Topic: Community Engagement

The Coronavirus pulled back the curtain on racial disparities in Buncombe County’s jails.

We have been meeting, countywide, and working intentionally on these issues since November 2018.

Likewise, if America has learned anything from the death of George Floyd, it’s that systemic racism exists. If people are willing to address the question of how they contribute to it, then we’ll be able to meaningfully make progress all over the country.

I chair the 26-person-strong Buncombe County Criminal Justice Equity Workgroup in North Carolina. It has diverse membership from our pretrial, court, and government systems, as well as from the local community.

Our goals are to normalize and prioritize racial equity, giving a shared analysis and definitions; to operationalize those efforts by providing tools and data to develop strategies and drive results; and to organize internal infrastructure and partnerships to make it happen.

The data show a baseline disproportionality in racial representations within our jails: Black people represent 6.3% of Buncombe County’s population but make up approximately 25% of our pretrial jail population. During Coronavirus, owing to COVID-prompted reduction in the jail population, the pre-trial population that is Black has been hovering between 29%-31%.

Even as we have reduced our jail population more broadly as part of our prolonged work with the Safety and Justice Challenge, we have struggled to make progress on the racial disparities in our jail population. The Racial Equity Workgroup was founded to work specifically on reducing those racial disparities and determine methods and policy changes that can achieve that goal.

Workgroup members view the group as a place where they can deal with uncomfortable issues and speak without judgment. By showing up in the first place, there’s a commitment to racial equity. We start from there. Broad representation from around the community means we’re able to take a community-wide approach.

As we work on the justice system, we have to look more deeply into our society as a whole while keeping the big picture in mind.

Our Community Engagement Workgroup, for example, surveyed residents of public housing as part of its community outreach, and found that their priority concerns were: systemic poverty, a lack of jobs and resources, outsiders bringing in and using drugs, peer pressure, a lack of understanding of the justice system, the school to prison pipeline, as well as police attitudes towards their community.

Data also helps us to get beyond surface level conversations and has built momentum in our jurisdiction to achieve our goals. Having the data available without pointing to a specific person who’s responsible has helped us to delve into some tough but necessary conversations.

Luckily, our group has met for long enough now that we can have conversations respectfully on these issues and bring the conversation back to the data each time.

Right now, one of the things that we’re looking into is the disparity in the length of stay for violent crimes. We are trying to understand when we compare Black people and white people with similar charges and backgrounds, why is the length of stay longer for Black people? We raise the question: if people of color are often charged earlier in life and more aggressively, is that leading to longer sentences or longer periods in custody because they may have a longer record? Conducting case reviews, this has not always been the case. So we ask ourselves, why? We are trying to find the root causes so that we can ultimately tell our court system and local law enforcement agencies: “This is the policy change we need to make for racial equity in our community.”

We’re looking at the court system as whole, asking things like are we having bond hearings as frequently for Black clients as we are for white clients. As a public defender, I’m asking myself “Am I negotiating as hard as I would for my Black client as I would for my white client? Am I raising these issues in my discussion with court actors?”

We’re all doing that work. It can be mentally exhausting for people of color to lead, particularly on top of our full-time jobs. But the working group all show up with an incentive to change things. And we know we have the power to strengthen our community.

—Yolanda Fair is a public defender and chair of the Buncombe County Criminal Justice Equity Workgroup.

Taking stock of the open-source podcast 70 Million and its impact as season two launches

70 million adults in the United States have a criminal record. That’s one in every 3.5.

Although I’m not among them, these 70 million have become a significant part of my life thanks to our “70 Million” podcast, for which I am the creator and executive producer. I wrote about the launch of season one for the Vera Institute of Justice last year, and was humbled by the opportunity to work with some of the most talented audio producers in the country, as they reported on entrenched contradictions that make meaningful justice reform seem impossible. This included:

• A rigged bail system;
• The criminalization of poverty;
• Defendant-funded courts;
• Counties incentivized to incarcerate;
• Nonexistent mental health services;
• For-profit corrections companies;
• The warehousing of immigrants;
• Foster-care-to-prison pipelines; and
• The rise in women behind bars.

