Topic: Featured Jurisdictions

New York Times staff writer Emily Bazelon moderated a lively discussion of the Safety and Justice Challenge recently, featuring panelists from challenge sites in St. Louis County, MO and Charleston County, NC.

The discussion coincided with release of a report by the Institute for State and Local Governance (ISLG), showing declines in jail populations by a significant percentage across the challenge’s sites. You can watch the full 51-minute video here.

“I think the main thing to take away is that we have seen a lot of progress in our sites,” said Reagan Daly, Research Director with ISLG. “This progress started before the pandemic. We’ve seen even more dramatic reductions in jail population since then.”

“We have seen improvements in outcomes across different racial and ethnic groups,” Ms. Daly said. “When you look at people of color who are who are in the systems in these sites, we’ve seen that they have also benefited from these jail population reductions.”

Success begins with getting different stakeholders around the table, said Beverly Hauber, District Defender at the Missouri State Public Defender’s Office.

“We have so many different stakeholders in our meetings, it has allowed us to see change and to have really thoughtful conversations,” she said. “And nothing is going to change if you can’t sit in a room and be honest and discuss some of the things that the folks bring to the table and the opinions that they already have.”

“That’s one thing that I noticed,” said Ms. Bazelon from the New York Times. “Observing MacArthur’s work, the grant gives everyone a reason to take part in this, including people in the system who, you know, may be perfectly satisfied with the status quo and not super interested in changing it. But they have to sit down and be there once the grant has been accepted. And I think that it’s a carrot, I guess, instead of a stick. It’s interesting to think about that dynamic.”

These processes are helped by the presence of community representatives, said Keith Smalls, a previously incarcerated individual, and a representative on Charleston County Criminal Justice Coordinating Council.

“When you are able to have community representatives like myself to these conversations, and you can give opinions, and ideas, and even hear people’s complaints about the system, then take those back to the drawing board, it brings people back to the table even more,” he said. “The most important thing is we can get results and then take those back to the community.”

Laurie Garduque, Director, Criminal Justice with the MacArthur Foundation said there have been challenges along with the “quick wins.”

“One thing the process really impressed upon us was that these are local problems that require local solutions because the criminal justice system operates at the discretion of those lawmakers,” she said.

The panel also discussed challenges with diagnosing the cause of increasing length of stay at some sites. They also touched on frequent utilizers of local jail systems.

Ms. Bazelon, who authored the book, Charged, about transforming the criminal justice system, said that prosecutors often told her, when she was discussing the issue of frequent jail users around the country, “we’re not social workers.”

But tackling the issues faced by frequent jail users is a matter of having community will, said Wesley Bell, St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney.

“I think that this country, with the most resources in the world, just has to have the will,” he said. “And when we decide to address the underlying causes of why that person is a frequent utilizer – generally drug addiction, substance abuse, and mental health issues – it’s not hard to do, it’s about having the will to do it.”

Reporters who joined the call asked whether COVID-19 has taught lessons about reducing jail populations that can be drawn on, into the future. It has, said the panelists, for example, jurisdictions have further reduced jail populations by reducing bookings and arrests, changing bail protocols, increased use of technology, and a focus on behavioral health for improving reentry chances.

Another reporter asked about the possible risk of withdrawing funding from a jurisdiction. Ms. Garduque responded by pointing out that the grants do not make up significant portions of any recipient’s overall budget. What they do is provide incentives for stakeholders to sit down and work together to solve common problems. And that once the relationships have been formed, the idea is to make them sustainable into the future.

The grant dollars give stakeholders a reason to sit down and form lasting relationships, said Ms. Hauber. But if the dollars were to go away, the relationships would sustain, she said. Reducing jail populations also saves jurisdictions money, the panelists agreed.

“When your jail population reduces by 30 percent, there’s an opportunity to reallocate funding in different ways,” said Kristy Danford, coordinator of Charleston County Criminal Justice Coordinating Council. Ms. Danford’s SJC site sustainably reduced its jail population by 20 percent between 2014 and 2019, and has placed community engagement at the heart of its decision-making.

—Matt Davis is a communications consultant supporting the Safety and Justice Challenge blog.

