Topic: Featured Jurisdictions

Located in western Tennessee in the Mississippi Delta, Shelby County has a population of almost one million residents, making it the largest county in the state. Shelby County is implementing several strategies to reduce its jail population safely, including adopting a new pretrial risk assessment tool, undertaking research and data collection on case processing to identify areas that contribute to increased stays in the jail and improving opportunities for release for individuals with behavioral health issues.

What were some of the issues occurring in the Shelby County justice system that prompted you to apply for the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC)?

Shelby County identified three major issues when we first applied for the Safety and Justice Challenge in 2015. The first issue was a budgetary challenge. Over half of the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office total budget went towards staffing and operating the jail. We wanted to improve outcomes for justice-involved individuals and to reduce jail operating costs. The second issue was disproportionate minority contact. Shelby County’s total population is 53.1 percent black. However, a 2014 snapshot of the Shelby County jail population found that 87 percent of males and 74 percent of females were black – a result that showed disproportionate minority contact as an ongoing issue. We knew this issue needed to be addressed. We thought that since the Safety and Justice Challenge focused on racial and ethnic disparities, the challenge would be a great fit for our criminal justice reforms. Lastly, we identified limited mental health resources for people who are involved in the justice system. Limited resources or limited access to available resources result in higher rates of incarceration for people suffering from mental illness. This population is often jailed because there is no alternative available.  These individuals will receive treatment and pharmacological services while incarcerated, but sending them to jail is not the right solution. We needed to find a better way to connect these individuals to community resources for treatment.

What are the main drivers of your jail population?

The Shelby County Jail is a pretrial-only facility. The main driver was that the average length of stay was increasing even while jail bookings were down. This trend of increased length of stay began in 2014. Because jail bookings continue to remain at low levels compared to past historical trends, the rising length of stay is what indicated to Shelby County that case processing delays were the main cause of our rising jail population. Specific drivers include a backlog of long-term cases of over 500 days in jail, delays in cases with co-defendants, case backlog in courts that have Special Prosecution Unit dockets and an increase in the case processing time from Held-to-State to arraignment in Criminal Court (Held-to-State refers to those cases that are bound over to the grand jury and reflect mostly felony cases). There are many players involved in Held-to-State cases, including law enforcement, the district attorney and the criminal court clerk, which often leads to longer processing times.

Can you give an overview of the programs, policies and practices that Shelby County has implemented as part of your SJC work?

Our first strategy is to reduce case processing times for defendants charged with felonies. This includes conducting case processing research with the Justice Management Institute (JMI) to identify areas that contribute to increased stays in the jail. JMI also conducted court observations, had discussions with criminal justice system partners, conducted an interview protocol with several judges and in September facilitated a case processing roundtable using a sample of cases. Through this work, JMI has identified several case processing issues and proposed solutions that will impact the time to disposition and the jail population.  In October 2018, JMI met with executive leadership to present issues identified and to discuss solutions to improve the flow of cases through the criminal justice system. The executive leadership included the sheriff, Shelby County mayor, district attorney general, chief public defender, a criminal court judge, a general sessions judge and representatives from the Memphis Police Department and the Criminal Court clerk office. Using the same stakeholders from the September roundtable, Shelby County also formed a case processing working group that will work in conjunction with the executive leadership to implement the recommendations proposed by JMI to help develop systemic reforms to address case processing delays.

Our second strategy is to develop a uniform indigence screening process to provide earlier assignment of counsel for defendants with felony cases. Early assignment of counsel supports the work of case processing as well, so Shelby County has decided to combine it with the first strategy. We anticipate that cases will get resolved much sooner and Shelby County could see the jail stay for some defendants shorten by one to two weeks.

Our third strategy is to consolidate the court processing and initial trial dates for misdemeanor citations so they occur on one date rather than two. Misdemeanor citations can be issued by law enforcement for certain misdemeanor charges rather than arresting individuals and taking them to jail for minor offenses. Using a phased-in approach for the remainder of the year, the Memphis Police Department and Shelby County Sheriff’s Office will be issuing misdemeanor citations with only one date on them for both processing and their initial court date. The consolidated process will make it simpler for the community by requiring only one trip to the Criminal Justice Complex. This new process is expected to result in a decrease in failure to appear warrants, which will give the General Sessions Court more time to focus on more serious matters.