These are among the alarming trends that 70 Million chronicled in its award-winning first season. With season two, which premieres July 15, we’re taking the investigation a step further by bringing a sustained focus to how lives and communities are maligned by an ineffective, expensive, and at times corrupt network of judicial systems.

We made 70 Million because most people who have never been personally impacted by a brush with the law have a naive, almost fictionalized, understanding of the dragnet effect of the legal networks at work in the U.S., most of which function to criminalize poverty. Luckily, this is the best time to produce 70 Million because there’s a growing national awareness about the need to undo the decades of damage caused by misguided policies, intentionally harmful laws, and racialized social and economic exploitation of generations of Americans.

Our open-source digital approach has proven effective, as the first season of 70 Million was a success critically and commercially. At the time of this writing, we’re past the 35,000 download mark, wit each episode surpassing industry averages for similar podcasts in terms of unique listens, impressions, and listen-through rates. 70 Million has also been recognized for its quality, depth and narrative strengths by multiple industry authorities. Most recently, we received Bronze in the Narrative/ Documentary Podcast category at the New York Festival Radio Awards, a category that included ESPN Films, Vox Media, and Panoply.

What’s more, the response from people in the justice reform field has been effusive, with professors and researchers enthusiastically endorsing and recommending the podcast. We even learning that professors at LSU, Harvard, and Vanderbilt universities have included the podcast in courses.

By gathering deeply reported stories of successful reform-oriented programs, season two of 70 Million will hopefully offer tangible examples that can be replicated, as well as provide important lessons on potential roadblocks.

We learned so much from our first season. We learned that there’s a demand for coverage of stories that focus on actionable ideas for local criminal justice reform. We learned that digital audio is an ideal medium for disseminating these necessary stories. Every smart phone comes preloaded with a podcast app, so accessing 70 Million only requires clicking on an app on your phone. That has made it easy to spread the word and gain listeners, even as a highly focused podcast.

Our format also makes it really easy to share episodes via email, social media, even texts. And that has been a great advantage in a field where personal and peer recommendations are still the leading way people find new shows to listen to. In season two, we expect to have more evidence of these two factors, as our podcast further penetrates into academia, activist circles, and even public policy spheres.

Season one had listeners in 33 countries; and we received nearly 1,000 listens by currently incarcerated people using the Edovo app. Most importantly, our episode listen-through rate falls between 77-81 percent, which is higher than the 60 percent average for podcasting in general.

So the message is clear: people want solutions-oriented story-driven examples of criminal justice reform.

I cannot leave without introducing the tremendous group of people who make up the season two team: Jen Chien, Luis M. Gil, Casey Miner, Mitzi Miller, Kate Krosschell, Adizah Eghan, Cher Vincent, Nissa Rhee, Kenia D. Serrette, Sarah MacClure, Emma Forbes, Eve Abrams, Cheryl Green, Pamela Kirkland, Laine Kaplan-Levenson, Rowan Moore Gerety, Carolina Hidalgo, Jenny Casas, and Sabine Jansen.

If you’d like to learn more about 70 Million and get involved in reforms yourself, we’re proud to offer syllabi, resources, toolkits, and more on our site, 70millionpod.com. We’d love to hear from you: hello@lantiguawilliams.com or @LanWilCo. 70 Million is made possible by a grant from the Safety and Justice Challenge at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which also supports the Vera Institute of Justice.

The mass uprisings spurred by the killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other Black Americans, have led many people to ask what role police should play in keeping communities safe. Despite this focus on policing, an observer of the criminal legal system might tell you that how police enforce laws is often influenced by how prosecutors handle criminal cases. We, as former prosecutors working to assist jurisdictions across the country with justice reform, believe the strategies outlined below are starting points for prosecutors to help promote a new vision of justice.

As cities explore ways to safely reduce the footprint of law enforcement, is there a reckoning that needs to happen for prosecutors? How might prosecutors better reflect communities’ values for public safety and provide community-driven solutions to crime? Given that prosecutors wield substantial influence over how laws may be enforced, we will benefit from prosecutorial approaches that improve people’s ability to sustain their own safety and the wellness of their communities.

