Report

Data Analysis Incarceration Trends Jail Populations January 17, 2024

Turning Local Data into Meaningful Reforms

Rebecca Tublitz

Effective criminal legal reform requires a strong understanding of the key challenges jurisdictions face in building safe and equitable legal systems, as well as an equally strong understanding of the carefully designed solutions—and how to thoughtfully implement them. Data and information must play critical roles in supporting each stage of legal system reform. With this in mind, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation launched the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC), a major initiative to support local criminal legal systems in reducing over-reliance on jails as a response to social problems. Today, the SJC supports a national network of 57 cities, counties, and states in implementing a range of policy and programmatic interventions to re- shape local justice systems, with the aim of safely reducing the number of people who go to jail and how long they stay. Data, measurement, and evaluation has played a pivotal role in guiding this initiative—for identifying drivers of the jail popu- lation, designing innovative decarceration strate- gies, monitoring progress, and evaluating and understanding performance. The Institute of State & Local Governance at the City University of New York (CUNY ISLG) plays a leading role in these data collection and analysis activities across the SJC, serving as a central liaison between local jurisdictions, external researchers, technical assis- tance providers, and the MacArthur Foundation. Safety and Justice Challenge cities and counties lowered jail populations by 18.6 percent—or 11,010 individuals on average—since the start of the initiative. This data is made possible by the data collection efforts detailed in the Main Report.

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Issue Brief

Frequent Jail Users Frequent Utilizers Human Toll of Jail Jail Populations Mental Health July 25, 2023

Recommendations To Reduce Frequent Jail Contact

Sarah L. Desmarais, Brandon Morrissey, Lisa Callahan, Samantha A. Zottola, Jen Elder, Kristin Lupfer, Elan C. Hope, & Richard A. Van Dorn

Although most jail admissions represent the only contact a person will have with the criminal legal system, there is a small group of people who experience more frequent jail contact and who represent a disproportionate number of both jail admissions and expenditures.1,2 People with frequent jail contact experience complex, interconnected social, economic, and behavioral health needs that may exacerbate (or be exacerbated by) their frequent jail contact. This group also experiences frequent contact with other services in the community, such as emergency rooms, homeless shelters, and treatment facilities. Strategies to implement services that meet complex needs and address structural barriers are critical to meaningfully and sustainably reduce system involvement among the population of people who experience frequent jail contact.

Effective change for people with frequent jail contact must proceed simultaneously on a systemic, policy level and on the individual services level. The population discussed in this policy brief typically has complicated behavioral and medical health needs, extensive criminal legal encounters, and significant social deficits such as poverty, isolation, and elevated risk of being unhoused. Many of their needs can be addressed with intensive, person-centered treatment in a coordinated continuum of care. The success of community-based solutions is supported by three foundational elements:

  1. A systemwide examination of structural barriers and opportunities,
  2. A focus on policies to effectively implement and support evidence-based interventions, and
  3. A re-envisioning of how the behavioral health and criminal legal systems can coordinate trauma-informed responses for people with frequent jail contact.

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1 Elsa Augustine and Evan White, High Utilizers of Multiple Systems in Sonoma County 1-31 (2020), https://www.capolicylab.org/wp-content/ uploads/2020/07/High-Utilizers-of-Multiple-Systems-in-Sonoma-County.pdf.

2 Ross MacDonald, Fatos Kaba, Zachary Rosner, Allison Vise, David Weiss, Mindy Brittner, Molly Skerker, Nathaniel Dickey, and Homer Venters, The Rikers Island Hot Spotters: Defining the Needs of the Most Frequently Incarcerated, 105 American Journal of Public Health 2262–2268 (2015), https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2015.302785.

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Report

Data Analysis Jail Populations Racial Disparities November 18, 2022

Measuring Progress: Declining Populations, Rising Disparities

Cecilia Low-Weiner, Kailey Spencer, Benjamin Estep, CUNY Institute for State & Local Governance

Exploring Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Safety and Justice Challenge Communities

Attempts to reform the criminal legal system are often driven by calls to fix the pervasive racial and ethnic disparities within it. However, these reforms, despite their intentions, can fail to improve or even exacerbate the same disparities they sought to fix.

Since 2015, cities and counties across the country have joined the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) to develop and implement data-driven initiatives to reduce jail populations and eliminate racial and ethnic disparities within these jails. While prior analyses by the CUNY Institute for State & Local Governance (ISLG) highlight major strides toward the first goal of reducing overall jail populations, the findings were less encouraging regarding reducing disparities: in many SJC communities, despite often dramatic reductions in bookings and/or jail populations across all racial and ethnic groups, disparities have persisted or even in- creased among these groups.

