Author: Matt Davis

Cities and counties participating in the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) significantly reduced their jail populations over the past few years – both prior to and following the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite that progress, racial and ethnic disparities in jails persist.

Today the SJC has selected four jurisdictions to join a new Racial Equity Cohort based on proposals that explicitly focus on racial and ethnic equity in the criminal justice system; center lived experiences of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and other people of color; and emphasize the SJC Community Engagement Pillars of authenticity, accessibility and transparency, respect for diversity, and commitment to ongoing engagement.

The four cities and counties selected to participate in the Racial Equity Cohort are Cook County (IL), New Orleans (LA), Philadelphia (PA), and Pima County (AZ).

The funding will provide training and technical assistance focused on racial equity and authentic community engagement, peer-to-peer support from other cohort members, and qualitative and quantitative data and analytic support. The new funding and support announced is part of that commitment to learning and investing in more intentional and effective strategies to eliminate institutional and systemic racism within the justice system.

In that context, let’s take a deeper look at the data on racial disparities in jails and why there is such a great need for this work.

Jail Populations Can Be Successfully Reduced

Data collected by ISLG show significant declines in overall and pretrial jail populations, and reduced jail populations for people of color across SJC sites. Jail bookings are down, particularly for people charged with misdemeanors.

Since the start of the SJC, participating cities and counties collectively reduced their jail populations by 26% as of November 2021. This equates to almost 19,765 fewer people held in jail in SJC communities since we began collecting data. The decline in the confined pretrial/awaiting action population accounted for 52% of the overall decline in jail populations across SJC cities and counties.

Despite Improved Outcomes, Disparities Persist

Though jail populations are down across racial and ethnic groups, disparities persist in jail populations. While many people admitted to jail are released within hours or days of their booking, many cannot afford to post bail and may remain behind bars for weeks or even months. These and other burdens of jail fall disproportionately on communities of color.

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, jail populations declined dramatically across the country and in cities and counties participating in SJC. Though declines in jail populations and bookings were prevalent across racial and ethnic groups, the declines were more pronounced for White people than for Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people. As a result, racial and ethnic disparities persisted or worsened in many SJC communities between February 2020 and October 2020. The disparities were particularly deep for Black and Indigenous people.

More SJC Communities Reduced Jail Populations for White People

Though jail populations have rebounded somewhat since the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, jail populations are still below February 2020 levels in many sites.

Still, in most sites the reductions for white people were greater than the reductions for people of color, resulting in persistent disparities.

From when communities joined the SJC through November 2021:

• Jail population declines for Black people equalled or exceeded declines for White people in only 3 of 17 reporting sites.
• White jail populations declined more than Latinx jail populations in all 12 reporting sites.
• Indigenous jail populations out-declined White jail populations in 2 of 4 reporting sites.

Trends in Individual SJC Communities

Data on the four racial equity cohort sites–New Orleans, Cook County, Pima County, and Philadelphia–further illustrate the persistent disparities that exist, even among sites that have made significant progress in reducing overall jail populations.

In New Orleans, Louisiana, the overall jail population declined by more than half since their baseline, but the reduction was more pronounced for white people (60% drop) relative to Black people (51% drop) and Latinx people (25% drop).

In Cook County, Illinois, the trends are similar. The t jail population ticked up slightly following the pandemic but remains significantly lower than baseline (down by 31%).. Still, the reductions in ADP for White people far outpaced reductions for Black and Latinx people.

In Pima County, Arizona, race and ethnicity trends are unclear–local partners will be working on expanding their capacity to track this data as part of their reform work. Overall, however, the jurisdiction’s jail population trends show a 9% decline from their baseline and an upticksince the initial months of the pandemic.

Philadelphia, like Pima, does not yet fully report race population breakdowns, but has seen an overall jail population decline of 39%, up slightly from a pandemic-era low.

Work to Eliminate Disparities Continues

As cities and counties continue to implement strategies to safely reduce jail populations, more work remains to eliminate racial and ethnic disparities. The new SJC racial equity cohort in select sites across the country is an opportunity to further reduce harm and implement best practices.

–The SJC has engaged the Institute for State and Local Governance (ISLG) at the City University of New York (CUNY) to track data across participating cities and counties.

