Author: stagingsjc

Any indication our neighborhoods may be becoming less safe will always be met with anxiety. The FBI’s annual report on crime, released in September, will fairly be met with some concern that our collective effort to keep citizens safe is going in the wrong direction.

According to the FBI, the violent crime rate in the United States remains near half-century lows, but increased nationally between 2015 and 2016, a continuation of increases seen in last year’s report. While any increase in violent crime is cause for alarm, a detailed look at the data reveals that a large percentage of the increases are concentrated in certain neighborhoods around the country, reflecting local factors. Combatting these factors will require locally tailored crime prevention strategies supported by research.

As two leaders on the front lines of our respective state and city’s criminal justice systems, we’ve pursued strategies to hold the people who committed crimes accountable and witnessed first-hand the harm that these crimes can cause communities. We also know how vital it is to look beyond the headlines and peel back the layers of data that mask what’s really happening in each state and the communities within those states in order to determine effective solutions to ensure the people in those jurisdictions remain safe.

For instance, from 2014 to 2016, Kansas saw its violent crime rate increase by 9 percent. What that number doesn’t show is that the state also saw a 7-percent decline in rape. During the same period, Georgia’s statewide violent crime rate increased 5 percent, but that hides the fact that its most populous city, Atlanta, saw its violent crime rate actually drop by 12 percent.

Other locations across the country are experiencing very different trends. In some communities, homicide is up, pushing the overall homicide rate to increase by 8.6 percent. Other crime categories have reached historic lows. National property crime rates, for example, were last this low in 1966, and national violent crime rates have been lower than the current rate only five times since 1971.

It’s important to take a comprehensive look at all crime trends, specific subsets of crime categories, historical context, and geographic characteristics of local jurisdictions, such as urban and rural. Additionally, poverty rates, illegal drug use and other societal issues should be examined to help understand larger issues leading to crime.

The complexity of local crime trends means that no one number can guide our public safety strategies. States and communities should collaborate with community members and stakeholder organizations when reviewing data and deciding on how best to allocate resources and develop public safety improvement and crime prevention strategies. The good news is that states that are targeting that type of approach are already seeing results.

According to a recent brief from The Council of State Governments Justice Center, South Carolina, Georgia, Michigan and several other states have seen recidivism rates fall significantly, meaning fewer people are leaving prison and committing new crimes.

A growing number of cities and counties are embracing targeted solutions as well. Through the MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge—to which CSG Justice Center is a strategic ally—forty jurisdictions are piloting data-driven solutions to reduce the cycle of incarceration that can destabilize individuals and communities and lead to more crime.

The FBI crime report should prompt a serious dialogue among state and local leaders about the differing challenges they face in combatting the pockets of persistent violence around the country. How can communities make a positive impact on violent crime trends while maintaining the progress being made on property crime in an era of tightening budgets? How can they best address the significant impacts opioids and mental health issues are having on our criminal justice systems?

This type of deep data analysis at the local level is the only way to ensure unique challenges are met with appropriate solutions, especially when state and local trends can be at odds with one another, both state by state and community by community.

In that spirit, towns, counties, and cities must take the same initiative to closely examine indicators like arrest rates and the effectiveness of probation and parole programs to key aspects of the local system, such as addressing crime at the moment of impact all the way through someone’s eventual release from prison or jail, determining whether victims are receiving restitution, and understanding how courts are using detailed assessments to make appropriate decisions for each individual.

The new FBI crime numbers should represent the beginning of a locally driven conversation about data-driven solutions, not the end. Federal policymakers should stand with states and localities as they dig into their crime data to make sure that funding, programs and policies are focused on the public safety issues most relevant to their unique communities.

Michael Boggs is a Georgia Supreme Court Justice and Co-Chair of the Georgia Criminal Justice Reform Council. Gordon Ramsay is the Chief of the Wichita Police Department. They both serve on The Council of State Governments Justice Center Board of Directors. This post originally appeared on the CSG Justice Center website. 

After more than four decades of continuous growth, the U.S. jail population has been on the decline since 2008. In 2015, the most recent year for which data is available, the average daily jail population declined yet again, slightly, by 2.4 percent.

The Vera Institute of Justice’s recent report Out of Sight: The Growth of Jails in Rural America found that during the decade prior to 2013, jail populations had been on the decline in large urban counties, but rose steeply in rural counties. Newly released 2015 county-level data, which Vera has just added to its Incarceration Trends data tool, reveals that these trends continue: nearly nine in 10 large urban counties experienced declines and, together, the jail population in the nation’s 61 large urban counties fell by 18,392 people between 2014 and 2015. That’s equivalent to emptying the Los Angeles County jails.

