Topic: Community Engagement

The Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) has been making considerable, steady progress in safely reducing jail populations over the last few years. But the recent COVID-19 pandemic put a lot of these initiatives into overdrive, creating historic, sudden drops in jail populations all over the country.

Recently, you may have been reading in the press that there is a “crime wave” going on, and that it is related to either the COVID-19 pandemic, related lockdowns, protests, defunding the police, or social unrest.

These articles contain a lot of misinformation about crime rates, whether they are increasing or not, and what is causing them to change.

First, it is important to note, there is no “crime wave”. Second, while there has been a short-term increase in homicides, those increases cannot be linked to drops in the jail populations.

It is incorrect to link de-incarceration efforts to short-term crime trends.

Too often in criminal justice reform, people have a pre-determined narrative in their heads. It is easy for some people to push a “lock-‘em-up” agenda because it stokes fear, sells headlines, and baits clicks. These narratives often rely on cherry-picked data to fit their needs.

But the SJC has always been a data-driven initiative. It is important to always let the data speak first, investigate causation, and then, and only then, develop policy. A recent JFA Institute report, based on data from 11 SJC cities and counties, draws some key conclusions regarding recent jail population and crime trends. Amongst our conclusions is that crime as reported to police in general and violent crime in particular are not up across those jurisdictions.

It is wrong, therefore, to say “violent crime is spiking”.

“Violent crime” as categorized by the FBI under the UCR system (Uniform Crime Report) is made up of four crime types: homicide, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. In our report on 11 cities and counties, there was a short-term increase in homicides reported, representing a 45% increase from 2019 to 2020. This on the surface seems dramatic, but it is important to put this finding in context. Homicide is the rarest of all crimes and represents a small portion of the totality of violent crime. Homicides represent an even smaller portion of total crime, making up only .05% of the total crimes reported in December 2020. Further, in terms of the context of historical crime rates, the number of crimes committed each year are way down over the long term:

Much more time is needed before any credible scientist would say there is a trend.

Perhaps more important, it’s clear that jail de-incarceration has no causal link to crime trends.

Among our key findings:

• Analysis of the eleven cities and counties studied revealed jail populations declined, yet crime and arrests declined as well, giving indication that declining jail populations did not compromise public safety.
• Overall, total reported crime was 22% lower in December 2020 when compared to December 2019 and 14% lower for the total number of reported crimes for Calendar Year (CY) 2020 versus CY 2019.
• When combining all jurisdictions. there was an average 39% decrease in jail bookings, which equates to over 130,000 fewer jail bookings in a one-year time frame. Jail booking decreases were fueled by the decrease in property crime and arrests, primarily for misdemeanor and lower-level felony charges.
• As a result of the change in jail bookings, the composition of the jail populations changed post-COVID-19, with a higher proportion being male and charged with violent felony and non-drug felony crimes.
• The length of stay for people in jail has increased due to the changing make-up of the jail populations and a slowdown in court case processing.
• After the historic initial decrease, jail populations rebounded somewhat, but stabilized in October 2020. During this time, there was no substantial increase in overall crime.

The report expands on our preliminary report issued in December 2020, which focused on the Impact of COVID-19 on crime.

COVID-19 created the most dramatic decrease in jail populations, over the shortest amount of time in modern history. The pandemic gave us an opportunity to rethink old practices and consider changes for the longer term.

The data we produced should be used to start a conversation on how and why some specific crime types did increase in the time frame studied. And we should consider how to combat that, smartly. Answers include improving community relationships and cohesion, better community policing, and violence de-escalation initiatives.

At this time, we must resist short-term narratives that do not match the data. It critically important now and should be a lesson learned we can apply to the future sustainability of criminal justice reforms, both within the Safety and Justice Challenge and elsewhere.

America’s over-incarceration problem begins in our local jails. Each year, there are close to 11 million jail admissions in the United States, nearly 18 times the number of yearly admissions to state and federal prisons. In many regions, jail populations have reached crisis levels.