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, but the commitment of the Safety and Justice Challenge to improving racial equity in the jail system runs year-round.

With that in mind, here are a dozen blogs on racial justice written by members of the effort and featured over the last year.

1. Exploring the Difference Between Racial Equality and Racial Equity. Christopher James with the Haywood Burns Institute defined the terms of the debate: “To start treating, say, the Black community ‘the same as everyone else’ at this point in history will not go far enough in terms of achieving true equality,” he wrote.
2. The Catalyzing Impact of George Floyd’s Death on Criminal Justice Reform. A year after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, we asked how community leaders, organizers and activists have continued to champion criminal justice reform and call for an end to police violence.
3. Here’s Why Jails Need Better Emergency Planning. Ronald Simpson Bey from Just Leadership USA reflected on the racial disparities in the jail system, and how they have impacted Black and Brown people, particularly through COVID. “We show that Black and Brown people are disposable in the United States when we fail to plan for emergencies,” he wrote.
4. How Prisons and Jails Might Function if Addressing Trauma Was a First Priority. Nneka Jones Tapia with the Square One Project focused on healing the trauma of over-policing in Black and Brown communities, a topic rooted in the experience of seeing her father arrested for marijuana possession when she was growing up as a child in North Carolina. “As a child, you never forget the experience of police officers hauling your father off,” she wrote. “You do not forget having to interact with your father through a piece of glass. They are links in the chain of trauma that lie embedded within a person. And it radiates through communities.”
5. Failing to Track Ethnicity Accurately. Troublingly, many jails across the United States are still failing to adequately track race and ethnicity, particularly of Latino people, says Nancy Rodriguez, a Professor at the University of California, Irvine.
6. Overrepresentation of Indigenous People in Jails. We also spoke with Indigenous people about their experience with the jail system. “Systemic biases in America’s government and legal systems are rooted in historic genocide perpetrated against Native people,” said Dr. Selso Villegas. “We’re invisible to people because that’s the way many in society want it,” he said.
7. Meaningfully Engaging People with Lived Experience. Aminah Elster is an SJC Fellow and Campaign and Policy Coordinator at the California Coalition for Women Prisoners. She wrote a piece about efforts by the District Attorney’s office in San Francisco to meaningfully incorporate people with direct experience of the criminal justice system in the office’s decision-making. She wrote, “efforts by criminal legal system leaders to engage community members with lived experiences of incarceration are often brief, centered on one-way, top-down information exchange or focused on asking for general input.”
8. Pathways to Collective Healing: Law Enforcement and the Communities They Serve. Aviva Kurash with the International Association of Chiefs of Police wrote about a four-year Collective Healing initiative led by the association to focus on how police agencies can build and maintain trust and legitimacy with the communities they serve.
9. Asking Ourselves: “Who’s Not Here in the Room?” Gwen Whiting is Director of Training and Leadership Development at Everyday Democracy. She’s worked with several cities and counties participating in SJC to embed racial equity, often through better community engagement. In this piece, she shares a key lesson for those across the country looking to do the same.
10. Local Communities Are Better Placed Than Governments to Determine Public Safety. Renita Francois with the City of New York focused on community-centered design principles. She wrote about the Mayor’s Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety and its work in Brownsville, Brooklyn, home to the most densely concentrated area of public housing in the United States. Its work included offering a community poetry night called Poetic Justice, a roller-skating event called Swervin; an employment expo for residents; and a performance of “King Lear” followed by an interactive, guided conversation about caregiving and death.
11. From the Barbershop to the Bakery, What Makes You Feel Safe? Emily Rhodes, a member of the Community Advisory Group in New Orleans, focused on community art projects designed to get residents discussing what they understand as public safety.
12. A Twitter Chat on Reducing Racial Disparities. Marshall Project Staff Writer Jamiles Lartey hosted a Twitter chat on strategies for addressing racial equity in our criminal justice system as part of the Safety and Justice Challenge’s commemoration of Black History Month. From ending cash bail to empowering impacted communities in criminal justice reform, to replacing police with community response models for crimes better handled without a law enforcement response, the conversation emphasized ways to hold the system more accountable for racial disparities.

