Topic: Community Engagement

Since 2015, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) has worked to safely reduce the nation’s overreliance on jails, creating tangible benefits for individuals, families, and communities. America’s local jails are complex systems, holding over 660,000 people daily, with more than 7.6 million cycling through annually. Transforming these systems requires coordination and collaboration across traditionally adversarial stakeholders who each have their own priorities and professional cultures.

Our new report, “What It Takes to Change the Way America Thinks About and Uses Jails,” highlights distinguishing traits of effective leaders on the front lines of reform. Drawing on ten years of quarterly jail data across 26 SJC communities and interviews with 25 leaders, including 11 national SJC advisors and 14 local leaders, we identified seven essential knowledges, skills, and abilities (KSAs) and five key insights that drive successful system improvement.

To complement the report findings, this blog post explores the influence of individuals on system transformation, directly informed by the reflections and aspirations of impactful leaders.

Finding Common Ground in the Safety and Justice Challenge

For the changemakers, SJC offered a crucial platform to shift long-held professional practices and build trust across boundaries. It created space for stakeholders who did not always agree–including law enforcement, court actors, advocates, community representatives, and others–to find ways to collaboratively focus on reducing unnecessary jail use and improving public safety.

For some, being part of SJC became one of the most energizing and pivotal points of their careers. One interviewee indicated that she had experienced years of frustration trying to make changes within rigid systems, often finding that strategies never fully materialized. However, she found that SJC proved collaboration across systems was possible and could lead to meaningful change for people and their communities. Local reform efforts that at one point felt isolated began to feel connected to something larger–a coordinated effort within a national network of peers working together towards a shared goal.

SJC’s structure helped to make this collaboration possible. In many communities, there were no existing cross-system forums, such as Criminal Justice Coordinating Councils, to bring partners together around common goals. Participating in SJC provided a rare opportunity to help traditionally siloed agencies work together on shared objectives, building trust along the way. Some changemakers described how conversations that previously only happened in formal meetings began to occur more informally as genuine partnership developed and people became more comfortable connecting directly with each other.

Many interviewees reflected that the essence of collaboration altered the way they viewed their own work. The experiences through SJC helped people think more broadly about their role in the justice system, seeing themselves less as a representative of a single agency and more as a contributor to a larger ecosystem.

The SJC network created a supportive community where leaders exchanged strategies, learned from similar challenges in other cities and counties, and gained the validation necessary to sustain long-term reform efforts. It reminded everyone involved that lasting change depends not only on great strategies and strong data, but also on relationships that make progress possible.

Wielding the Magic Wand for Future Changemakers

When asked what they would give to emerging leaders if they had a magic wand, the changemakers revealed a powerful, aspirational vision, granting courage to individual leaders, and commitment from the systems around them.

Many changemakers wished for stronger institutional support that would eliminate the endless battle to justify reform and provide the foundation to consistently take bold action. They imagined agencies and communities that embrace change rather than resist it, making curiosity to new ideas the default setting. Some spoke to the need for institutions to demonstrate bravery by taking calculated risks, absorbing criticism well, and standing firm in the face of opposition so the individuals driving reform do not bear that burden alone.

Others focused on the practical foundations of change, envisioning justice systems with the infrastructure, staffing, and resources needed to deliver meaningful improvements. They would grant emerging leaders facilities designed to promote safety and care with the support necessary to sustain progress. They also would like to see comprehensive data systems, believing strong data infrastructure is a legacy that breaks down silos and facilitates informed decision-making.

Some leaders focused on the tools and perspectives emerging changemakers need in order to navigate complex political and social landscapes, particularly around public perception and inclusion. Many emphasized the importance of honest storytelling, making sure reform is portrayed accurately and not defined or hindered by moments of fear and misinformation.

Beyond policy and practice, changemakers wished for future leaders to hold onto empathy, resilience, and grace – for themselves and for the people they serve.

These wishes for future leaders offer reflection on their personal experiences and a collective vision about the next chapter in system transformation – a vision of courageous institutions, informed communities, strong data and infrastructure, and leaders who approach their work with compassion and conviction.

The Roadmap for Transformation

Altogether, these reflections demonstrate not only what SJC accomplished, but also what it made possible. Across counties and roles, changemakers described how the initiative changed their approach to their work and showed collaboration as not only necessary, but achievable. The relationships, shared learnings, and trust developed through SJC – both within counties and across the nation – proved that progress happens when a network of partners strive toward a common purpose. The hopes expressed for future generations of changemakers are a reminder that change does not end when a grant cycle closes or a program sunsets. It lives on in the skills, values, and connections that people carry on throughout their work.

As the Safety and Justice Challenge comes to a close, the lessons shared here and expressed in more detail in our new report serve as gratitude and guidance for the ongoing transformation supported by the people and partnerships continuing to move it forward.

Here is a link to the report.

