Spirit of collaboration reins in jail costs in New Mexico

By: Lisa Simpson

Costs Featured Jurisdictions Interagency Collaboration June 23, 2015

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.

Local Leadership in Criminal Justice Reform

By: Nicholas Turner

Featured Jurisdictions Interagency Collaboration Jail Populations June 3, 2015

Most discussions about the potential of criminal justice reform center on decreasing the number of people we put in prisons—state and federally operated facilities that hold sentenced people. Equally important, though often absent from these conversations, is the role that local jails play in our criminal justice system. The number of annual admissions to jails—which hold people who are awaiting trial or are serving short sentences, often under a year—has nearly doubled in the past three decades. As a result, county and city justice systems now contain a third of the country’s incarcerated population on any given day. Paying close attention to our use of jails can reveal both the high costs they carry and the wide potential for reforms they offer.

Our recent report on the true price of jails confirmed what we suspected: they cost more than most policymakers and the public realize. The price tag is more than the commonly quoted $22 billion per year because significant jail costs often sit outside jail budgets—costs like employee pensions and the health care and educational programming incarcerated people receive. In a quarter of the jurisdictions we surveyed, costs were 20 percent higher than their budget allowed for, and one jurisdiction’s were more than 50 percent higher.

There is, however, promise for change, as reinvestment of jail savings into the things that help communities thrive stands a better chance of succeeding at the local level than in larger systems. Leaders close to their communities know best how to reallocate funds for positive outcomes, both inside and outside of the criminal justice system. And because cities and counties commission and pay for community based-services, they are well positioned to redirect savings that meet the needs of the people they serve.

Through my years at Vera and beyond, I have seen firsthand how local justice reform can achieve real change. Our organization was formed in 1961 in response to a local problem—the overuse of cash bail—and the solution that Vera and New York City came up with was soon spread nationwide by influencing the 1966 Bail Reform Act. Even large counties and cities like New York are nimble enough to act on opportunities to safely reduce the number of people they incarcerate—more nimble than state and federal systems. Local jurisdictions also have many system players with discretion to act, from prosecutors and judges to law enforcement officials and mayors’ offices. Finally, jails don’t oversee large populations of people serving long sentences, like prisons do. As just one example of recent success, Bernalillo County in New Mexico achieved a 39 percent decline in jail population in two years after creating an emergency jail population reduction plan due to a federal lawsuit it faced.

The Safety and Justice Challenge is an opportunity not only to reinvest the high costs of jail use, but also to rebuild and restore the trust that has been absent between many communities—particularly communities of color—and their law enforcement and local leadership. I look forward to watching what the 20 jurisdictions selected to be part of the Challenge Network do with this opportunity.