The last two years have been turbulent for all our partners in the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC), particularly for the cities and counties that have committed to reducing their jail population and eliminating racial and ethnic inequities as part of the SJC Network.

Communities participating in SJC range from the small (Missoula, MT) to the immense (Los Angeles, CA), and they vary demographically, politically, geographically, and in every other way you can imagine. But the COVID-19 pandemic touched all of them. It brought with it death and economic disruption, as it has everywhere. It also brought change and opportunity. By forcing local systems to adopt emergency measures to save lives—including suspending or discarding the routines, institutional habits, and assumptions that make jail incarceration so common—the pandemic experience has imparted valuable lessons.

The most obvious lesson, and perhaps the most important, is that we can do without incarceration, to a degree that many had not foreseen. All the cities and counties involved in the SJC reduced their jail populations during the pandemic, some quite dramatically. They got average jail populations down to the lowest levels in decades, and quickly, without endangering the public.

They achieved this largely through collaboration and using data in real-time to understand who is arrested and booked into jail. Local criminal justice systems are fragmented, and lots of agencies working independently play a part in filling jails. With strategies to reduce jail populations already underway and key decision-makers already working together, SJC communities were better positioned than most to respond to the crisis. Even before the pandemic, for example, there were more than a dozen multi-agency “jail population review” teams in place across the SJC Network, tasked with routinely looking at jail data and court records to identify people in custody who could be safely released. Adapting structures like this for COVID-19 purposes—using them to identify medically vulnerable people, say, or all people in jail charged with misdemeanors—was relatively easy.

Many cities and counties participating in SJC have also broadened their collaborations in ways that benefited them when the crisis hit. They were already working with public health officials and other agencies outside the criminal justice system; community advocates and representatives; and people who were directly impacted by the criminal justice system—all of whose cooperation, perspectives, and expertise were needed to cope with the pandemic.

In order to get and keep people out of jail facilities, where social distancing was difficult or impossible, and the danger of outbreaks was high, cities and counties participating in SJC used a variety of techniques. Police reduced or eliminated arrests for offenses like drug possession, sometimes issuing citations instead. Courts released individuals being held on low cash bail amounts or discarded cash bail altogether. Pretrial release and community supervision were expanded to include people charged with more serious offenses. Old warrants were quashed, and new ones were not ordered. And many of the people who were released got the support they needed—housing, food, medication, transportation, and service referrals—to remain in their communities.

Technology also helped. Many cities and counties used video conferencing for hearings to clear up cases while minimizing interactions. Probation and parole departments instituted online check-ins, helping to reduce revocations that often lead to jailing. Many of these practices, though intended to be temporary, are still in place, and many SJC communities are discussing ways of making them permanent.

Not all the news is good. Despite the overall reductions in jail populations, the racial disparities that preceded the pandemic have persisted. There are fewer people in jails, reducing the harm caused by incarceration, but among those who are in jails, people of color are still overrepresented. This has occurred even as the SJC has centered racial equity in its approach, committed to authentic community engagement, and focused on identifying and eliminating the drivers of racial and ethnic inequities.

Also left behind, for the most part, are people accused or convicted of violent felonies—a very large proportion of the incarcerated population, and one that cannot be ignored if we really mean to end mass incarceration.

At the same time, there are broad threats to the sustainability of the progress our partners have made, as well as the stability of the coalitions that achieved them. One of them is the perception that criminal justice reform generally, and pretrial detention reform specifically, have led to increases in crime, including the disturbing spikes in homicides many U.S. cities have witnessed in the past two years. We have good evidence to the contrary—including an analysis showing that no crime increases accompanied substantial jail population reductions in SJC communities during the initiative’s first two years; a more recent study drawing similar conclusions with regard to the even larger jail population cuts during the pandemic; and an assessment focusing on Cook County, which found no increase in criminal activity following bail reform there. Nevertheless, we think it would be a mistake to underestimate the potency of law and order rhetoric equating safety with punishment, which is what brought us mass incarceration in the first place.

All of which is to say, we still have work to do. It is, once again, a reminder that it is not enough to simply adopt best practices to reduce the jail population. Even amid crisis, careful attention must be paid to the racial disparities and working towards true equity. We look forward to what we can accomplish together in the next year.