Amidst the ongoing national conversation about public safety and policy priorities, the voices of those most impacted must be centered in order to see real change.

To that end, the New Orleans Safety and Justice Challenge Community Advisory Group (CAG) devised a creative way to shift that conversation from City Hall and budget-planning board rooms into the streets where our neighbors live, work, and play.

The mission of the CAG is to support and participate in the successful implementation of the Safety and Justice Challenge strategies and hold public agencies and officials accountable to reducing the jail population and increase equity within the criminal system. We have always recognized that a plan or strategy without the community’s voice will not be sustainable nor successful. In our three years of existence alongside the city’s Safety and Justice Challenge commitments, we have sought numerous opportunities to bridge the gap that often exists between policy makers and their constituents, those most impacted and those making decisions at a distance.

As the pandemic has ravaged New Orleans physically, economically, and culturally, and the centuries-long movement for racial justice gained fresh steam this summer, we wanted to put our Safety and Justice Challenge Community Engagement funds to use in a way that would open the door for the essential conversations that would create a healthy, safe, and equitable city for current and future generations. We wanted to channel the energy of both the national protests for justice and the continuous efforts to safely reduce the jail population in the context of a global health crisis in an accessible and engaging way. We knew that debates over criminal system reform can easily break down without really uncovering what real people need to feel safe. Who is the system really serving if we do not have the chance to share our experiences with those in power?

In 2020, the city of New Orleans spent $313 million on “public safety,” but those dollars do not always align with the things that make people who live here feel safe. And the field of public safety is so professionalized that it often excludes many of the people whose very safety it is tasked with upholding. We wanted to close some of that disconnect by broadening the tent of voices that are involved in the discussion of what public safety means in New Orleans. Inspired by The Black Thought Project in Oakland, California, we envisioned inviting the community into the process of reimagining safety through an interactive public art installation.

We hired local barber and artist Ronnie Dents to oversee the design and installation of community chalkboards in seven locations around the city. We used grant money to pay Black-owned local businesses suffering from pandemic losses to host the boards and grassroots community groups to monitor the boards for hate speech, as well as chalk and supplies. All came together to amplify the diversity of our voices in response to the question of “what makes me feel safe?”

Local businesses hosting the chalkboards include barbershops (HeadQuarters and Juju Bag), restaurants (Neyow’s Creole Cafe, Treme Hideaway, Two Sistas ‘N Da East), a bakery (Mr. B’s) and a neighborhood market (Burnell’s Lower 9th Ward Market).  We have also partnered with community organizations to monitor the boards: Community Book Center, Lower 9th Ward Homeownership Association, Guardians Institute, Southern Solidarity, VAYLA and Roots of Music.

The answers shared on the boards have been as diverse as “being anywhere the police aren’t” to “the color purple” and even reflections on religion and spirituality. “The most fulfilling part of the project has been the conversations that have been had as a result of the prompt,” says Dents. “I look forward to what thoughts and attitudes and actions come as a result of answering this very important question.”

The timing of the project to coincide with local elections in November and December was intentional. We wanted to create an opportunity for conversation, even in a socially-distanced way, for neighbors, business owners, and community members that could frame criminal system reform in a community-rooted way. Ultimately our hope is that campaigning and elected officials would listen to the citizens of New Orleans and be spurred on by what residents actually value around safety and justice.

Our Community Advisory Group is a diverse and representative group of New Orleans residents who volunteer our time and energy to hold the city’s stakeholders accountable to the Challenge strategies. We are looking forward to seeing more answers from the community about what makes them feel safe, as this project plays out over the coming months.

The people of New Orleans are speaking up about how we can keep each other safe. Will our public officials listen?

—Emily Rhodes is a member of the Community Advisory Group, New Orleans Safety and Justice Challenge and works for the Center for Employment Opportunities in New Orleans.

—Natalie Sharp is the Community Advisory Group Coordinator and works at Travis Hill School, which has a school located inside of New Orleans’ juvenile detention center and adult jail.

As we consider the role of law enforcement in our communities, we must acknowledge that the police are not a one-size-fits-all solution to the myriad problems they have been empowered to solve.