Our fourth strategy is implementing a validated pretrial risk assessment. We partnered with the Crime and Justice Institute (CJI) to have a validation study of our current risk assessment tool done; a tool that has been in use for almost 30 years and had not undergone any type of validation. The outcome of the study was that the tool was not valid. As a result, Pretrial Services decided to adopt the Laura and John Arnold Foundation’s Public Safety Assessment (PSA). Our Safety and Justice site coordinator, JMI, received training from the Arnold Foundation and conducted onsite initial, introductory PSA trainings with various criminal justice agencies in September. We have also developed an implementation team consisting of a cross-section of stakeholders who will work together to develop a decision-making framework in order to make pretrial release decisions based on the outcome of the PSA. The framework recommendation will classify individuals based on their likelihood of returning to court and committing a new offense before trial. It is critical for this strategy to not only focus on implementing new tools, but to include stakeholders in the development process, as well as provide education on how these new processes work.

Our fifth strategy is enhancing early release opportunities for defendants with behavioral health issues. In March 2018, we implemented the Brief Jail Mental Health Screen (BJMHS) at the beginning of the booking process to flag possible behavioral health issues. This was done because there were issues around the sharing of information from the local health assessment done by our jail medical staff with non-medical personnel in Pretrial Services. However, after a site visit from Policy Research, Inc., (PRI) we compared results from the BJMHS and jail medical assessment and saw that, unsurprisingly, the jail medical assessment showed more defendants with possible behavioral health issues. We decided to look into whether the results of the local assessment could be used and shared instead of using the BJMHS at booking.

As part of this strategy, a counselor and a case manager/discharge planner (CM/DP) were hired. The counselor is part of Pretrial Services’ Behavioral Health Unit and will advocate for appropriate release options while the case manager/discharge planner will develop discharge plans that will connect these individuals to treatment in the community with the intention that they will remain stable for longer periods of time. After talking with the jail medical provider, the Health Department determined that the results of the local assessment could be shared with pretrial services because the new CM/DP is a medical professional. We anticipate discontinuing the BJMHS at the end of November 2018. We hope these changes will reduce the amount of time individuals with behavioral health issues spend in jail.

Who is involved in your Safety and Justice Challenge efforts? Was everyone on board from the beginning or did you have to convince people to sign on?

Since the planning stage in 2015, all of Shelby County’s justice stakeholders have been involved including local law enforcement, the jail, General Sessions and Criminal Court judiciary, private and public defense, prosecution, etc. Shelby County has a history of strong collaborative relationships within the criminal justice community. Like many jurisdictions, there never seems to be enough funding to accomplish all of our goals, so our criminal justice community has worked together to make change happen. This collaborative foundation has served us well for the SJC efforts and these relationships have grown and improved through our time in the SJC.

How is Shelby County using data and sharing information among agencies and systems to help with your Safety and Justice Challenge efforts?

In 2016, our criminal justice data system, composed of the court case management and offender management systems, was replaced after five years of planning to create a new and improved data system. The new Integrated Criminal Justice Information System (iCJIS) is intended to enhance data sharing between the two systems. However, the implementation of this system required extensive effort and time from our IT staff.  For our SJC solutions to decrease case processing and the validation of our risk assessment tool, we needed to do data pulls to get baseline measures. However, our county IT teams were still heavily involved in implementing the new system to ensure the daily needs of users were met. For that reason, we contracted with an outside vendor for these two data pulls, which ended up being a long process. We were able to complete the data pulls in early 2018 through that process and were able to make slight modifications in iCJIS so future requests for certain data points would be simpler.

What outcomes have you seen so far and what do you hope to see long term?

Our Misdemeanor Citation Consolidation strategy is running smoothly and all remaining precincts and divisions will be trained on using the new system by January 2019. Based on calculations using resources and expertise from the MacArthur Foundation and JFA, this strategy is expected to have a small direct impact on the jail population (less than 1 percent), but a significant indirect impact on criminal justice stakeholders by freeing up their time for more serious cases.

The Behavioral Health strategy will also have a minimal impact on the overall population, but a significant impact on the recidivism of a small group of defendants that use a large portion of resources including jail beds and staff time. The counselor and case manager/discharge planner are now both on board, so we will begin tracking their results to ensure that this strategy is providing release opportunities by connecting individuals to treatment in the community.