As our colleagues at the Center for Court Innovation have set forth in Shrinking the Footprint of Police: Six Ideas for Enhancing Safety, there are proven ways for localities to invest in solutions that increase safety, limit the use of police, and remain rooted in anti-racist, community centered practices.

Prosecutors, too, have the ability—and indeed, an opportunity—to take these efforts even further.

This moment can inspire prosecutors, who see their role as representing the interests of the “the People” (their constituents), to forge new practices, partnerships, and programs that complement community-led safety efforts.

New Practices

First, prosecutors can develop practices that prioritize the well-being of survivors and accused people. Enter, again, the outside observer of the criminal legal system. This person sees prosecutors mostly urging swift legal action against people arrested for crimes. And the consequences are primarily retributive in nature: file charges, seek a conviction, and pursue an accompanying sentence. Prosecutors are trained to review an accused person’s criminal history and the alleged offense to recommend how the justice system should respond to the accused. These factors are indeed relevant to how cases might best be resolved, but how might early decision-making improve with more information? Perhaps the accused has a long trauma history, has unmet mental health needs, or is battling a substance use disorder without resources to address it. What if one or many of these factors contributed to the alleged offense? Prosecutors would do well to embrace a more holistic view of who accused people are early and often.

Prosecutors, who often advocate for sentencing outcomes, can also push for options other than jail to promote a person’s healing and community restoration. This concept is not new to prosecutors. They often obtain similar information, about how harm has affected someone, to better understand survivors and witnesses on their cases. Given that accused people are also part of communities that we want to keep safe, it is important to extend this practice to them.

New Partnerships

Along with developing the internal practices needed to ensure consistency between the office’s mission and its culture, prosecutor’s offices must embrace existing community solutions early and often. Community-based organizations (CBOs) provide tailored and targeted services that are needed in community as supplements to the social services provided by city and state government. Prosecutors can use these services as early on in cases as possible. In certain instances, they can also hold off on prosecuting people while they participate in these programs, to reduce further exposure to the court system. As an office beholden to its constituents and charged with protecting community safety, prosecutors must be familiar with and use community-based organizations and the services they provide as a bridge between the criminal justice system and communities affected by crime. Research supports this approach.

New & Expanded Programs

Once formal pathways to community-based services are in place, prosecutors may begin to identify gaps in the landscape to safely meet people’s needs outside of the court system. Maybe there’s a need for more programs that can reflect the cultural and ethnic needs of constituents. Perhaps services need to be available beyond business hours to serve people at the most critical times. There may also be a demand for more holistic programming that can offer housing and employment support—for accused people and their families—to help address the root causes of contact with the court system.

Whatever the needs may be, localities must be in a position to meet them if they intend to provide the supports that can preemptively address community needs. This kind of response takes investment, and prosecutors are in a unique position to offer a much-needed assist. Prosecutor’s offices often have access to civil asset forfeiture funds, which allow police and prosecutors to seize property with a suspected connection to criminal activity. These resources are often funneled back into the budgets of these same entities to spend in ways that promote public safety. To this end, prosecutors could invest asset forfeiture funds in local organizations that provide services to court-involved people.

Safe communities require investment—in networks and resources that can respond more nimbly, and often more affordably, than government might sometimes be able to do. At this moment of reckoning, prosecutors, too, can examine ways to heed communities’ renewed concerns about the criminal legal system.

Prosecutors can harness their power as representing “the People” to heed their call to broaden our view of how to keep them safe. This cannot happen unless we promote a culture that prioritizes healing and well-being over convictions. Indeed, prosecutors, who see their role as seeking justice can lead the charge to promote more human-centered approaches, for people accused of crime and survivors.

The criminal justice reform movement has often overlooked the inclusion of victims in their efforts. It has also misunderstood and frequently miscommunicated who victims are. In fact, when the National Center for Victims of Crime entered into the conversation about reform, people asked, “why are victims interested in reform, and why should they be included in the process?”

The answer for those of us in the field is clear – victims are at the moral center of the criminal justice system. Soliciting victims’ opinions on issues that will affect their lives is the right, smart, and just thing to do. However, reformers may be surprised that crime survivors are often their strongest allies and supporters. That’s because in the majority of cases, those who have committed a crime have also survived trauma and identify as victims themselves.