What the overall downward trend in the total U.S. jail population masks, however, are rising jail populations in 40 percent of suburban and small and midsized counties, and in more than half of rural counties (See Figure 1, below). The source of this data, the Annual Survey of Jails (ASJ), does not cover every jail in the United States however. Its main purpose is to estimate the national jail population. The survey covers all large jails, but only a sample of smaller jails.

The jail population grew in 195 out of 482 suburban and small and midsized counties surveyed in 2015, while 156 of the 272 rural counties surveyed had more than 8,700 additional people in jail combined. While these jails are individually small, the growth in these places adds up.

Though rural counties have the highest incarceration rates, the ASJ collects data in only 14 percent of rural counties. So while the rural jails that participated in the 2015 survey experienced sharp increases, the ASJ does not provide a tally of the jail population change in all 2,000 rural counties.

The overall picture painted by the 2015 jails data is one of tremendous declines in large, urban jurisdictions being eroded by sharp increases in jail populations in a large proportion of suburban, small and midsized, and rural counties. In urban areas such as Philadelphia and Houston, significant reforms are under way through national initiatives like the Safety and Justice Challenge. There are also more localized changes occurring in urban areas —like bail reform in New Jersey and the move to close Rikers Island in New York City. But smaller and more rural counties continue to lag behind. In order to bring these counties further into the fold of reform, governments and their partners can use the available data to examine what’s happening in their communities, contribute to filling the gaps in data and knowledge and, ultimately, initiate plans for change.

*This blog is cross-published from www.vera.org. Photo credit: Spencer Means/ Flickr

Like many other courts nationwide, outstanding warrants present challenges in Spokane’s Municipal Court. Warrants contribute to court inefficiency, and they are costly from a monetary and social justice perspective.  As the second largest municipal court in the state of Washington in the biggest city between Minneapolis and Seattle, it is not surprising that the court has accumulated over 4,600 outstanding misdemeanor warrants from people failing to appear at court hearings. The court, however, is taking steps to address this backlog as part of the city’s efforts to safely reduce its jail population.

A warrant for arrest is issued when someone fails to appear for a court date. Once a warrant is issued, any contact the person has with law enforcement will result in an arrest on the outstanding warrant, even if that new contact is unrelated to any criminal conduct. For example, if a person is pulled over for speeding, she could be taken to jail for an outstanding warrant. Because of jail overcrowding, many people who are arrested on misdemeanor warrants are booked into jail and quickly released. Despite the fact that these defendants do not spend the night in jail, such cases are still costly for local taxpayers.  Each booking into jail increases the city’s proportionate share of the jail costs based on the jail’s average daily population. While the cost varies annually, taxpayers have paid about the same rate per day to incarcerate a misdemeanant as they would pay for him to stay in one of the finer local hotels.

To help address this issue, the core team from Spokane Municipal’s Community Court—which is a problem-solving court handling quality-of-life offenses such as trespass or pedestrian interference in the downtown area—recently held a “WarrantFest.” The event allowed people facing misdemeanor charges to have their warrants recalled—or canceled—and to renew participation in resolving their cases. To mitigate participants’ transportation challenges, the team—a judge, prosecutor, public defender, and court clerk—visited multiple locations in the city where many people who are homeless and vulnerable traditionally congregate:  a large, downtown homeless shelter; the regional bus and train station; and the hub for the city’s bus system.  In order for a location to serve as a WarrantFest site, all that was needed was internet access and chairs or benches for individuals to sit. Because Spokane’s Municipal Court uses an electronic case management system, the team was able to address all cases our court handles and set new court dates for participants within a week.

While the warrant backlog wasn’t eliminated that day, the event had a significant impact on those who participated.  Take, for example, the young woman that arrived at the WarrantFest’s “court” with her nine-month-old baby in a stroller. She has lived in desperate fear of getting arrested on an outstanding theft warrant from five years earlier and going to jail. Over the past few years, the young mother had completely changed her life and wanted to address her past mistake, but she was terrified to go to jail without anyone to care for her baby.  At the event, she was able to reconnect with an attorney to address her old shoplifting charge.

Another example involved a man who had, at one point, appeared frequently in criminal court on minor charges, in large part because of substance abuse and mental illness issues. However, he had not been seen at court for quite some time, which led him to have a warrant out for his arrest. He set a new court date at WarrantFest, and when he appeared at the new court date a week later, he was sober, following his prescribed medication regime, and employed. Like the young mother, he had made significant positive changes in his life. After reconnecting with his attorney, he is in the process of finishing what he needed to do in order to be held accountable—all without going to jail and losing his job and support system.

