Topic: Costs

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.

Local jails admit nearly 11 million people every year, a number that has almost doubled since 1978. Most people are released within a few days, but being detained can lead to serious consequences: job and housing loss, more punitive sentences, reduced social mobility, future criminal behavior, worsened health, and weakened familial and social bonds. These consequences are severe for those entering jail who are already disadvantaged, whether because of mental illness, substance abuse, poverty, or other factors such as race and gender.

Forming the Innovation Fund

Recognizing these severe effects of jail incarceration, jurisdictions nationwide are rethinking the use of jails and their local justice systems to make communities healthier, fairer, and safer. To further these efforts, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation partnered with the Urban Institute in 2016 to host the Innovation Fund under the Safety and Justice Challenge. The Innovation Fund supported a cohort of 20 jurisdictions to implement bold and innovative ideas to reduce over-incarceration in jails and build capacity for future system change. The Innovation Fund demonstrated that small seed funding can achieve outsized impact for jail reform in diverse communities nationwide.

With $50,000 grants each, technical assistance from Urban Institute, and a peer learning network, Innovation Fund sites transformed their use of jails by shifting away from presumption of detention, increasing local capacity to understand their jail population, and expanding reform to traditionally overlooked populations.

Supporting alternatives to jail

Many Innovation Fund sites focused their efforts on supporting alternatives to jail and shifting away from presumption of detention. For instance, the Akron County Prosecutor’s Office implemented a felony summons initiative throughout Summit County, OH for people charged with non-violent, low-level felony offenses. Focusing on felonies generated concern locally, but the Akron Prosecutor’s Office secured leadership buy-in and trained over 4,000 officers in 10 agencies. To date, the county has issued over 700 summons. Polk County, IA used the opportunity to train officers in the Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) model; training increased rates of police drop-offs to crisis observation centers rather than the county jail or local hospital. Lastly, three jurisdictions used the Sequential Intercept Model (SIM) to better understand their criminal justice and mental health systems, and identify opportunities to safely divert people with behavioral health issues from needless involvement in the criminal justice system.

Understanding the jail population

Jurisdictions also transformed their use of jails by increasing local capacity to understand their jail population and overall justice system. Allegheny County, PA and San Francisco, CA tackled their data systems by building powerful data dashboards and analytic tools to monitor key points and influence decision-making. Campbell County, TN implemented the Service Planning Instrument for Women (SPIn-W), a gender-responsive assessment and case planning tool. Data from the SPIn-W allowed key stakeholders to better understand the needs and risk factors of women in their local jail, and make data-driven decisions on referrals for clients to services and programming.

Expanding jail reform to overlooked populations

Some jurisdictions expanded their jail reform efforts to populations often overlooked in justice system interventions. Buncombe County, NC developed and piloted an intimate partner violence (IPV) pretrial supervision protocol and deployed the Ontario Domestic Assault Risk Assessment (ODARA) for people with IPV charges on pretrial status. The county has seen jail bookings for people with IPV offenses drop by 10%. Missoula County, MT conducted interviews with incarcerated Native Americans to learn about cultural identity during detention and implemented culturally-specific programming in the jail. Recommendations from data collection have influenced strategic conversations about jail programming and reentry for Native Americans countywide.

Even with small seed funding, the Innovation Fund spurred meaningful change on justice system practices in 20 distinct communities and built a sustainable community of innovators over a year and a half, with impacts that continue to grow. We are excited to see what our sites will do next.

By the fall of 2013, Bernalillo County, New Mexico—and the City of Albuquerque before it—had been entangled for almost 20 years in a federal lawsuit regarding conditions at its local jail, the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC). Persistent overcrowding at MDC thwarted all efforts to settle the lawsuit. The facility was under a court order limiting the jail population to 1,950, but by the fall of 2013, the population was hovering at around 2,600. In order to comply with the court order, the county was renting out-of-county jail beds to house as many as 622 people in facilities as far away as Polk County, Texas, all at a cost of $10 million annually. In addition to the immense cost, these measures significantly impacted the incarcerated people and their families, as well as the criminal justice system’s ability to operate efficiently.

The financial costs and negative impacts were unsustainable. Construction of a new jail unit or temporary facilities was similarly unaffordable, as well as ill-advised since the county was incarcerating people at almost twice the national rate. The county’s ability to reduce the jail population was also limited, as almost every imaginable strategy to reduce the jail population required the collaboration of several, if not all, criminal justice stakeholders, including the police, the courts, and prosecutors. But they had been unable to come together to effectively tackle the problem.

In response, the county sought and obtained legislation creating the Bernalillo County Criminal Justice Review Commission in July 2013. The commission, headed by the Supreme Court’s Administrative Office of the Courts, brought together a range of local criminal justice stakeholders to seek ways to reduce the jail population. At the same time, the county created a “core working group”—a smaller group comprised of judges from the District Court (which handles felonies) and Metro Court (which handles misdemeanors), the courts’ two pretrial agencies, the district attorney’s office, and the public defender’s office—focused on implementing strategies to reduce the number of people in the jail. Although originating independently, the two entities soon began working closely together.

Stakeholders were able to vet their ideas with one another, and agreed-upon initiatives began to emerge. Initiatives that came from this collaborative process faced less opposition to implementation, particularly as many of the initiatives were low or no cost. For example, one strategy identified through this process was to reduce the time defendants waited for a probation violation hearing from 30 days to 15. Because almost a quarter of the people in jail were waiting for probation violation hearings, reducing the time it took for a case to be disposed (usually by reinstatement of probation) substantially reduced the jail population.

Nothing helped the process more than seeing results. Past inertia had been in part due to what appeared to be the futility of the effort. As the jail population started dropping, however, the enthusiasm for change grew. The stakeholders continued to work collaboratively, but also began independently identifying and implementing improvements within their own agencies. More and more, ideas were brought to the table and the dialogue was focused on how to make things work as opposed to why they wouldn’t work. While the county provided staff to help move these ideas to fruition, the collaboration of the stakeholders was the key. Not much more than a year later, the jail population has decreased by almost 40 percent, to fewer than 1,600. People are no longer sent out of the county to be jailed, one MDC 64-bed housing pod has been closed, and jail conditions have improved.

The spirit of collaboration demonstrated that incarceration levels are within our control. And it continues as we learn that implementing best practices, reducing jail costs, improving the operation of the criminal justice system, reducing crime and recidivism, and improving the lives of county residents are compatible—if not concurrent—goals.

This post was originally published by the Vera Institute of Justice’s Current Thinking blog. More information about Bernalillo County can be found in Vera’s recently released report, The Price of Jails: Measuring the Taxpayer Cost of Local Incarceration.