Ninety percent of individuals who have been, or are, incarcerated, are also crime victims. Labeling someone an “ex-con”, “felon”, or “prisoner”, however, clouds our perception of them and their perception of themselves.  Attaching these labels to individuals attaches the corresponding stigma of being “bad” and “not deserving” of assistance and crucial services to address their trauma. While in fact, this assistance is what may help them to heal and live productive lives. “The worst part of repeatedly hearing your negative definition of me, is that I begin to believe it myself,” wrote Eddie Ellis, the late justice reform leader.

The taint of these labels extends to the places where people who have been incarcerated, and are crime survivors, live.  We call them “bad neighborhoods” making it easier to leave them unprotected and under-resourced rather than providing these places with treatment, assistance, security and compassion.

In 2016 the Department of Justice Office of Justice announced that it would no longer use the words “felon” or “convict”, and in 2018 Washington state’s reentry council urged people to “use accurate and non-stigmatizing language” to describe individuals who have been formerly incarcerated. Such people are “often characterized as being part of a criminal underclass”, the council said. While the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a resolution to adopt the practice of using “human-first language”, recently.

As we continue to reform the criminal justice system, let’s ensure that the voices of victims are heard and considered.  Let’s also stop defining others by the worst thing that they have done in their lives and create additional barriers to their success and healing. As Eddie Ellis said, “no single moment or experience should define any of our lives forever. Least of all in words.”

Renee Williams is the Executive Director of the National Center for Victims of Crime. 

You can watch a Facebook Live video on this subject featuring Ronald Simpson-Bey of JustLeadershipUSA and Erik Henderson of San Francisco County, and Mai Fernandez of the National Center for Victims of Crime on the MacArthur Foundation’s Facebook page.  

Depending on one’s perspective, the role of law enforcement is often summarized into catchy but vague terms; peacekeeper, guardian, warrior, gatekeeper, savior, and enforcer are some of the most common. But none completely captures the multifaceted role we often play in communities around the world.

To a survivor of domestic violence or a parent with a choking infant, a police officer, sheriff’s deputy, or trooper might be a welcome source of support. To someone who was swept up as part of a “tough on crime” initiative, law enforcement officers are often viewed as warriors or enforcers.

The history of law enforcement shows that these roles are dynamic and change over time. In many communities, law enforcement agencies are at a critical nexus of redefining their role as gatekeepers to the criminal justice system.

With this in mind, the Vera Institute of Justice recently released a report entitled “Gatekeepers: The Role of Police in Ending Mass Incarceration,” outlining a roadmap to change which includes a series of recommendations that go beyond encouraging the establishment of alternatives to arrest programs.

The report delves into the need to address structural factors to alleviate the pressure on law enforcement agencies to arrest, and outlines how to do this through partnerships with other stakeholders such as community-based service providers and elected officials.

It’s important that we reinforce this point— that while the title of the report focuses on police and other law enforcement officials as “gatekeepers,” the report’s substance goes much deeper, highlighting the need for community-wide collaboration, and making it very clear that responsibility for the shift away from mass incarceration goes far beyond law enforcement, alone.

In truth, most individuals enter the field of law enforcement to help people and would rather have other options beyond arrest to respond to public safety challenges. In simplest terms, law enforcement officers do not want to bring people to jail at all hours of the day and night any more than people want to be brought to jail – particularly when alternatives to arrest, if available, would be a far better tool.

In areas where alternatives to arrest and/or booking exist, law enforcement takes full advantage of these non-punitive options, which is better for the citizen with whom they’re dealing, and gets officers back on the street and able to respond to calls for service faster and interdict violent crime. However, when options and discretion are limited, jail becomes the default. Law enforcement cannot reduce custodial arrests alone; government at all levels must work to provide alternatives.

Alternatives to arrest practices, like pre-arrest diversion and the use of crisis response or triage centers, show great promise to reduce both the collateral consequences of contact with the justice system and recidivism. This paradigm shift to increase law enforcement discretion to use non-punitive options is growing in the work of both local police agencies and national entities.

