Topic: Crime

Jails book and confine more than 10 million people every year in the United States. People incarcerated in jails can experience overcrowding, lack of resources, exposure to violence, and deteriorating physical and mental health.

In response to these harsh conditions and impacts on individuals, practitioners and policymakers have pushed to reduce the size of US jails. As part of this national movement to rethink jails, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation founded the Safety and Justice Challenge to provide support to local communities to tackle the misuse and overuse of jails. With financial and technical assistance support from MacArthur, over 50 cities and counties have implemented innovative strategies to reduce their local jail populations by releasing more individuals on pretrial release and reconsidering the use of jail for new bookings.

However, the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in 2020 forced cities and counties participating in SJC to reduce their jail populations even more to meet social distancing recommendations. Since COVID-19, data from SJC communities analyzed by the CUNY Institute for State and Local Governments (ISLG) consistently show that decreasing the jail population does not lead to violent crime. Additionally, across SJC cities and counties, most individuals released pretrial were not booked for a new crime, and it was even more rare for an individual to be re-booked for a violent offense. Combined, the data from SJC communities suggests reducing the size of the jails is not only possible but does not lead to a rise in crime broadly or a rise in violent crime, specifically.

This is especially true for Multnomah County, Oregon, which had remarkable declines in their jail population during COVID without a rise in violent crime. Capitalizing on existing SJC relationships, Multnomah County stakeholders implemented some new strategies but mostly relied on expanding the eligibility of existing SJC reforms to quickly reduce their jail population. At the same time, the county experienced decriminalization of drug use and 100 days of social unrest in protest of police brutality and systemic racism which created the destruction of several buildings and businesses. Combined, the decriminalization of drugs and protests increased the visibility of drug use, houselessness, and created a general sense of lawlessness across the county even though crime or violence did not increase. Now, four years after COVID-19 began and two years after of the passage of the decriminalization of drugs, Multnomah County residents are critical of criminal justice reform and pushing for standard criminal justice responses, like the reliance on jail.

A new research study produced by Justice System Partners delved into the experience and data in Multnomah County and made the following findings:

• The Value of the SCJ during COVID-19. Because Multnomah County was already working with SJC when COVID hit, staff had all the infrastructure in place to safely reduce their jail population. The county’s participation in SJC laid the groundwork and framework for stakeholders to meet and collaborate quickly. Although some new approaches were implemented, the county mostly expanded the eligibility of pretrial reforms they had previously implemented as part of SJC. These strategies include citation-in-lieu of arrest and booking; reducing jail admissions for community supervision violations; limiting warrants for recorded court absences; and expediting jail releases with manual review. Using various strategies, county stakeholders reduced the number of bookings throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, and specifically experienced a steady decline in jail bookings across each of the subsequent four time periods.
• Reaffirming evidence on violent crime and using jails effectively. Reducing the reliance on jails did not lead to an escalation of jail bookings for violence broadly. Nor did it lead to an escalation of jail bookings for violence by individuals with a history of violent charges. The individual demographic composition of the jail remained relatively the same throughout the study period. However, the composition of the charges booked into jail changed significantly. Overall, the jail experienced a lower proportion of bookings for low-level and non-violent charges, demonstrating that during the two years following the start of the pandemic in March 2020, stakeholders relied on the jail for booking more serious charges. Bookings for violent charges did not increase during the pandemic, demonstrating that reducing bookings for low-level charges does not lead to an increase in violent charges. The composition of jail bookings shifted during the period of social unrest in the summer and fall of 2020, with a greater proportion of jail bookings associated with behavioral charges (such as disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, and harassment, among others). The jail held fewer people overall and fewer numbers of individuals were booked with a violent offense. However, what was booked was more often for a violent offense. Therefore, the proportion of violence charges in the jail increased, but not necessarily the number of violent charges. This suggests the county began relying on jail predominately for violent offenses charges – a more effective use of its jail.

• Perceptions of safety extend beyond classic definitions of violence. During the study period, community and justice system staff members reported a decrease in perceptions of safety, largely from visibility of drug use and social disorder. Community stakeholders discussed their perceptions of safety differently than justice system staff, echoing earlier Safety and Justice Challenge research on the multifaceted concepts of “safety.” This suggests system staff stakeholders should aim to “frame conversations around community safety instead of public safety.” Perception of public safety is less about classic definitions of violence and more about the discomfort with physical and social disorder. Community members often discussed perception of seeing or experiencing more “violence” during COVID-19, but actually described physical and social disorder including property damage and drug use. In the summer of 2020, community members protested police brutality and the role of the justice system in communities following the murder of George Floyd. Interviews with community members indicate that there is a need for conversations about the term violence, including which individuals and what charges should be characterized as violent. As a field, we must grapple with how people who commit violence and systems that are violent may be interconnected.