Criminal Justice grantmaking ›
Criminal Justice strategy ›

For years we have witnessed an increase in the number law enforcement interactions with individuals in the community with unaddressed behavioral health challenges. Conversely, there remain far too few alternatives to unnecessary arrest or transport to the emergency department.

Middlesex County, in Eastern Massachusetts, is New England’s most populous county. Our criminal justice and behavioral health leaders recognized the need improve capacity and access to behavioral healthcare in the community. In 2018, the Massachusetts legislature created the Middlesex County Restoration Center Commission to develop a pilot that would help solve the “divert-to-what?” question. In Middlesex County, the sheriff’s office offers evidence-based programing and treatment for incarcerated individuals, but individuals should not have to go to jail to receive the services they need.

We are grateful to have recently been invited to join the Safety and Justice Challenge’s new IMPACT behavioral health cohort, to share some of the lessons we have learned, and learn from our partner jurisdictions in this impressive network. The Commission has just entered its fourth year of work, and our path forward will be made easier through this tremendous peer exchange opportunity.

One of the biggest lessons we have learned, and hope to pass along to our partner jurisdictions, is the importance of improving collaboration and communication across siloed fields like public safety and behavioral health. All too often, addressing behavioral health needs of the community remains in traditional agency siloes. From the sheriff’s office to mental health service providers and police departments to peer and advocacy organizations, it is only this kind of collaboration that is able to stop people from falling through the cracks.

Middlesex County has 1.6 million people with 54 different police departments spread across urban, suburban, and rural areas. We are fortunate to have the progressive leadership of our police chiefs focused on diverting individuals away from the criminal justice system and into treatment. Similarly, we are fortunate to have a health and human services community poised to step up to increase outreach and engagement, to partner with public safety, and to provide appropriate assessment, treatment, stabilization, and support services to affected individuals.

In an effort to shift the responsibility back to the behavioral health community, we knew it was necessary to develop a model that knit together services in a way that made them easily accessible to both the public and local law enforcement. We wanted to move away from the traditional model of stabilization and release from the emergency department. The Restoration Center will offer both stabilization as well as a comprehensive assessment to inform referral to treatment so the needs of individuals can be appropriately met. Our goal is not only to stop the cycle of unnecessary incarceration but also to help individuals stay healthy enough that they do not have to return to the center.

After years of planning and implementation our goal is to launch a pilot Restoration Center in 2022. We believe we are well positioned to launch the model we have developed in large part due to our commitment to the cross-sector planning process which started with identifying gaps in the delivery of behavioral healthcare, a cost-benefit analysis, and interviews with individuals with lived experience. Through our state legislature, we were successful in securing initial funding as well as a trust fund that will allow the Commission to accept third-party funding.

Now that the Commission’s 2022 budget includes $1 million in funding for the pilot – endorsed by a recent editorial in the Boston Globe, we can begin our work of identifying a provider. We continue to pursue additional funding to ensure that we can implement a full range of services identified as critical to the success of individuals who might otherwise be arrested or hospitalized.

The center will provide behavioral health services to individuals in mental health or substance use crisis. These services will help support ongoing law enforcement efforts across the county to divert individuals with behavioral health conditions from arrest or unnecessary hospitalization.

Local law enforcement and corrections have shouldered this burden for far too long, with over 70 percent of people in our Middlesex Jail & House of Correction having an open mental health case and 80 percent have a history of substance use.  Each and every one of these individuals receives treatment while incarcerated, but these are services that people should be able to access in the community. Our hope is that the Restoration Center will help stop the cycle of unnecessary incarceration.

We attribute a lot of the success of the Middlesex County Restoration Center Commission to the commitment of our diverse stakeholder group. It is not common to have a sheriff co-chair a legislative commission with the president of a mental health advocacy group. It is also unusual to get representatives of the 80 largest behavioral health providers at the county, police chiefs, the chief administrative justice of the trial court, and key state legislators at that table. And sustaining the focus on a challenging goal for over three years is the rarest thing of all. But that is what it takes.

Unfortunately, political will is often the hardest thing to secure. But we owe it to the people falling through the cracks to get it right.

A new research paper from the Square One Project at Columbia University offers the first comprehensive review of experimental social policy interventions that can end mass incarceration. The review demonstrates that greater investments in healthcare, education, employment, housing and social services – as well as increased scientific rigor in implementation – are needed to effectively decarcerate.