Police officers should not be first responders when our loved one’s mental health is compromised, when our child has a bad day at school, when our teenager rebels, when a member of our community is unhoused, or when our neighbor is battling the sickness of substance abuse. Organizations rooted in the community already know that person by name, and we have a responsibility to invest in those organizations’ ability to respond.

In New York City, where I lead the Mayor’s Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety, (also known as MAP) we’ve had demonstrable success doing just that. I work with residents in the city’s most disenfranchised neighborhoods to develop solutions that will make them safe.

True safety lies in networks of strong community leaders, well-resourced local organizations, complete access to opportunity, a responsive government, and the realization of justice. That’s why in New York City, we’ve spent the past four years developing NeighborhoodStat, or NStat.

NStat is a process that brings together neighbors, community organizations, and agencies to support safer, more vibrant communities. The approach is grounded in the belief that public safety cannot exist without the trust and participation of the public. NStat involves these parties meeting regularly and rebuilding trust.

I have sat in on dozens and dozens of NStat conversations with Black and Brown communities, and while there are those for whom safety is very much about law and order, what is more commonly affirmed in those conversations is that safety isn’t about the absence of crime — it’s about the presence of opportunity. This video demonstrates how the process has worked in New York, and gives direct voice to those people’s concerns:

An example of the NStat process at work is in Brownsville Brooklyn, home to the most densely concentrated area of public housing in the United States. It is a vibrant, tight-knit community with a strong sense of pride, and it produces powerful and profoundly committed organizers. Conversely, residents have had to fight against deeply entrenched inequity and disinvestment, and the violence that is a by-product of that condition.

The 73^rd Precinct area that includes Brownsville consistently ranks among the top precincts for crime, yet despite what’s happening around it, the Brownsville Houses, arguably through the leadership of its residents and community partners, have continued to buck the trend.

In 2019, as part of NStat, residents of Brownsville Houses noted concern with critical hotspots in their community that they deemed underutilized, poorly taken care of, and vulnerable to negative activity. They also dug into high poverty and high unemployment at Brownsville Houses that make young people vulnerable to crime. In response, residents created B-Lit, an innovative lighting series that included activating public spaces at night-time.

Here’s a picture of the B-Lit project:

The series also offered programming that included a community poetry night titled Poetic Justice; a roller-skating event called Swervin; an employment expo for residents; and a performance of “King Lear” followed by an interactive, guided conversation on about caregiving and death. In each case, the community activated the shared space for a neighborhood event.

Overall, Brownsville Houses have experienced notable declines in major and violent crime and exhibited an almost 87% decline in shootings — the most significant decrease of all developments that are part of the Mayor’s Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety since its launch in 2014.

The NStat process is not a perfect solution to every public safety challenge, but it does strive to serve as a mechanism for residents to achieve their vision of safety for their own communities.

Behind the strategy is the belief that if we really want to understand how to undo the structural damage that has destabilized communities of color, then the government must come down from its ivory tower and take a seat at the people’s table.

A 2019 report from the Center for American Progress noted about NStat that “while this approach may seem like a radical departure from traditional policing-focused methods of crime reduction, the model is firmly grounded in evidence on the factors that influence neighborhood safety.” It also found that because NStat focuses on “micro-level communities,” jurisdictions of all sizes seeking to address public safety through community investment can learn from it.

Crime is an outcome. It’s the product of centuries-long, government-backed structural inequity, disinvestment, and dehumanization. It should not be a surprise that neighborhoods with the least amount of government dollars flowing into the community, the lowest rates of educational attainment, minimal access to fresh food, and the highest rates of incarceration and chronic disease also have the highest crime rates. This is what systemic inequity looks like.

The days of using conditions that the government helped create as an excuse to over police neighborhoods are over. We can no longer strip entire neighborhoods of resources and tell residents to build a future with broken tools. It’s past time to divest from punitive enforcement and invest in well-being and opportunity. The time for communities to self-determine their own safety is now.