• Staff wellness matters for sustainability of reform. COVID-19 brought an emphasis and renewed interest in physical and emotional well-being and health. As we work to heal communities impacted by the justice system, we must also consider the impacts of the system on staff, too. Staff experienced significant workplace trauma from social unrest and still showed compassion for the need to reduce reliance on jails. Staff who experienced harms are still healing yet responsible for sustaining the work. There are significant challenges with tasking the people who experienced workplace trauma to champion reforms without acknowledgment or space for healing.

The experiences and data from Multnomah County during this period serve as valuable guiding principles for other communities looking to navigate the complex terrain of justice reform with equity, efficiency, and humanity.

Bria Gillum, Senior Program Officer, Criminal Justice for the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and Aswad Thomas, Vice President of the Alliance for Safety and Justice (ASJ), appeared at The Atlantic Festival 2023 in Washington, D.C., in a talk entitled “How to Invest in Safety and Well-Being.” It was part of a session underwritten by the MacArthur Foundation on criminal justice reform.

Bria interviewed Aswad, who survived a robbery attempt that left him with two life-altering gunshot wounds, about his experience as a survivor of violence, and his journey to embrace the Trauma Recovery Center (TRC) model of addressing the needs of crime survivors, who often face the biggest barriers to accessing healing services.

After Aswad left the hospital with his gunshot wounds, there were no support services, or even information about where to look.

“My story might sound unique, but it’s not unique at all,” he said at the conference. “In this country, three million people are crime victims every year, but only nine percent of people get access to victim services.”

Thomas began organizing crime victims and advocating for victims’ rights, and today he is working to expand the ASJ’s national network of crime survivors to elevate their voices in criminal justice reform.

“When you think about the criminal justice system, the voices of crime victims like me have never been at the center of criminal justice policies,” he said. “One thing that we are trying to do is to elevate this new victims’ rights movement, this is calling for new safety solutions to help stop the cycle of violence.”

In addressing this need for advocacy, services, and resources, Aswad spoke about his organization’s TRC model as a “one-stop shop that provides you with all of the recovery services that you need, without all of the red tape.” The first center was developed at San Francisco General Hospital in 2001. Today, there are 52 TRCs in the United States.

He said community is at the heart of what ASJ does. “What we do is we build community,” Aswad said. “We build community with survivors, providing peer-to-peer support. We build community with law enforcement, with advocates, with legislators, and we build that community so that we can start having conversations around our public safety policies.”

Aswad shared some of ASJ’s accomplishments. “In the past 10 years, we passed about 91 criminal justice and public safety reforms across the country. We’ve changed victim compensation programs in about ten states. We’re helping to provide more protections for victims to be safe from employment protections and housing and protections.”

Another area of advocacy for ASJ is criminal justice reform. “Across this country, crime victims are now organizing to change criminal justice policies,” he said. “Past reforms have reduced incarceration and helped to incentivize more rehabilitation for folks who have caused harm. But also working on reforms to remove the barriers for people coming out of the justice system and back into our communities. We also passed laws, so [that crime victims can] access housing, jobs, education, things that help promote stability. Those are the things that help keep communities safe as well.”

In response to a question from Bria about what it means to be safe in your community, Aswad asked the audience to close their eyes and think about where they feel most safe.

“Is it a garden? Is it at church? Is it with family? Think about where you feel most safe. The majority of us in this room, I don’t think we say more police, or that we feel safe with more prisons. We feel more safe in community with each other. So that’s what we need to invest in, more Trauma Recovery Centers, more mental health programs, more solutions to help stop the cycle. That’s how we actually get to true safety in this country.”

You can watch the full conversation on YouTube.

As summer concludes, it’s increasingly clear that there was no so-called crime wave. The FBI reported that over-all crime dropped by 10% in the first quarter of 2023 as compared to the first quarter in 2022. In particular, the number of murders dropped by 17%. A national expert in criminal justice data, Jeff Asher, published a piece about it in The Atlantic. Looking at the first six months of 2023 as compared to 2022, the murder rate fell by double digits across America. It was “astonishing”, he wrote.

Yet with few exceptions the media either seems unaware or is uninterested in these downward murder rates because they don’t tend to grab readers’ attention in quite the same way that rising ones do. Drumbeats of murder stories continued in cities across the country. Reporting on downward trends was rarer. The New York Times did run a story citing the drop in shootings in New York City. The 25 percent fall is in line with other falls across the country. But this is an important story to tell as it has significant consequences for the public’s perception of how safe criminal justice reforms are like the Safety and Justice Challenge, a project of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, that have significantly reduced jail populations across the country over recent years.

First let’s examine murder rates and why they increased in 2020 and are declining again. Historically, murder rates since 1931 have ranged from 10 to 5 per 100,000 population (see graph below, figure 1). The historic average is 6.7. So, the recent increases since 2020 actually reflect the historic average. Assuming the first six months of 2023 hold, the 2023 rate will dip down to 5.7 – well below the historic average.

