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John and Sam were trapped in a vicious cycle of incarceration. When money was scarce, John would make Sam’s court payment instead of his own so she could stay out of jail and care for their child. It was a heartbreaking choice that he made more than once. John has been incarcerated four times for failure to pay fines and costs—each time for 10 days. Even though John and Sam were on the brink of homelessness, the court never asked about their financial ability or offered an alternative to payment.

This is modern day debtors’ prison.

Since 2009, numerous ACLU investigations have revealed that people are being jailed simply for being too poor to pay their fines and fees. These practices damage communities, waste taxpayer dollars, and frequently trap victims in a cycle of incarceration and poverty, while also flagrantly violating the law. Even more troubling, debtors’ prisons create a two-tiered system of justice in which the poor often receive harsher punishments and end up paying more in fees for the same crimes as their wealthy counterparts, simply because they are poor.

In 2013, the ACLU of Ohio issued The Outskirts of Hope, detailing debtors’ prison in Ohio, and created a series of videos to highlight the stories of those affected. We also sent legal demand letters to courts where debtors’ prison occurred and issued an action alert that prompted hundreds of Ohioans to ask the Ohio Supreme Court to take administrative action. As a result of this work, thousands of Ohioans have been released from jail, and over $180,000 has been credited to people for the time they were unconstitutionally jailed.

Shortly after the release of our report, the chief justice of the Ohio Supreme Court met with the ACLU of Ohio and pledged to help stop debtors’ prison practices in Ohio courts. In addition to providing training on how to properly collect fines and costs and to step in where debtors’ prisons occur, the Ohio Supreme Court pledged to create a “bench card.” The bench card is a concise resource for judges that clearly lays out proper and improper methods to collect fines and costs, and even outlines the process for a court to substitute community service for court costs.

Since the bench card’s release, debtors’ prison-related complaints have severely dwindled. The ACLU believes in the simple principle that no one should ever be jailed for being too poor to pay their fines. After years of investigation and advocacy, along with firm guidance from the Ohio Supreme Court, this simple principle is becoming reality, and thousands of Ohioans are able to start new lives.

The Ohio Supreme Court’s bench card was the first of its kind in the country, but after widespread media attention, other jurisdictions have begun to use it as a model to help stop de facto debtors’ prison practices in their own state.

Learn more about the ACLU’s current efforts to end debtors’ prison across the country.

This post originally appeared on the Vera Institute of Justice’s Current Thinking blog.

Crime and punishment are generally perceived to be urban problems, not rural ones. This is not surprising considering that the largest jails — such as New York City’s Rikers Island and the Los Angeles County Jail — get the most nationwide attention. But would it surprise you to find out that small counties are the places where jails have grown the most, and are where nearly half of our nation’s jail inmates are now held?

Last month, the Vera Institute of Justice released In Our Own Backyard: Confronting Growth and Disparities in American Jails. The headline finding of the report is that small counties (those with fewer than 250,000 residents) have contributed the most to the four-fold nationwide growth of the jail population since 1970. The jail populations of small counties have increased by 6.9 times since 1970, far exceeding the pace of growth of 4.1 times in mid-sized counties (those with 250,000 to 1 million residents), and 2.8 times in large counties (those with more than 1 million residents). Smaller counties together now hold 44 percent of the nation’s jail inmates — a significant change since 1970, when they held only 28 percent. If jails in small counties grew at only the rate of mid-sized counties, there would be 120,000 fewer individuals incarcerated in jails today.

The animated image below illustrates that small, mid-sized, and large counties each trended upwards at roughly the same rate until 2000, when the incarceration rate in small counties continued to grow, as it subsided in large and mid-sized counties. The “bubbles” are used to group data for large, mid-sized, and small counties and are scaled to the number of incarcerated individuals.

For more, you can investigate these trends for each state in this data visualization.

Since we released the report, many have asked us the same question: “Why have jails in the smallest counties grown the most?” We have only begun to investigate the possible answers to this question. It could be because larger counties have a wider tax base to draw on to fund health and social service programs to address needs that otherwise would land people in jail, or because the spotlight on the largest jails has helped to suppress their growth. In fact, it is jails in large and mid-sized counties — such as New York City, Bernalillo County, NM, Hampden County, MA, and New Orleans, LA — where jail populations have been most likely to decline in recent years.

But while the cause of this trend isn’t clear, its implications are: Reform is necessary in all counties — not just the largest — to end the misuse of jails in America. This is why the small jurisdictions participating in jail reduction efforts as part of the MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge — such as Pennington, South Dakota, and Mesa, Colorado — are just as instrumental to ending our overuse of incarceration as the large ones, like Houston and Chicago. And data is fundamental to reform. Vera’s new report is a publication of our Incarceration Trends Project, the centerpiece of which is a new data tool that collates and analyzes publicly available, but disparately located, jail data dating back to 1970 for every one of the approximately 3,000 U.S. counties. The tool can be used to explore your own county’s data, including jail population, admissions, and length of stay, and how these trends compare to those of similarly situated counties.