Renita Francois is the Executive Director, Mayor’s Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety in New York City

We launched the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) to stimulate a broad transformation of local criminal justice systems across America. Our goal is to change justice policies and practices in a tangible and measurable way to reduce the routine, reflexive, and almost mechanical overuse of jails contributing to mass incarceration. But we also aim to change criminal justice attitudes and mindsets. We want to change not just the decisions being made, but the way decisions are approached: the values driving them, the interests consulted, the voices heard. Success, as we see it, would mean not just fewer people in local jails. Success would mean local justice systems that have been opened up and truly treat people fairly.

We have had mixed success in making progress towards these goals. Jail population numbers have fallen in the communities we support, and we have good reason to hope that, over time, the practical demonstration that jail usage can be safely reduced will prompt change nationally. But the “opening up” of local justice systems has proved harder.

Most Safety and Justice Challenge communities, even those that now use their jails less, continue to use them disproportionately for people of color, particularly individuals who are Black, Indigenous, and Latinx. Data collected by cities and counties participating in the Safety and Justice Challenge has made this problem more transparent and has helped identify where in the system disparities occur most.

If we believe the system is racist why are we relying on system actors to determine who participates in system reform?

We have found that most judges, prosecutors, defenders, sheriffs, and other justice system partners do not know how to effectively engage community members as equals, be accountable, or share power. We have taken steps to support learning and experimentation in this area, making grants for community engagement activities, and bringing on new technical assistance providers. Still, few of our system partners have found ways to work consistently with community members on an open and equal basis.

In December, we convened two virtual meetings with a broad array of community advocates and representatives, the majority of whom had direct experience with the criminal justice system, as victims, as formerly incarcerated individuals, or both. The sessions surfaced a wealth of wisdom and experience, and four lessons emerged.

Remember the Importance of Language

“A good first step is language—language is incredibly important,” one of the participants pointed out. “The SJC should start articulating a commitment to ‘eliminate’ disparities instead of ‘reducing’ them.” The other participants agreed.

Our caution and modesty in stating a measurable, accomplishable goal (“reducing”) had landed completely wrong and was perceived as toleration for a certain amount of discrimination and injustice. The meetings reminded us that reform is not enough for many people closest to these issues. “We need to abolish this system, not reform it,” as one of our advisors put it, “and we should say as much.”

Examine How We Make Grants

We were urged to use our grantmaking to rectify power imbalances and exclusion in local criminal justice systems. The Safety and Justice Challenge mainly funds system actors—with non-system community stakeholders receiving support indirectly, if at all. “[But] if we believe the system is racist,” one advisor asked pointedly, “why are we relying on system actors to determine who participates in system reform?”

Another suggested that we “focus on expanding allies to include more grassroots advocates, empower local leadership of grassroots organizations, and form intersectional coalitions of allies with varying specializations to attack the issues from all angles.”

And, we were told, we should be explicit about what we are doing: “Grantees should be required to list key stakeholders on the grant who are Black, formerly incarcerated, or have a proven track record demonstrating their ability to work with the community.”

Equip and Empower Community Leaders

Many of the people attending had direct and painful experiences with the justice system, and all agreed that people who know the most about the problem should lead the search for solutions. “It’s imperative we engage directly impacted communities,” a participant said. But, he added, “A false sense of power is not power; you can put people on committees and invite them to panels, but if you’re not resourcing these efforts, these token efforts are insignificant.”

Think Beyond Criminal Justice

Many of our advisors argued that we should take a much broader view of what constitutes criminal justice reform and how we define safe communities. If we want safe communities, they suggested funding workforce development, partnering with public school systems, or supporting re-entry.

They also urged us to expand our sense of what is possible. “We are trying to get people to radically reimagine,” one advisor said of her work. “My organization has engaged thousands of people in creative practices, and every time we find that when we move into the creative mind space, it breaks us free of this narrow view of what’s possible.”

Next Steps

From these lessons, we plan to rethink the role of community engagement in the Safety and Justice Challenge. To support this goal, we will expand and diversify our formal advisory structure to include people with lived experience, find ways to partner with and invest in community-based organizations and leaders, use our funding to take bolder actions, and be more explicit in our language and goals.

