here in the United States and in the colonies that predated it.”

Academics like Angela Davis have also shown how mass incarceration emerged out of Jim Crow, which arose from enslavement, Kelly said. She recommended Imani Perry’s South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. The book “helps us to understand how so much of our contemporary life, our institutions, our families, our culture is really anchored in the experience of Black enslavement,” she said. The United States was created through a particular form of colonization—the transfer of a European population to the North American continent, Kelly said. The intention was to “remove, erase, and replace the Indigenous population,” Kelly said. Scholars call it “native elimination.” Mass incarceration can be seen in that arc of elimination in   U.S history, Kelly said. It is about “removing unwanted populations” from the “white settler society.”

Bria asked Kelly how current conversations about criminal justice policy fit into that lens. For example, there are conversations happening today about reverting to policies from the 1980s and 1990s, like bringing back cash bail or arresting people for crimes of poverty. Bria asked: “What lessons can history teach us about criminal justice reform, and how can we use the history of this country to impact change?”

Kelly said that white supremacy is resilient and adaptable, cautioning against supposed reform efforts if they end up harming colonized and marginalized groups. For example, Kelly referenced Indian Boarding Schools as a so-called reform effort against genocide. She referenced Jim Crow laws as supposed reform efforts against the white backlash against Black emancipation from slavery. We need to monitor the outcomes of reform efforts across time to see if historically marginalized communities are not harmed, Kelly said.

Bria also asked Kelly to reflect on what era the United States is in, now, in 2022. We are transitioning out of an era of mass incarceration, Kelly said. But what comes next is still being defined. We need to listen to the voices and leadership of Black and Indigenous communities “to ensure we have the capacity to build a new society rather than a new regime,” Kelly said. She also called this a “very dangerous moment.”

Kelly spoke about using data to inform those conversations.

“One of the things that we noticed here in Los Angeles – and I’m sure you all were noticing this in other localities across the country – is that data was being used against our communities. We were being told that we always needed a bigger jail or more jails to keep us safe,” she said.

Instead, at UCLA, Kelly worked with community-based organizations in Los Angeles to acquire arrest and jail data. She worked together with those communities to clean up the data, categorize it, give it definitions, and analyze it. Together, they founded the Million Dollar Hoods project, which maps the cost of mass incarceration, documenting that local authorities are spending more than a million dollars annually to incarcerate people in some neighborhoods. The leading charges and causes of arrest in those neighborhoods were narcotics possession and driving under the influence, according to the data. “Both are substance related issues and the community wanted to see a community health response – not incarceration — to those substance related issues,” Kelly said.

The project has also sued the Los Angeles Police Department for data, including 200 boxes of records from the 1980s and 1990s. “We can use these records to document happened during the era of mass incarceration, and how the rise of policing and incarceration extracted much-needed resources from Black communities” Kelly said. Million Dollar Hoods is also collecting oral histories with residents. It’s important to collect people’s stories, Kelly said, to assess the past, understand the present, and imagine a new way forward. “Today, at the end of the age of mass incarceration, we refuse to have our stories overlooked, hidden, or ignored. We are saving our stories, on our terms, to assert a voice in the future to come.”

Bria closed the conversation by asking Kelly to reflect on the work of the Safety and Justice Challenge. The SJC is a diverse network including public defenders, prosecutors, policymakers, city and county leaders, and judges, Bria said. We are entering the third year of a pandemic, and we are continuing to deal with the death of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color people by law enforcement. Bria asked Kelly: “Do you have any recommendations about what we can collectively do to move forward on our criminal justice reform efforts? Taking history as our example, what should we be grappling with?”

Kelly encouraged SJC members to read history, especially to understand the history of criminalization, policing, and incarceration. It documents the many turning points and is a way of opening up the collective imagination about what is next, she said.

Kelly also recommended another book, called Covered with Night—A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America by Nicole Eustace. It is a story about the murder of an Indigenous man by a White colonist. The White colonists were eager to be seen as doing justice and proposed killing the White murderer. But Indigenous people halted the process to avoid “greater harm and greater damage.” Instead, they demanded that the murderer pay emotional and financial reparations and that the neighboring white and Indigenous communities use the crisis to build stronger bonds.

“I encourage people to look at that book for an early alternative to punishment,” Kelly said. “I know everyone’s so busy, but maybe on weekends, pick up a chapter here and there to find the alternative histories that ground our radical perspectives and possibilities for what’s to come.”

March is Women’s History Month, and the picture for women in America’s jails remains troubling. Focusing on women in jails is an important part of the work of the Safety and Justice Challenge as it seeks to reduce jail populations across the country. Here are just a few examples of the challenges women face in jail.