There are plenty of good local examples, but here are two:

• Tallahassee/Leon County, Florida Pre-Arrest Diversion, Adult Civil Citation (ACC) program: A four-year evaluation of this program, which started in 2013, showed that law enforcement, working directly in partnership with community-based behavioral health professionals, reduced the recidivism rate by approximately 80% for program participants. In addition, the 84% of participants who successfully completed the program avoided arrest records and any accompanying collateral consequences. Legislation passed in Florida in 2018 mandates Adult Civil Citation programs in every Florida county, leading to improved public safety, reduced impact on human dignity, and future opportunities by avoiding the life-long consequences of an arrest record.
• Milwaukee, Wisconsin, The Sisters Program: From 2013 to 2015, 704 women were arrested in Milwaukee 1,292 times, and 83% of those arrests occurred in just two police districts. The Sisters Program is a community-police partnership that offers diversion from the justice system, giving women the opportunity to change their lives and avoid future incarceration, fines, or other judgements. The Sisters Program is designed to create a citywide policy that uses a public health-based approach to street prostitution and sex trafficking, rather than a criminal justice approach that criminalizes women. Women diverted by the Milwaukee Police Department to the Program are connected to a variety of resources, including crisis management, counseling, advocacy, assistance with obtaining housing, and other critical resources.

On the national level, beyond participating in the MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge, the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) has worked on several projects to promote justice system change and support law enforcement efforts to build stronger community-police relationships. Through these projects, IACP has created resources to support law enforcement in pretrial justice reform, conducted a study of citation-in-lieu of arrest programs that demonstrates widespread support for this practice, and created the One Mind Campaign to ensure successful interactions between police officers and people affected by mental illness.

So, how does this shift in culture and practices occur?

The reality in many communities is that few services are available all day, all night, and all year round, as law enforcement are, so they become the default resource for immediate help. Incidentally, that’s why people tend to call upon the police for so many different things.

Growing the capacity and availability of community-based treatment and services in order to create options for police—like diversion programs and community drop-off centers—takes collaboration among several local systems, including justice, behavioral and public health, medical, and local government. To be clear, having these resources available will reduce the reliance on a criminal justice response.

Additionally, creating 24/7/365 non-emergency help hotlines in communities can also reduce the reliance on law enforcement so that their calls for service are for instances in which there are public safety concerns.

These recommendations may seem simple and straightforward, but the process of implementing them can be complex. By working collaboratively with community-based partners, stakeholders can begin to identify gaps in treatment service capacity and combine expertise to work on system-wide solutions to fill those gaps, including identifying sources of state and federal funding and combining or co-locating local resources.

For many justice system agencies, the need for alternatives is evident, but the path to establishing them is uncertain. The wide variety of alternatives to arrest that communities and law enforcement are using can be overwhelming; it raises questions of what is the “best” or “most effective” approach.

There are also competing interests between addressing the real need for restructuring how communities seek and provide help versus gaining traction and showing progress by tackling the low-hanging fruit. New approaches might be difficult to introduce to the rank and file, such as the concept of harm reduction, which is a set of practical strategies and ideas aimed at reducing negative consequences associated with drug use. Alternatives to arrest that incorporate harm reduction may be foreign to law enforcement who were trained to act on a binary choice – whether or not the person they are dealing with has “done wrong”.

This uncertainty should not be a barrier to exploring alternatives to arrest, however. It should be an incentive. When there is uncertainty, innovation can thrive. The climate is ripe for new ideas that go beyond low-hanging fruit and create deeper structural changes.

In the end, criminal justice reform is not simply police reform. We welcome and encourage all efforts to provide law enforcement officers meaningful alternatives to arrest to better serve our communities.

—Dr. Ronal Serpas retired in 2014 as Chief of Police in New Orleans, Louisiana. Previously he was Chief of Police in Nashville, Tennessee, between 2004 and 2010, and Chief of the Washington State Patrol between 2001 and 2004. He is now a Professor of Practice in the Criminology Department at Loyola University, New Orleans, and is the Executive Director of Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime and Incarceration. He is a past Vice President and member of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP).