Author: Matt Davis

Members of the Safety and Justice Challenge learned during their annual convening in January 2022 about how Tulsa, Oklahoma has struggled to reckon with the legacy of its 1921 Race Massacre. The discussion showed how Tulsa’s history impacts its present. It also demonstrated the complexity any jurisdiction must face in navigating ongoing inequities as it seeks to lower its jail populations sustainably and fairly.

Today in 1921 mobs of White residents of Tulsa killed as many as 300 Black people. City officials had deputized some of the mobs and given them weapons. The mobs burned and destroyed 35 square blocks of homes and businesses in the Greenwood District. At the time, it was one of the wealthiest Black communities in the country, known as “Black Wall Street.” For many years after the massacre, Oklahomans rarely spoke about it. Long-term Oklahoma residents say they only recently heard about it. Meanwhile, efforts to commemorate the centenary brought tensions to the fore.

At the SJC convening, Madison Dawkins, manager of local partnerships at the Square One Project, chaired the discussion about the Race Massacre. She was joined by Oklahoma State Senator George Young; Kris Steel, Executive Director of Tulsa’s Education and Employment Ministry; Kymberly D. Cravatt, Assistant Director of Prosecution for the Chickasaw Nation; and Yvita Fox Crider, the Director of Statewide Outreach for Oklahomans for Justice Reform.

Square One’s Reimagining Justice Locally initiative is working with these Oklahoma-based leaders and others on a two-year project to consider important contextual issues around the Race Massacre. While last year marked the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre, historic injustices persist in Tulsa. They include ongoing racial disparities, economic inequities, and the social and cultural consequences of Oklahoma’s overreliance on punishment.

Kris began by saying Oklahoma’s historic policies and practices are rooted in racism, economic disparity, and violence. “Unfortunately, we have a pretty tough time recognizing and certainly reckoning with the historical past,” he said. The centennial weekend of the Massacre brought “tension and awareness,” Kris said, but after it was over, “it felt like we went back to things as normal.” Kris pointed to subsequent actions by the Oklahoma legislature to forbid teaching about racial disparities in schools. “Our response has not been good,” he said. “We have struggled ultimately to recognize and deal with our troubled past as a state.”

Tulsa County is an SJC site. Kris said the goals of the SJC in Oklahoma are three-fold: to advance social change through reckoning with the county’s historical injustices; to support and empower local communities to reimagine a vision of justice grounded in racial and social equity; and to invite and build a coalition among diverse stakeholder groups to build power and increase equity. Those groups will engage in discussions around “our current reality,” Kris said, focusing on historic disparities, how the state responds to violence, and what opportunities exist to build a more just state.

Yvita echoed Kris’s sentiments about ongoing disparities in Tulsa. “We are harming our communities of color. We’re seeing generational cycles of poverty and trauma,” she said. “One of the things we’re seeing is that the problem is so big, and there’s such a lack of understanding about it that people don’t necessarily know where to start.” That’s why the Reimagining Justice Locally project is so important, she said. “It helps us to engage in this conversation and guide us through civil discourse.” She said the project invited Oklahomans to understand one another’s experiences and see historic inequities. It is ultimately an opportunity to build a better state, she said.

Oklahoma State Senator George Young was brought up in Memphis, Tennessee, but has since spent 40 years in Oklahoma. During that time, he has not heard much discussion of the Massacre, he said. “The problem is that we in Oklahoma have not opened it up,” he said. He said local efforts to acknowledge the 100^th anniversary of the massacre were a start in addressing years of denial that took place after the event, but that they still did not go far enough. “We have not done enough to reveal, to make this manifestation of what occurred and how it’s significant and important,” he said.

Senator Young pointed out that Black people account for 35 percent of Oklahoma’s incarcerated population compared to eight percent of the state’s population. As a pastor, he also raised the fact that overt religiosity is often a part of legislative discourse in the state. He said it is concerning that these inequities persist despite frequent references to Christian faith. Others echoed this concern.