My colleagues Emily Wang, Laura Hawks, Lisa Puglisi, and I reviewed more than 23,000 research articles to produce the paper, “Towards A New Framework for Achieving Decarceration: A Review of the Research Literature on Social Investments.” We sought to answer the question: Which interventions into social policy (investments in housing, healthcare, employment, education, and social support programs) through community-led organizations have been shown to reduce incident incarceration or recidivism? The lack of research was stark: only 53 total papers fit our research protocol and were included in our findings.

Three intervention types had the most consistent and largest reductions in criminal legal system interaction:

1. Early childhood education programs, particularly those that support parents

Some of the most effective early childhood interventions happen before a child is even born. Effective nurse-family partnerships help families stay healthy during pregnancy. Once the baby arrives, these nurses can help monitor important signifiers of good health and teach new mothers best practices in post-partum healthcare for both mother and child. Research indicates improved life outcomes, including decreased interaction with the criminal legal system, for both the mother and the child immediately following the intervention and decades later.

Likewise, the average layperson might not think great preschool programs are significant, but the research suggests that their impact is huge. The cognitive malleability of a preschool-aged child suggests that active stimulation and meaningful educational experiences at this age can improve well-being down the line, and research has proven this true. The research literature demonstrates that the most effective preschool programs are those that have structured, individualized curricula and provide “wraparound services,” or a direct line of communication between teachers and parents or guardians. This can be as simple as a teacher being able to ask a parent, “I’ve noticed that Sam seemed tired today and wasn’t as engaged with his friends as a consequence. Have you noticed a change of sleeping habits?” Parents and teachers can then work together to make sure the child’s full needs are met, in and out of the classroom. While interactions like these seem small or intangible, they are strong contributors to improving tangible measures of well-being.

2. Community-based job placement specialists that help individuals re-entering society find stable, gainful employment

The research shows that it is not enough to give people just any kind of job as they are transitioning from justice system involvement and back into society. It turns out that gainful employment – jobs that are skilled, long-term, provide benefits like healthcare or retirement funds, and offer opportunities for promotion or managerial experience– is the only thing that really reduces criminal legal system interaction. Temporary, non-skilled work at low wages does not help in any significant way.

The most effective transitional employment programs for people reentering society from carceral settings are those that offer case management; in these situations, a case worker will partner with the reentering person to strategize, create resumes, practice interviewing, and even call potential employers to vouch for their suitability. Active collaboration between the reentering person and their case worker empowers people who are reentering to pursue jobs that feel meaningful and well-suited to their interests, skills, and lifestyle.

Likewise, there is heavy emphasis during reentry programming on obtainment of a high school diploma or certificate of General Educational Development (GED). But these do not significantly reduce recidivism – they do not provide many opportunities for meaningful employment. We found that existing research shows that people need an Associate’s or Bachelor’s-level degree to effectively overcome the stigmas they experience on reentering civilian life.

3. Social services care coordination and Multisystemic Therapy

Multisystemic therapy (MST) has been studied in multiple samples of justice-involved youth people, with significant reductions in criminal legal system involvement demonstrated. During MST, young people participate in group or individualized therapy accompanied by psychosomatic medication if needed – essentially traditional cognitive behavioral therapy. In addition, their entire family is involved in their rehabilitation. This means extra sessions with a young person’s family, teachers, or other community members, or at least active communication between the parties and therapist. Because of this broader engagement, MST gives a fuller picture of a child’s socio-emotional context (e.g., “is this child acting out because of family hardship?”), and helps a therapist actively involve adults in the young person’s life in comprehensive care coordination.

What does this mean for the SJC Network?

People who are working to reduce jail populations – for example, as part of the Safety and Justice Challenge – are often siloed from people who make broader decisions about community-led investments in social supports. But our review of the research shows how efforts to reduce jail populations fit into a broader picture of how to effectively end mass incarceration. Reducing the number of people in jails and fortifying our social safety net are the twin pillars of decarceration. Cities and counties participating in SJC should continue actively engaging with community-led organizations providing social policy programming, as the work of SJC and its community counterparts is deeply connected.