Just one day afforded opportunities for many other success stories like these. Tracking data is important for our team, and from the electronic case management system we found that very few people whose warrants were recalled at WarrantFest failed to appear at their next court hearing. The court plans to continue the success of WarrantFest, with some modifications to expand opportunities to participate, which will likely increase the number of success stories. We also anticipate inviting additional courts to join in future efforts so that more warrants can be addressed. As we witnessed , giving people the opportunity to finally take  care of these cases—and simultaneously reducing the use of jail—is far more productive than having the warrants sit in drawers.

On any given day, there are more than 730,000 people incarcerated in more than 3,000 local jails across the United States. While many people assume that high incarceration rates are only concentrated in major cities, a recent report by the Vera Institute of Justice reveals that, in fact, small and rural counties are the main drivers of jail growth across the country. One of the factors cited in Vera’s report is a lack of resources—meaning that small and rural counties often lack infrastructure for social services, such as readily available community treatment facilities, and face a unique set of challenges within their criminal justice systems.

“Small and rural counties” references a subset of “rural to small and medium metros” as defined in Vera’s report and excludes Safety and Justice Challenge sites that are the first or second most populous counties in their state.

Despite challenges, these counties remain dynamic incubators for change, poised to quickly bring multiple stakeholders together and foster collaboration. A recent addition of Innovation Fund sites to the Safety and Justice Challenge (the Challenge) has created an opportunity to test out bold ideas in 20 new places. Through our work at the Urban Institute to support project implementation, we can witness how smaller jurisdictions seek to overcome these challenges and implement reforms that are responsive to the needs of their communities.

Innovation Sites offer a unique look into how jail growth manifests in smaller areas

The addition of six Innovation sites—Buncombe County, North Carolina; Campbell County, Tennessee; Deschutes County, Oregon; Durham County, North Carolina; Summit County, Ohio and Yakima County, Washington—greatly expanded the Challenge network in small and rural communities.

Challenges that small and rural counties face are not unique in their existence, but are unique in the way they manifest. As a result, localities must tailor solutions to best meet their needs.

Scarce resources leave little room for innovation and risk

Smaller sites have limited ability to start new programs and ensure their fidelity. The issues of staffing, finding a location to host new programs, and securing funding beyond seed investments are all major hurdles. Campbell County, a rural jurisdiction in Tennessee, planned to incorporate a gender-responsive assessment and case planning tool. However, their choices were limited to tools that are offered at a reasonable price and at an accessible location without compromising the quality of training. Campbell County successfully overcame this barrier by exploring alternative assessments that were of high quality and could provide immediate online training, which would better fit the county’s timeline and budget restraints.

Another example is Deschutes County, Oregon, which is piloting a diversionary pre-charge program for people suspected of possession of a controlled substance. Deschutes faced various implementation challenges such as staffing, finding a location to host meetings, and developing a triage center. In collaboration with multiple stakeholders, they were able to strategize other options, such as using a temporary space until they could find something more long-term. As a result, Deschutes County developed an innovative program to divert people with substance abuse needs to more appropriate community treatment options and has built a community that seeks to continue to build on their current work moving forward.

Fewer community options for behavioral health treatment bring too many people to jail

Both large and small communities are struggling to find effective solutions and stop the unnecessary incarceration of people with behavioral health needs. Because small and rural counties rarely have adequate community alternatives, an overreliance on jail persists. Yakima County, Washington is addressing this issue comprehensively by using the Sequential Intercept Model, a conceptual framework to address the community-wide interface between criminal justice and behavioral health systems. Through this model, Yakima seeks to enhance its continuum of care for people with serious mental illness and to expand its options to divert people at any point within the criminal justice system. This continuum will integrate current intervention options such as the county’s dual diagnosis court, behavioral health diversion, and pretrial services.

Buncombe County, North Carolina has been successful with timely screening and assessment. They rely on pretrial services as well as mental health and substance abuse counselors at the detention center to appropriately assess and diagnose people and divert them to community treatment. Such solutions are not yet scaled, but they are a step in the right direction and a signal to other similar-sized communities that something can and should be done about this pervasive issue.

Despite challenges, small and rural counties have a unique opportunity to affect positive criminal justice reform.