Special thanks to the key changemakers, site coordinators, and CUNY ISLG for their participation in this project.

Criminal legal reformers are increasingly adopting a more holistic conception of safety, one where the goals of reducing crime, violence, and recidivism are necessary but not sufficient. This means extending the parameters of public safety investment beyond the traditional boundaries of the criminal legal system.

A new policy brief from the Center for Justice Innovation makes the case for why investment “upstream” of justice-system involvement—investment in and tailored to communities—is criminal legal reform and promotes community safety.

Los Angeles County, for example, may have quietly rolled out the next generation of criminal legal reform. Ballot Measure J, which was approved by voters in 2020 and is now the Care First Community Investment Spending Plan (CFCI), mandates that at least 10 percent of the county’s locally-generated, unrestricted funds—estimated to be between $360 million and $900 million in the first year alone—go toward direct investment in social services and community-based alternatives to incarceration. In establishing CFCI, the county declared it “time to structurally shift…budget priorities and reimagine Los Angeles County” to “address racial injustice, over-reliance on law enforcement interventions, limited economic opportunity, health disparities, and housing instability.”

If implemented well, CFCI will serve as a vision of community safety as part of a larger push for community justice. This vision runs counter to the status quo in most cities and counties, and it requires deeper investments in community-led programs and preventative services upstream from system-involvement.

Despite the conventional wisdom that contact with the criminal legal system deters crime, research tells a more complicated story. Even fleeting system-involvement can increase a person’s future risk of an arrest. As for longer periods of confinement, a recent meta-analysis of more than a hundred research studies concludes—as a matter of “criminological fact”—that incarceration has “no effect on reoffending or slightly increase[s] it when compared with noncustodial sanctions.”

Researchers have found that the bulk of the needs driving system-involvement include the need for familial support, stable employment, educational opportunities, and strong community ties—all needs most meaningfully addressed within the community.

A recent comprehensive review of evidence-backed strategies for reducing community violence cites a shortlist of effective measures, including improvements to neighborhood environments, efforts to promote anti-violence social norms, and youth engagement programs. These kinds of upstream strategies will not look the same in every community, and there is powerful evidence to support this locally-tailored approach.

A team led by Princeton University sociologist Patrick Sharkey found that “every 10 additional organizations focusing on crime and community life in a city with 100,000 residents leads to a nine percent reduction in the murder rate, a six percent reduction in the violent crime rate, and a four percent reduction in the property crime rate.”

And then there are the cost savings. In New York City, the comptroller calculated that the cost of jailing one person for one year was a staggering $556,539. If you are imagining the good that could be done if those public sums were redirected, consider that it costs less than one-thirteenth of that amount—$42,000—to provide supportive housing with services for the same period. In establishing CFCI, Los Angeles estimated that the almost $400 million it was spending annually to house roughly 900 youth in juvenile facilities could fund a full year’s tuition for more than 30,000 in-state students at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Yet across the country, city and county governments continue to focus on shoring up responses to crime rather than minimizing the need for these responses in the first place. With few exceptions, governments at all levels allocate the lion’s share of their budgets to law enforcement agencies, shouldering them with almost exclusive responsibility for community safety—along with sizeable investments in other “downstream” agencies such as pretrial services and probation departments. Even with compelling research evidence in hand, reformers have struggled to broaden the gaze of governments to include preventative intervention as a credible and effective use of public safety dollars.

There are encouraging signs, however. The City of St. Louis recently established an Office of Violence Prevention. In Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass has pledged to “hold people who commit crimes accountable,” but also “to take real steps to prevent crime from happening in the first place.” She is investing in the social and economic conditions impacting families via a new Office of Community Safety. In New York City, through a range of initiatives in historically disinvested communities, the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice is working to “democratiz[e] public safety while removing systemic barriers that many residents have and continue to face.”

But we must go further. In pursuit of lasting impact, reformers—and their counterparts in government and philanthropy—must swim upstream toward the waters of community-led innovation. Does this approach to reform make the work more complex and less conducive to easy replication? Does it shift considerable power from system actors to community members? Will it change the world for the better? Yes, yes, and yes.

Everyone wants to feel safe in their community. Yet, we know little about how people make sense of what community safety looks and feels like to them. Discussions among policy makers and the media often center on a very specific and limited conception of safety. It emphasizes crime rates as a key measure, and the criminal legal system as the primary means of achieving this goal.

But aspects of safety captured by criminal legal system data may not align with community priorities or values. Allowing communities to define what safety means to them enables them to tailor this definition to their needs and values. It allows them to identify their own priorities for action, helping to advance the goal of safety for all.

A new report explores the meaning of community safety for people who live and work in three US counties. Each county faces some challenges that impact views of safety. Missoula County, Montana; St. Louis County, Missouri; and Mecklenburg County, North Carolina are all currently working on interventions around crime and community safety funded, in part, through the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation‘s Safety and Justice Challenge initiative.