We have developed a statistical model that accurately projects future crime rates. The model uses several demographic and economic factors that have been shown to be associated with changes in the crime rates.

One of the most important factors in the model is the inflation rate—as the inflation rate goes up and down, so too does the murder rate. There is a lagged effect, as it takes a little time for lower and higher inflation rates to impact people’s behavior.

When COVID-19 hit in 2020 there was an associated increase in the inflation rate reaching a high of over 9 percent (see graph below, figure 2). Not unexpectedly, the crime rates soon began to climb, although never coming close to the high rates of the 1990s when inflation was over ten percent. Today the inflation rate has dropped to 3 percent and so, too, the crime rate has begun to recede. Assuming the inflation rate continues to decline and other factors in our model do not change, crime rates and murders will continue to slowly decline.

Unfortunately, the media and other pundits wrongfully assigned the post-COVID-19 murder rate increases to progressive criminal justice reforms. Bail reform, lenient prosecutors and judges, and police reforms were all cast as the causes of increases in homicides. Yet how does one explain why homicides are now declining with these same reforms still in place?

The tone of crime coverage is important because it shapes public sentiment which in turn can shape public policy. Polls show that the public believes that crime is up, even when the data above show it is down. As sociologists W. I. Thomas and Dorothy Thomas stated almost a century ago, “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”

Public sentiment influences policy makers and their decisions to support or resist criminal justice reforms. The research is very clear that we can reduce jail populations and keep communities safe. But when the media tends to report more on rising and not falling crime rates, it creates significant challenges.

While much has been achieved with the Safety and Justice Challenge, there are signs that some of these results could slip away in part because of erroneous public perceptions and the lack of media reporting about declining crime trends. It will be important for SJC sites, which are showing the same crime drops, to make their case to the public and the local media about what is really going on.

Table 1. SJC Major City Murders 2022 vs 2023

A recent uptick in violent crime across the country has alarmed many Americans. But even as communities work to address the root causes of violence and the effects of incarceration, new data from our Safety and Justice Challenge shows there is no link between reducing jail populations and increases in crime. Communities can feel confident in efforts to reform the local criminal justice system and safely reduce the jail population.

Since 2013, MacArthur has invested over $323 million in local justice reform, including tracking progress and analyzing the effectiveness of reform strategies. We have built close partnerships with research leaders in the criminal justice field, including grantee City University of New York’s Institute for State & Local Governance (ISLG) and the JFA Institute, to examine data from cities and counties participating in the Safety and Justice Challenge.

From this deep engagement with data and our relationships with diverse experts and people with lived experience, we have learned many valuable lessons. And the findings of two new reports—“Jail Populations, Violent Crime, and COVID-19: Findings from the Safety and Justice Challenge” by ISLG and “The Impact of COVID-19 on Crime, Arrests, and Jail Populations” by the JFA Institute—are among the most useful and insightful, and reinforce with data what we have heard from people involved in the justice system.

These analyses looked at what happens when cities and counties across the country focus on criminal justice reforms that make the system more fair, just, and equitable. They found that in communities participating in the Safety and Justice Challenge, there is no relationship between reforms that reduce reliance on jails and recent upticks in violent crime across the United States.

Reducing Jail Populations While Keeping Communities Safe

Since the Safety and Justice Challenge began, participating cities and counties have collectively reduced their jail population by 20 percent. This has resulted in about 15,000 fewer people in jail on any given day, allowing individuals, who are legally presumed to be innocent, to instead remain with their families, communities, and hold onto their jobs while their cases were pending.

JFA Institute’s close examination of the data found that even considering the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, which temporarily reduced jail populations dramatically nationwide, most Safety and Justice Challenge cities and counties continued to outperform the nation as a whole in reducing jail populations, without jeopardizing community safety. As COVID-19 mitigation efforts wane, these communities have shown that progress can be sustained. Many of the emergency measures taken to reduce the jail populations during the pandemic, and that have remained in place in the months since, do not have an impact on public safety.

Meanwhile, ISLG’s analysis looks at how often individuals released from jail return to custody while their criminal case is still pending. The findings, which use individual-level jail admissions data from 2015 through April 2021, show that reforms focused on releasing people from jail before their trial did not drive recent increases in violent crime. The report found:

• There is no correlation between declines in jail incarceration and increases in violent crime through COVID-19.
• Most individuals released on pretrial status were not rebooked into jail. This has remained consistent over the years.
• Of the small percentage of the individuals rebooked into jail, it was very rare that they returned with a violent crime charge and exceedingly rare that they returned with a homicide charge.

The evidence is clear: cities and counties should push forward with making the criminal justice system more equitable and fair. The decreased use of jails has no impact on crime, particularly violent crime, and communities should look beyond incarceration to address safety concerns. To claim that reforms jeopardize community safety ignores the data and unnecessarily puts the lives of incarcerated individuals and their families at risk.