Kymberly D. Cravatt said that as a lifelong Oklahoman, she did not know about the Race Massacre until she was an adult. Everyone involved in the discussion agreed that while complex, the effort to continue this work in Tulsa is worthwhile. They also agreed that it cannot go forward without properly acknowledging the historic racial violence.

Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd two years ago today on May 25, 2020. People protested racial injustice in the criminal justice system across the country and beyond, and as a result, some cities and counties pledged to make significant changes to law enforcement.

But in recent conversations with people involved with the MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC), many reflected on how not enough has changed in the last two years and how the landscape for criminal justice reforms is now becoming more challenging. And yet, they also pointed to areas of progress.

Jose Bernal, an organizer with the Ella Baker Center in Oakland, California, was the SJC representative on San Francisco’s Reentry Council, where he was part of the movement that successfully worked for the closure in 2020 of a seismically unfit jail facility. Bernal said the COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with Mr. Floyd’s death, brought about a reckoning that helped close the jail. San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors had been talking about closing it since 1996, but the events of 2020 helped influence some supervisors to finally support the closure.

But since 2021, there has been a shift in how some people view the criminal justice system, Bernal said.

“In an ideal world, we want to believe that our elected officials are moved by data and facts. And, you know, there are a few that are,” Bernal said. “But right now, there is this very dangerous narrative moving us back towards the 1990s’ ‘tough on crime’ approach.”

Some people believe that we “don’t have enough police, law enforcement is under-resourced, and crime is out of control,” Bernal said. “And it’s a false narrative. The facts don’t substantiate it. Crime is actually at historic lows.”

“We should still be having the conversation about reinvesting that money into the community, but it’s not what you see in the headlines,” Bernal concluded.

Keith Smalls is a community representative and Co-Vice Chair of the Charleston County Criminal Justice Coordinating Council. He said the influx of new people into the movement for criminal justice reform following Mr. Floyd’s murder was welcomed. But the passion did not always help change policy, and in some cases, it provoked a backlash.

“Two years ago, a lot of new voices came into the movement for reform,” Smalls said. “A lot of passionate people lent their support and joined the front line for reform. But suddenly, when the protesting stopped, people took their passion home. What I tell people is that they were welcome to join the movement for reform then, but that they are even more welcome now. We need you.”

Smalls also reflected on how the criminal justice system continues to fail people, and how those who have experienced incarceration can help address these continuing problems. He recently delivered a Ted Talk in Charleston about the misnomer of calling it the “corrections” system. In the talk, he said his own experience in the criminal justice system helped him understand that it is not designed to rehabilitate.

“The system has never been designed for ‘correction,’” Smalls said. “The only people who can really show that to people at the decision-making table are people who have experienced incarceration.”

“Eighty-five percent of the people who go to prison come home. So, we should talk about what we’re making inside these systems. We get to a safer society by treating and rehabilitating people,” Smalls said.

The city council in Portland, Oregon—located in Multnomah County which is participating in the SJC—voted in 2020 to shrink the Police Bureau, but some advocates think accountability is still needed. Portland’s former Assistant Police Chief Kevin Modica believes there is more work ahead but that is optimistic.

“There have been some administrative rule changes and there is legislation moving now towards more accountability, but without a new movement for public safety reform, we’re still going to be living in the status quo. That’s going to show up in police interactions with Black boys and Black men on the street,” Modica said. “We’ve not done enough to engender a culture change. But I’m a lifelong reformist, and I do believe things will get better.”

Derrick Dawson is a National Organizer with Crossroads Antiracism Organizing and Training in Chicago. He is serving as a technical assistance provider to the SJC’s racial equity cohort in Cook County.