Reducing these disparities continues to be a challenge within SJC communities, indicating that the benefits of SJC’s strategies aren’t being felt equally among all racial and ethnic groups. This brief seeks to further explore the disparities highlighted in Measuring Progress—an online tool developed by ISLG that measures jail trends since SJC implementation—and set a course for further analyses.

Report

COVID Data Analysis Incarceration Trends November 18, 2022

Measuring Progress: The Fall & Rise of Jail Populations During the Pandemic

Cecilia Low-Weiner, Brandon Martinez, Benjamin Estep, CUNY Institute for STate and Local Governance

A Closer Look at COVID-19’s Effect on Bookings in Safety and Justice Challenge Communities

Across the country, counties seeking to curb the overuse and misuse of jails have looked to a common entry point to do so: their front doors. Since the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) launched in 2015, participating communities have implemented data-driven strategies that have helped reduce the number of people booked into their jails, reductions often closely linked to declines in overall jail population. By January 2020, just prior to the onset of COVID-19, bookings had declined in SJC communities overall by 13 percent, with no negative impacts on community safety: crime trends remained stable or decreased following SJC implementation. When the pandemic started spreading across the United States in early 2020—especially rapidly within jails—SJC communities began implementing emergency measures to reduce their jail populations, many of which directly impacted bookings and resulted in steep declines.

In an effort to understand how these declines were achieved in individual communities, and gain insight into how to sustain these lowered populations, SJC site coordinators collected information on the strategies implemented and closely tracked jail trends. This brief seeks to expand upon findings from Measuring Progress—an online tool developed by the CUNY Institute for State & Local Governance (ISLG) that measures jail trends since SJC implementation—to explore booking-related trends across communities pre- and post-COVID, offering a first look at how some of these emergency decarceration strategies may have impacted trends and what has happened since normal operations have resumed.

Report

Bail Community Engagement Crime Data Analysis Featured Jurisdictions Human Toll of Jail Jail Populations Pretrial and Bail Pretrial and Jails Pretrial Justice Pretrial Services Racial Disparities July 1, 2022

Expanding Supervised Release in New York City

Safety and Justice Challenge, Center for Court Innovation

In 2015, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation launched the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC), a multi-year initiative to reduce populations and racial disparities in American jails. To advance knowledge development grounded in a research agenda that explores, evaluates, and documents site-specific strategies to safely and effectively reduce jail populations and address racial and ethnic disparities, the Foundation engaged the Institute for State & Local Governance (ISLG) at the City University of New York (CUNY) to establish and oversee an SJC Research Consortium. Consortium members are nationally renowned research, policy, and academic organizations collaborating with SJC sites to build an evidence base focused on pretrial reform efforts.

Under New York City’s Supervised Release Program (SRP) individuals awaiting trial are released under community supervision to ensure their return to court, instead of via bail or pretrial detention. Defendants are eligible for the citywide SRP if they meet specific criteria, including arrest charge type, estimated risk status, and community ties. Towards the goal of reducing the jail population, New York City expanded the City’s Supervised Release Program (SRP) several times by altering the eligibility criteria to include a wider range of individuals. The first large expansion of SRP since 2016 occurred at the beginning of June 2019. A subsequent program expansion occurred in December 2019 as New York State prepared for 2020 bail reform legislation to go into effect.

In an effort to better understand the impact of expansion of SRP as a jail-reduction strategy, ISLG and the SJC Research Consortium funded the Center for Court Innovation to examine the impact of the June 2019 expansion. The Center conducted a time series analysis to determine if observed post-expansion SRP enrollment and/or detention rates significantly differed from predicted rates. The study found that the expansion increased SRP rates across racial groups and reduced detention for non-violent felony offenses, though not for misdemeanor offenses. In addition, the findings show increased use of SRP for misdemeanor offenses, which may suggest net-widening.

Key takeaways:

  1. Increasing program participation does not always decrease detention. For small program expansions (like the 2019 expansion) to have a true impact on detention, these initiatives must target serious crimes that are likely to be detained.

  2. Large changes are needed for large impact. Larger expansions, especially those that are driven by legislative change (like the December 2019 expansion in preparation for bail reform), can have a greater impact on detention compared to smaller expansions.

  3. Targeted efforts to reduce racial disparities are necessary. Disparities are not automatically impacted by increasing program participation and decreasing detention across the board. To reduce racial disparities, targeted efforts must be made.

Together, the findings suggest that the SRP expansion reduced detention for some offenses and highlight the importance of measuring the impact of program implementation and expansion to inform future work and jail reduction efforts in New York City and other jurisdictions.