Laurie Garduque is Director, Criminal Justice, at the MacArthur Foundation  

People of color and other diverse groups should not be denied fair access to drug court and the support needed to successfully complete it. A new tool has the potential to reduce racial and other inequities that currently exist in such courts across the country.

Drug court is often the last chance for many people to stay connected to their community rather than spend time in jail or prison. That means it’s particularly important that we don’t deny that opportunity to anyone because of biased decision-making.

Drug courts want to be fair but disparities exist. For example, many drug courts’ retention rates are lower for Black people than white people, which means more Black people end up going to prison or jail. The data also shows that there are racial disparities with being admitted to drug court in the first place – in other words, whether people even offered the opportunity.

The National Association of Drug Court Professionals (NADCP) says it is up to drug courts to find inequities and address them. But courts need some help. That’s why the National Center for State courts partnered with NADCP to develop a new equity tool, the Equity and Inclusion Assessment Tool that gives drug courts the means to assess where they stand on inclusion and equity. It helps courts analyze referrals by race, ethnicity, gender identity, age, and sexual orientation.

It is an easy-to-use spreadsheet-based tool designed to be accessible to almost any court, providing useful summary statistics and graphics to assist with data interpretation. It is the diagnostic component of a suite of tools and responsive actions developed by NADCP to promote inclusion and equity in drug courts. Such steps include rewriting curricula to be more inclusive and hiring more Black case workers. These tools are consistent with best practice for fostering racial equity in the criminal justice system more broadly.

There is broad interest in the tool, with almost 400 people attending a webinar to introduce it. Since its launching in August 2020, the tool has been implemented by numerous jurisdictions. For example, Minnesota is pilot-testing the EIAT in 13 drug courts to determine its suitability for use in that state as a prelude to possible statewide implementation. Researchers from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington are using the Equity and Inclusion Assessment Tool to assess equity and inclusion in the drug courts with which they work. We have also been approached by software firms that develop databases for drug courts that seek to incorporate the logic embedded in the assessment tool into their databases. This is a very promising development that will certainly promote the use of the tool and the logic underlying it. Further, some of the sites that participated in our pilot study before the release of the tool to the field more generally have used the information generated by it to take affirmative steps to address problems.

It’s good that we aren’t sweeping disparities under the rug. I have been working on drug courts for years. Defense attorneys could make the argument that these courts aren’t doing all they can to be fair, and they cite statistics showing that Black clients have less chance of succeeding in drug court than white clients do. Against this backdrop, it is important these courts come into compliance.

The Equity and Inclusion Assessment Tool is also designed to examine inclusion and equity in drug courts with respect to several other demographic characteristics, including age, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity. Further, since the tool provides users with pull-down menus to identify reasons for failure to admit candidates for drug court as well as similar menus to identify reasons for failure to successfully complete drug court, it will be possible to better understand the decision points that result in differential inclusion and equity by race other characteristics.

To maximize the utility of the Equity and Inclusion Assessment Tool, drug courts will be required to track data that many have not tracked in the past. Importantly, drug courts must record data on the characteristics of referrals and must track referrals to the point of admission and beyond to the point of drug court completion. Most drug courts also do not currently record data on sexual orientation or data required to identify gender identity.

There is potential for huge change with this tool beyond drug courts. We’re also getting enquiries from other types of problem-solving courts. Mental health courts as well as juvenile drug courts are asking if this can help them address equity. And the answer is “yes.” This method could work in any number of different types of problem-solving courts, as well as more mainstream courts interested in investigating the fairness of their processes.

Folks interested in the tool may also wish to check out the article published earlier this year in the Justice System Journal that describes the evolution of the Equity and Inclusion Assessment Tool from a performance measure to a tool. Results from the pilot-testing are also expected to be published in a peer-reviewed journal later this year year. I’m eager to engage with cities and countries as part of our work with the Safety and Justice Challenge.

The Equity and Inclusion Assessment Tool and NADCP’s Adult Drug Court Best Practice Standards on Equity and Inclusion, which the assessment tool supports, are consistent with the Safety and Justice Challenge’s goal to address racial disparities in incarceration.

—Fred Cheesman is a Principal Court Research Consultant at the National Center for State Courts.