“Unfortunately, once George Floyd was murdered, everybody wanted a quick fix for systemic racism,” he said. “And quick fixes don’t work for systemic racism. In fact, every time we try to initiate one, we do more harm than good. It supports White supremacy. Because when quick fixes do not work, we’re allowed to say, ‘well, we tried that and it didn’t work, so why should we try?’ And that serves to reinforce the continuation of White supremacy, because now we have an excuse not to try anything new or different.”

Instead, Dawson said, it is important to strike the balance between starting somewhere and recognizing that there is a long way to go.

“In our work with the Cook County SJC team, for example, we’ve been very clear with everybody that this is a two-year project, and we have no delusions about solving the problem of systemic racism in two years. But we also recognize that we must start somewhere,” he said.

“There has been a growing understanding of the issues around systemic and institutional racism. The more folks that we can get to think about these issues systemically and institutionally, now, perhaps the next generation will have less of a slog than we have. Cook County and other systems are recognizing that we need to engage in the long-term work, otherwise we will be in the same place 20 or 30 years from now, as we are today.”

There is great news for people looking to understand how jail populations are changing across the country: The Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) has a new tool enabling anyone to track progress of SJC site jails.

The jail trends tool distills all the progress achieved across SJC sites since the Challenge began. Users can click through to different tabs to explore key trends across SJC sites and can drill down in each of these trends to view them on an individual site basis for a more nuanced local perspective.

We are also planning a series of accompanying briefs over the coming months, which will be available here as they’re released. Each brief will take a more detailed look at specific findings and provide additional context to help explain the trends.

Below is an overview of how users can interact with the tool and a highlight of some of the key findings.

Tracking Jail Populations by SJC site

One of the primary goals of the Safety and Justice Challenge is to reduce the misuse and overuse of jails. Users can select a specific SJC community to see how local jail populations have changed since before they joined SJC, to the most recent available quarter. Overall, SJC communities collectively reduced their jail population by 26% since the start of the SJC, resulting in 19,983 fewer people held in jail on any given day. While progress varies across sites, 15 sites reduced their jail population by 15% or more.

Looking at Pretrial Populations

Communities participating in SJC have successfully implemented a variety of strategies to reduce the pretrial jail population and ensure people can stay in their communities while their case is pending. Users can select individual sites to see how their pretrial population has changed. Overall, SJC communities have collectively reduced their pretrial populations by 18% since the SJC began.

Comparing SJC Sites to National Jail Population Declines

One yardstick for understanding jail population change in SJC communities is a comparison with jail population trends nationally. Overall, the population decline in communities participating in SJC outpaced the national jail population decline prior to the pandemic, and declined at a similar rate during the pandemic. Between 2016 and 2019 the national jail population remained flat. Among SJC communities that began implementation in 2016, jail populations declined by 11% during the period. After the onset of the pandemic SJC sites mirrored the national jail population reduction of around 27% between June 2019 and June 2020.

SJC Sites’ Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on jail populations – particularly on jail bookings. In this tab, users can select a community to see how the pandemic affected local jail booking trends. While bookings were declining across sites before the pandemic, bookings dropped substantially, by 57%, between February 2020 and April 2020. Since the low in April, bookings have been rising in most SJC communities. However, as of the most recent quarter, they are still below pre-pandemic levels.

Tracking Racial Disparities

The other core goal of the Safety and Justice Challenge is to reduce racial and ethnic disparities in jail populations. Since implementation, outcomes improved for people of color across SJC communities, but improvements in outcomes for White people outpaced those for people of color. Jail populations declined by more than 15% for Black populations in 10 SJC communities, for Latinx populations in six, and for Indigenous populations in one of four communities. Despite this, declines for White populations were greater. That resulted in persistent or increasing disparities. Users can view disparities for both jail populations and bookings both across SJC sites and at the individual site level.

Future Innovation

Now that the tool is live, we are working with SJC sites and other stakeholders to bring more findings to the public, including trends in length of stay, and further information on how the composition of jail populations has changed over time – in addition to making quarterly updates to the data already publicly available. Please check back regularly to see what’s new!

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.