Small and rural counties have a collaborative advantage to resolving issues in their criminal justice systems: because of their size, they can often quickly bring multiple stakeholders to the table to make decisions and come to consensus. This also allows for better coordination, which can improve the way the system works for the people passing through it. For instance, Campbell County set up bi-weekly meetings with key stakeholders, including corrections staff, the judiciary, and key staff involved in the county’s drug courts to discuss and build out their Women in Need Diversion program as well as promptly review cases at the point of referral. Yakima did the same, pulling together key stakeholders from multiple departments and agencies to strategize the best way to link their systems.

Perhaps the most important opportunity that rural and smaller jurisdictions have is that their change makers are members of these close-knit communities. They are engaging in true ground-up community work creating change in a manner that is responsive to the needs of their people. When someone has a real stake in making their own community better, reforms acquire a different and more positive sense of ownership and meaning.

As Albert Einstein said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” It’s hard to imagine a better example of the need for new ways of thinking than in the difficult challenge of criminal-justice reform at the local level of government. Whether you’re driven by a passion for restorative justice, concerned about safety in your community, or looking for ways to get runaway costs under control, criminal-justice reform benefits everyone.

In Spokane, Wash., we’re dealing with the same criminal-justice issues that jurisdictions throughout the nation face. Our regional criminal-justice system is expensive, yet we’re collectively not getting the results we want: Our jail continues to be overcrowded, and recidivism rates are too high. System-level change is necessary, yet also very difficult. Our regional philosophy is to lead the necessary change instead of letting change lead us, and as regional government executives our collaborative leadership is crucial.

Recognizing that our local governments can no longer afford to continue performing services that are duplicative or fail to deliver desired outcomes, Spokane County and the city of Spokane have jointly committed to a regional partnership to find a better way. Our mission is to effectively change our predominantly offense-based, punishment-focused criminal-justice system into one that is offender-based and rehabilitation-focused.

As senior leaders, we like to stress the point, “You can’t face it if you can’t see it.” So we’re using a very structured, project-based approach to identify areas for improvement, taking the necessary time up front to clearly “see” each problem through facts and data. Further, we demand solutions from our project teams that will deliver better system outcomes without requiring more taxpayer money. A recent example: In the past year, we spent less than 50 percent of the original estimate on our new computer-aided dispatch/records management system for 911 services. That equated to millions of taxpayer dollars saved.

After defining and agreeing upon a specific system problem, we formally charter a project to address it that defines the sponsor, project manager, allocated budget, team members and stakeholders, objectives and deliverables, assumptions and risks, and timeline. Our Spokane Regional Law and Justice Council (SRLJC) approves these charters, provides overall governance and receives frequent updates on projects.

Aligning our vision to that of the Safety and Justice Challenge, a national, foundation-supported effort to reduce over-incarceration, has made all the difference in this effort. Our SRLJC has recently hired a regional criminal-justice administrator who has brought us a nationally recognized skillset and is effectively working with our key stakeholders, including community members, to implement our improvements. And thanks to our partnership with the Challenge, our pretrial services team has been expanded by six members and has recently implemented an innovative tool called the Spokane Assessment for Evaluation and Risk (SAFER) to reduce unnecessary incarcerations.

As a result, we’ve significantly expanded monitoring services across all three of our courts to safely supervise individuals in our community instead of housing them in jail. Last month we conducted 841 SAFER risk assessments, which recommended that we release and/or monitor 65 percent of these individuals. And we’ve reduced our average daily jail population by 6.7 percent over the past five months.

Of course, a key part of any reform effort like what we are undertaking is to make sure that taxpayer money is spent wisely and effectively. The county and the city share the burden of a $220-million-a-year criminal-justice system. If we can collectively be just 10 percent smarter, more efficient and more creative, we can reinvest $22 million annually to improve our criminal-justice system while also enhancing public safety. Cost savings generated from smarter ways of delivering higher-quality service, along with investments from non-government partners, will allow us to create new, evidence-based programming and support facilities, which will result in reduced recidivism and accelerated rehabilitation.

Just building an effective multi-jurisdictional, regional team to solve our criminal-justice challenges has proved to be a herculean effort in innovation. We’ve learned that it is impossible to touch one part of the criminal-justice system without impacting other parts. It’s only through the collaboration of our county and city forces that we’re able to make these commitments to new, dynamic investments in an environment in which each of our individual agencies is severely financially constrained.

We’ve already made impressive progress. But there is so much more to do, and many years of difficult decisions and actions lay ahead. With the foundation we’ve built around a shared vision, we believe that we will be able to lean into the effort together and build a far better criminal-justice system for our community.

This post was also published on Governing.