In Missoula, there is general agreement that the physical and social environment is rapidly changing. Housing-related concerns and the visibility of the unhoused population dominate conversations around safety. Part of these changes are due to an influx of new residents and associated increases in home prices, making basic needs less affordable even for people with stable employment. At the same time, many perceived that the unhoused population was growing in visibility because of a higher prevalence of drugs, a limited supply of low-income housing, and difficulty accessing mental health and substance use treatment services.

In St. Louis, violence is a significant concern for area residents. Like in many places, aggravated assaults and homicide rose at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Concerns about violence are exacerbated by the county’s proximity to St. Louis City, which has high rates of these crimes. St. Louis County’s high level of fragmentation creates many challenges for community safety as it hinders the ability to address crime and safety-related concerns in a coordinated fashion. Black county residents, particularly those residing in North County, are disproportionately impacted by crime and the criminal legal system.

Violence is also a significant concern for residents of Mecklenburg County. Violence, particularly aggravated assault, and homicide, increased rapidly from 2018 through 2020, before leveling off and falling; however, violence, particularly gun violence, continues to be a significant safety related concern for people in Mecklenburg County. Other forms of violence, including among youth and police violence, are also viewed as serious concerns.

An analysis of local newspaper coverage of crime trends found that media reports often attributed increasing violence to root social causes (e.g., mental health issues, substance use, poverty); however, the solutions presented were just as or more likely to rely on the criminal legal system. Further, individuals who work for the courts, law enforcement, and government were quoted most frequently, while the perspectives of system-impacted individuals were rare. Although many factors shape news coverage, these selective narratives have significant sway over public perceptions of violence.

To develop a new conceptualization of community safety, we asked people what this term means to them. We solicited a group of local stakeholders to help organize and make sense of these responses. They generated a Community Safety Concept Map. It has 11 components grouped into five domains or “regions”:

1. Personal safety and security;
2. Thriving and socially connected community;
3. Resources and services for a socially and economically just community;
4. Responsive and effective government and public safety agencies;
5. Systems for preventing and addressing harm.

Personal safety and security are at the heart of community safety for most people, yet the types of harm and day-to-day hassles that concerned people varied based on life experiences. These differences underscore that conversations about community safety must be inclusive and include the perspectives of marginalized groups, as their safety concerns may require a different set of policies and actions.

On average, people rated all the components of community safety as important or very important. Recognizing the overlap of safety with other community priorities, such as ensuring that everyone has their basic needs met and an equal opportunity to lead a stable life, can help promote and sustain collaboration among agencies.

Several key recommendations emerged from the work:

Language is important. Framing conversations around “community safety” Instead of “public safety” may help people think more expansively about what safety looks like and how to achieve this goal. Redefining community safety in this way has the potential to reveal the broader historical forces that create and sustain inequalities in accessing safety.

Educate people on what a more inclusive and equitable vision of safety can look like. While low rates of violence and feeling secure are key components of community safety, it is much more than that. The methods used in the report can help residents and stakeholders see a range of possibilities that move beyond a focus on crime statistics.

Identify local priorities and structure future action steps using the Community Safety Concept Map that was generated from this research. This map is designed to be a dynamic tool to engender discussions about safety and to ensure that a holistic perspective is being considered by a multitude of stakeholders (e.g., community groups, local leaders, educators).

Collect data from a representative group of community members, making sure to include the perspectives of groups who are most impacted by crime and the criminal legal system. This includes unhoused individuals, people of color, and other minoritized groups as well as people who work in the criminal legal system. Rural communities may have unique perspectives on safety and should be included in any effort of this type.

Make information on community safety readily available, so that it can be used by a variety of stakeholders. All three counties have ongoing data collection efforts that can be leveraged to measure various components of community safety identified in this study. Creating a dashboard or website that brings together these data and makes them easily accessible can empower communities to assess their own progress toward achieving safety.

When resident input is solicited, ensure there is follow-up, so people know how the information is being used. For example, local stakeholders could partner with the media to describe what is being done to address safety-related concerns and how the community can contribute to these efforts.

Replicate this work focusing on the experiences of youth. Youth are an important part of the community that we were not able to reach in this study, and they likely have very different views than older community members. From an equity and representation perspective, it is important to consider their views.

Conduct this work on a regular basis to keep up with shifting priorities. Changes in the demographic or economic profile, like what happened during the COVID – 19 pandemic, can change community perceptions. Views on safety are dynamic and should continue to be reassessed.

The Prioritizing and Measuring Community Safety Toolkit associated with this work provides a step-by-step guide for local communities interested in reimagining community safety.

Hand the microphone to individuals closest to the problem to illuminate overlooked areas of safety that are often taken for granted or absent from mainstream discussions about this issue. Moving forward, communities can benefit from local conversations that are more centered on advancing safety for all than narrow crime-oriented definitions that are just one component of how people experience and think about safety.