No one formula can tell us what size each jail should be. But the wide variation in incarceration rates among counties that are otherwise similar indicates that the number of people behind bars is not inevitable, but largely the result of choices in policy and practice. With new information about our jail trends in hand, communities large and small can begin to make better informed choices.

This post originally appeared on Medium.com. 

Providing programs in jail that teach job skills and prepare inmates for employment will reduce the chance that they will return after they are released—saving money in the long run and improving public safety. However, meaningful inmate programming can be costly. Creative use of existing staff and vendors can, nonetheless, yield impressive results, as we found in Milwaukee.

The Milwaukee County House of Correction (HOC), which supervises most of the county’s sentenced population, historically has not offered any substantial inmate educational activities, pre-employment programming, or job training. When County Executive Chris Abele took over management of the HOC in May of 2013 and began working with advocates and experts across the criminal justice system, the HOC was able to implement several programs that give inmates a chance to break the cycle of incarceration and give back to the community.

Although some of the inmate programming activities implemented at the HOC since May of 2013 are paid through the HOC operations budget, many were established by using the expertise and dedication of existing staff, leveraging vendor contracts, and by partnering with community groups. These programs use a small amount of the budget, but provide a significant impact that can assist inmates to become more employable and prepared for reentry upon release.

When using vendor contracts and staff roles to build new programs, it can be particularly effective to involve staff or vendors in the development of a program from the beginning. The Preparation for Success Program, a six-week pre-employment training program implemented in late 2014, was conceived, developed, and implemented by an HOC programs officer. Our program officers typically schedule events or presenters, supervise inmates on work crews, escort them to activities, and make sure programs run on time, in addition to being available for various other tasks as needed. The Preparation for Success program is presented as part of these regular duty activities and only requires a small amount of materials, but successfully promotes self-esteem, empowerment, and confidence by assisting inmates in practical job preparation skills such as filling out applications or drafting cover letters and resumes.

In another case, during a process to hire a vendor to run foodservice operations at the HOC, each vendor was required as part of their bid to propose a culinary job training program for inmates at no cost to the HOC (i.e., the cost of the program would not be paid through a portion of fees paid to the vendor). The successful bid vendor proposed—and has been conducting—a nationally recognized restaurant and food safety training and certification program for the inmates, IN2WORK, since January of 2014.

Other programs do require dedicated financial support, but it can often be obtained by a combination of grants, community partnerships, and small initial investments from existing budgets. For example, the Home2Stay program provides job training in welding, applied mathematics, and machining through a United States Labor Department grant obtained by Word of Hope Ministries. The HOC assists with the screening of participants and provides transportation for inmates to the instruction and training sites.

Earlier this year, the HOC established a Vermiculture operation—or worm farm—on HOC grounds.  The program produces worms to feed reptiles at the Milwaukee County Zoo as well as worm casings to be used as organic fertilizer by groups such as local garden organizations. It develops job training skills, demonstrates entrepreneurship, and provides inmates with an opportunity to give back to the community and make productive use of their time during confinement. The HOC made an initial purchase for supplies and stock from existing programming funds to get the program started, but after that, a portion of the casings that the worms produce are exchanged with a vendor for fresh materials for further processing at no cost to the HOC.

Through the dedication of HOC staff as well as the collaboration of justice system stakeholders, advocates, community organizations, and businesses, in less than three years we have been able to grow from virtually no substantive programming to offering dozens of programs that provide meaningful reentry support, with nearly 78% of eligible inmates involved in at least one (all inmates who are sentenced to the HOC are eligible). We now look forward to making other collaborative changes to the way we use the HOC as one of the jurisdictions selected to participate in the MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge, a national initiative to change the way America thinks about and uses jails. As our experience shows, budget concerns in strapped local jails across the country should not prevent the development of reentry programming, but encourage it, as creative collaboration will result in supportive options for individuals that can reduce recidivism, improve public safety, and save costs.

As our name says, the concept of community is central to our supervision practices at the Department of Community Justice (DCJ) in Multnomah County, Oregon, which handles probation and parole as well as pretrial supervision in Portland and surrounding areas. We are consistently seeking out research and best practices that provide guidance on how to best supervise those individuals placed on probation and post-prison supervision, such as the use of structured sanctions as a way to hold offenders accountable. This commitment to keeping individuals in their home communities extends as well to those who are awaiting sentencing and disposition through our Pretrial Services Program (PSP).

The majority of jurisdictions in the U.S. rely on bond schedules, which specifies monetary amounts accused persons must pay to be released pretrial, based on the charges they face. In Multnomah County, 61% of people booked into jail are awaiting trial and have not yet been charged with a crime. Many defendants on low-level charges who cannot afford bail plead guilty through negotiations before trial, solely in order to be released from jail. The creation of pretrial diversion options for such cases can have a profound effect on case disposition and sentencing. In Oregon, pretrial services were created in 1973 in conjunction with the abolishment of the commercial bail bond system. It was a joint effort among judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, law enforcement officers, and correctional officers—and the continued collaboration of all these stakeholders has been the key to the program’s success.