We Lock Up More Women Than Any Other Country

Only 4% of the world’s female population lives in the U.S., but the U.S. accounts for 30% of the world’s incarcerated women. Such an alarming disparity should prompt us to consider how our policies and practices are contributing to it. Nearly half of the 231,000 women and girls locked up in the U.S. each day are in local jails. Compared to other countries, the U.S. locks women up at the highest rate on the planet.

Racial Disparities

White women are incarcerated at a rate of 108 people per 100,000, less than half the incarceration rate of Black women. Native women are incarcerated at a rate of 349 people per 100,000. Black women are incarcerated at a rate of 285 people per 100,000.

Unsupportive Environments for Pregnant Women

58,000 pregnant women go to jail annually. But recently published findings from the groundbreaking Pregnancy in Prison Statistics (PIPS) Project and other datasets shed light on a common but rarely discussed experience: being pregnant, postpartum or giving birth while incarcerated. In total, 22 state prison systems, all federal prisons, 6 jails, and 3 youth confinement systems participated in the PIPS Project, a systematic study of pregnancy and its outcomes among incarcerated women. The project shows that being pregnant in jail or prison, or youth confinement, is characterized by a lack of supportive policies and practices. For example, only one-third of prisons and jails had any policy about breastfeeding and lactation. Even where policies supporting lactation did exist, relatively few women were breastfeeding or pumping.

Absence of Reproductive Choice

Two articles recently published in medical journals analyzed incarcerated people’s access to abortion and to permanent and reversible contraception. The studies reveal that abortion and contraception access varies greatly between states — and that abortion access for incarcerated people is related to broader state policies. Even in states that officially allow abortion, many people may be effectively blocked from obtaining the care they need, thanks to insurmountable barriers like self-payment requirements and physical distance from abortion caregivers. The studies make clear that people behind bars often have very few, if any, choices and autonomy when it comes to their reproductive health and decisions.

Rise in Jail Deaths Troubling as Jail Populations Become More Rural and Female

New data show record high deaths of people locked up in jail, as jail populations have shifted toward smaller, rural jails and growing numbers of women. A lack of accountability and acknowledgement of women’s unique disadvantages all but ensures more deaths to come. Women’s jail populations and rural jails are growing together. Between 2004 and 2014, the number of women in jail increased 43 percent in rural counties, while declining 6 percent in urban counties. For decades, jails in non-urban jurisdictions have quietly proliferated, fueled by increases in pretrial detention. Additionally, researchers have found that women entering rural jails are significantly more likely to have co-occurring serious mental illness and substance use disorder, despite being severely under-identified by their jails as having such needs.

Prisons and Jails Separate Millions of Mothers from Their Children

2 million women are jailed in the U.S. each year, and 80% are mothers. Every Mother’s Day, nearly 150,000 incarcerated mothers will spend the day apart from their children. Most of these women are incarcerated for non-violent offenses. Most are also the primary caretakers of their children, meaning that punishing them with incarceration tears their children away from a vital source of support. Women incarcerated in the U.S. are disproportionately in jails rather than prisons. Having to leave their children in someone else’s care, these women will be impacted by the brutal side effects of going to jail: Aggravation of mental health problems, a greater risk of suicide, and a much higher likelihood of ending up homeless or deprived of essential financial benefits. Most women who are incarcerated would be better served though alternatives in their communities.

Drug Law Enforcement Appears to Have Driven Women’s Incarceration

After skyrocketing for decades, overall incarceration rates have finally been on a slow decline since 2008. But a closer look at the data reveals a major exception: women. From 2009 to 2018, the number of women in city and county jails increased by 23% — a rise that effectively cancelled out more than 40% of the simultaneous 7.5% decrease in the men’s jail population. Meanwhile, reductions in state and federal prison populations have mostly affected men. Over the past 35 years, total arrests have risen 25% for women, while decreasing 33% for men. The increase among women is largely driven by drugs: During that period, drug related arrests increased nearly 216% for women, compared to 48% for men. Knowing that drug arrests are on the rise, we looked to see if addiction is increasing among women, particularly opioid abuse. We found that although women and men are equally likely to develop a substance use disorder, 57% of those misusing opioids are women. The health toll is enormous: Women entered emergency rooms due to painkiller misuse an average of once every three minutes in 2010. Women’s rising opioid use is also reflected in an almost 600% increase in opioid overdose deaths from 1999 to 2016, compared to a 312% increase for men over the same time frame.

Challenges on Release

1.9 million women are released from prisons and jails every year. Formerly incarcerated women (especially women of color) have higher rates of unemployment and homelessness; and are less likely to have a high school education, compared to formerly incarcerated men.

More on Women in Jail

As strategic allies of the Safety and Justice Challenge, I encourage readers to check out the Prison Policy Initiative’s Women and Gender page, for more of our original research and visualizations, and our research library for work done by other organizations looking at the incarceration of women.