The primary purpose of jails is to detain people who are awaiting court proceedings and are considered a flight risk or public safety threat. Many people admitted to jail cannot afford to post bail and may remain behind bars for weeks, months, or even years awaiting trial or case resolution. Our over-reliance on jails has negative consequences for people who are incarcerated, their families, and communities. Burdens of jail fall disproportionately on communities of color. Black Americans, for example, are jailed at five times the rate of white Americans and comprise a proportion of the jail population that is three times their representation in the general population.

In response, the MacArthur Foundation launched the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) in 2015, and has so far invested $252 million in the effort. Its aim is to help create fairer, more effective justice systems on a large scale.

The goal of the SJC is not just to reduce jail populations, but to do it safely – this has been a pillar of the initiative since its inception. Our previous research has highlighted the substantial reductions made in jail populations across SJC sites since 2015. But our new report provides an initial look at those decarceration strategies through a safety lens. More specifically, it explores how both aggregate crime rates and returns to custody among people released from jail changed after the launch of the SJC and the implementation of decarceration strategies in sites through 2019.

Reducing Jail Populations Without Compromising Public Safety  

Our latest analysis runs through 2019 and explores how crime rates changed after the launch of the SJC. It also analyzes returns to custody among people released from jail. We will explore COVID-19’s impact in future briefs.

Our analysis should be viewed as a first step towards assessing decarceration and public safety. Our measures rely on administrative data from criminal justice agencies, and as a result are reflective of the justice system’s responses. Future stages of our work will aim to explore public safety in a much more nuanced manner. For now, our goal is to lay a broad foundation of understanding about the trends we are seeing.

Findings suggest it is possible to craft decarceration strategies without compromising public safety. In fact, our measures of public safety across SJC sites remained about the same before and after reforms were implemented to reduce local jail populations.

Local Crime Trends Remained Stable or Decreased in Most SJC Sites

During the first few years of SJC implementation, 11 sites experienced a reduction in index crimes greater than 10 percent. The majority (19) either experienced some decrease or remained the same.

The Rate of Returning to Jail Custody Was About the Same

Among individuals released from jail pretrial, return to custody rates for felonies, misdemeanors, property crimes, and violent crimes within a year remained about the same.

Being returned to custody on a violent charge was rare before and after SJC implementation; being returned on a homicide was very rare. Most individuals who returned to custody within a year did not return on a more serious charge.

Regardless of the specific charge type, return to custody rates among those released pretrial did not change after the implementation of decarceration reforms began.

Prior to the implementation of SJC jail population reduction strategies, 38 percent of people released on pretrial status were returned to custody within 12 months of their release. (Note that our return to custody measure includes returns for reasons other than a new criminal charge—future work will focus more narrowly on returns that involve new charges.) This remained true in the years following SJC implementation – of those released pretrial in the second year of the SJC implementation, 39 percent returned to custody within a year. The vast majority of sites did not experience an increase in the return to custody rate after SJC implementation began.

Conclusions

The findings of this analysis suggest that decarceration efforts in SJC sites did not endanger public safety as measured by crime rates and returns to custody. As incarceration rates declined during the SJC, crime and violent crime rates also dropped or remained the same in most sites, mirroring national crime rate trends. When examining individuals who were returned to jail custody within a year of release, the rates of return were about the same before and after the SJC – suggesting that decarceration efforts, especially among the pretrial population, do not lead to a higher rate of returns. Importantly, returns to custody for violent crime charges and homicide charges were rare before and after the SJC. Of course, our measures are not inclusive of all definitions of public safety. Future work will examine the public safety implications of the SJC more comprehensively.

More on the Data

SJC sites share jail population data once a month with the Institute for State and Local Governance (ISLG) at the City University of New York (CUNY). A subset of sites submit detailed case-level jail data to ISLG once a year. We sourced crime data from the FBI 2019 Crime in the United States report.