The primary mission of PSP is to evaluate the risk of releasing defendants prior to trial, supervise defendants in the community, and ensure that defendants attend court hearings. PSP supervision allows defendants an opportunity to remain employed or in school, continue to receive medical services (such as drug, alcohol, or mental health treatment), and stay connected to their community pending resolution of their court cases. In 2014, 86% of those receiving PSP supervision showed up for their court dates, demonstrating that pretrial supervision can be a successful pretrial alternative to jail detention.

In addition to pretrial supervision, Multnomah County’s DCJ contributes to the effective management of jail beds through the use of structured sanctions. Research has consistently demonstrated that the delivery of swift and certain sanctions supports reduced recidivism. Oregon established a structured sanctions program in 1993 through a law giving probation/parole officers (PPO’s) the authority to apply immediate consequences to offenders on probation when they violate conditions of supervision. The implementation of this law allows PPO’s to impose a range of sanctions up to and including jail time. Like the establishment of PSP, this law was made possible through the collaboration of justice system stakeholders, and it gave PPO’s the authority to implement sanctions. The public safety partners realized that by not requiring a court hearing to impose short jail stays on probation and parole violators, the process would be more effective, saving time and money.

But it’s important not to overuse jail, even for the limited purposes of “swift and certain” sanctioning. After years of DCJ using more than 600 jail beds daily for this purpose, DCJ and our County Commissioners established a target of using fewer than 450 jail beds a day. Our target is based on research that continues to show that the length of a jail sanction has little impact on an offender’s success in completing probation or parole, and that longer stays are actually detrimental to public safety by increasing the likelihood of recidivism. This has led us to review when and how jail beds are used for sanctioning, and to consciously limit jail stays imposed for purposes of sanctioning violations of probation and parole.  As a result, lengths of stay have declined, and DCJ now uses a yearly average of 379 beds a day to sanction violators. When comparing 2008 to the present, we’re using about 80,000 fewer jail beds a year.

We look forward to continuing this work as one of the 20 jurisdictions selected to participate in the MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge, a national initiative to change the way America thinks about and uses jails. As we’ve already seen, the result of our commitment—along with that of our local public safety partners—to positively impact those under our supervision and their families by keeping them in the community when appropriate has increased public safety, saved taxpayer money, and contributed to stronger communities.

The Decision Points blog series explores the seven key decision points during the typical criminal case where choices can be made to reduce jail populations.

Judges play a critical role in a typical criminal case, not only in the most direct ways—delivering bail and sentencing decisions—but also through managing trial speed.

Through my work as an Administrative Judge and Chief Judge, I have learned that it is vital to understand, measure, and monitor judicial workload because caseflow has a direct effect on the jail population. For example, it is estimated that two-thirds of Palm Beach County’s inmates are awaiting court appearances. The circuit needs to ensure that these cases are handled in a timely manner to avoid unnecessary pretrial detention.

Recognizing the importance of effective caseflow management in ensuring timely disposition of cases, I created a tool called the “In/Out Report” that judges can use to verify, on a monthly basis, that cases are moving efficiently through the court system. Additionally, this report helps measure judicial workloads and make sure that the cases are equitably assigned among the judges and divisions, such as civil court, criminal court, and family court.

The In/Out Report incorporates four kinds of data to give a comprehensive snapshot of the current docket that can be used to make informed caseflow decisions:

• Pending cases—the number of active cases within a specific judicial division on the day the report is run;
• Reopened cases—the number of cases that were closed and then subsequently reopened (as of the date the report is run);
• Filings—the number of newly filed cases assigned to each division; and
• Dispositions—the cases in which all issues are resolved and no further judicial action required.

With the information provided by the monthly In/Out Report, our judicial docket now has an 88-day average period from a filing to disposition for misdemeanor and felony cases and an above-state-average clearance rate of 107.9%—which means that we dispose more cases than we receive in a given time period.

What bolsters the effect of using this new report is that the judiciary is not working alone in this endeavor. In Palm Beach County, the circuit, as well as its court partners, are carefully analyzing each decision point that affects our criminal justice system; from law enforcement point of contact through arrest, booking, first appearance hearing, appointment of counsel, bond hearing, arraignment, case disposition, sentencing, and possible reentry. Together, we are fine-tuning the various processes.

Most recently, with the added resources made available by the MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge funding, the county, court, and court partners are collaborating further to carefully evaluate the criminal justice issues that impact our community with the goal of reducing the county’s jail population, without compromising the safety of our citizens. Creating judicial workflow reports is one example of the kind of data-driven reform effort that can help achieve this goal.

The Hon. Jeffrey Colbath is the Chief Judge of the Fifteenth Judicial Circuit in Palm Beach County Florida. He is in his second term as Chief Judge having served since July of 2013. Previous to the Chief Judge position, Judge Colbath served as the Administrative Judge of the Circuit Criminal Division of the Court which included a divisional caseload in addition to the administrative responsibilities.

Note: This piece also ran on the Huffington Post (“Decision Points: Reporting on Caseflow Affects Pretrial Jail Populations”)