Together with JMI, we have finally completed all the necessary steps leading up to case processing solutions (data analysis and report, interviews, observations, etc.). The first meeting that involved discussing potential solutions was held at the beginning of October and we have a second meeting occurring in early November. This strategy will have the greatest impact on our average daily jail population (21 percent), but is also the most time consuming. We hope to have at least some components of this solution implemented by the end of the year if not sooner.

The Public Safety Assessment is in progress. Inputting the PSA into our case management system for automation is still under review and will affect the timeline. Once in use, this strategy is expected to have a 1 percent impact on the jail population, but we are anticipating that number will be greater as the PSA will create more release opportunities.

NACo would like to thank Chris Floyd, Shelby County’s Criminal Justice Coordinator, and Katy Mack, Shelby County Sheriff’s Office Grants Manager, for speaking with us about their efforts.

*This blog post originally appeared on www.naco.org.

Twelve new Innovation Fund sites expand the Safety and Justice Challenge Network and bring fresh ideas on how to tackle overincarceration.

Local decisions and dynamics make a significant contribution to America’s high incarceration rates.  Local policing practices, judicial decisions, or crime patterns contribute to the overuse of jails. As a result, millions of people cycle in and out of jails annually, disrupting the lives of many people and families and putting local governments under financial pressure.  To tackle this issue, communities across the country are looking at how they can safely reduce their jail populations, improve their responses to people with behavioral health needs, address racial and ethnic disparities, and reduce correctional costs.

To help find effective solutions and spur innovation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has invested more than $100 million to date to support jurisdictions in undertaking jail reforms through the Safety and Justice Challenge. Within two years, the network of jurisdictions grew to include implementation sites that are working on comprehensive reforms, and Innovation Fund sites that receive seed funding to take risks and test innovative ideas.

Momentum for change is building and early results are promising. For example, in two years Philadelphia has reduced its jail population by  36 percent. East Baton Rouge Parish, LA established the parish’s first pretrial release program to operate from within the jail, which creates an option for some participants with behavioral health needs to avoid custody. In Buncombe County, NC, jail bookings for people with domestic violence charges are down 10 percent in late spring 2018, compared to the same period in 2017.

Today, the network is expanding as we welcome a new cohort of 12 Innovation Fund sites. Administered by the Urban Institute, the Innovation Fund further enhances the reach of the Challenge network as it inspires and supports local innovation, experimentation, and peer learning across the nation. The new cohort broadens the network to a total of 52 jurisdictions, located in 32 states and a rich mix of geographically dispersed urban, suburban, and rural communities.

The new sites deepen current reform efforts by zeroing in on issues such as assisting women coming in and out of jail (Cumberland County, ME), improving connection to care for high utilizers (City of Long Beach, CA) or offering free rides to court hearings (Hennepin County, MN). You can find brief descriptions of the new Innovation Fund sites and the work they’ll be undertaking here. Agencies who spearhead the reforms represent a wide variety of local leaders such as sheriffs, the courts, prosecutors, public defenders, departments of health and human services, city and county administrators, and many others.

The 12 Innovation Fund sites not only expand the reach of the Safety and Justice Challenge network but represent an inspiring array of justice reform efforts to safely reduce jail use.

A version of this post appeared on Urban Wire blog.

In 2020, Americans across the country joined in protest to demand an end to racial injustice and police violence. As more and more Americans begin to reconsider the role of law enforcement in our society, city leaders have a unique opportunity to re-envision their approach to strengthening community safety and wellbeing.

Sparked by a series of high-profile incidences of police violence against the Black community, the protests drew national attention to the outsize role of policing in many American cities. The number of police officers nationwide has ballooned over the past several decades, yielding only modest impacts on crime rates, at best. From resolving noise complaints to reversing overdoses, our society has come to rely on police officers to respond to a broad swath of issues beyond simply responding to crime. The expansion of policing has created disproportionate harm for Black Americans, who are unjustly subjected to higher rates of arrest, incarceration, and aggressive enforcement tactics. All too often, contact with the police can turn fatal. Police violence is now among the leading cause of death for Black men, one in 100 of whom will be killed by law enforcement in their lifetimes.

Now, building on years of work from grassroots campaigns and local advocates, the movement to shrink the footprint of the police is gaining momentum in communities nationwide. As the calls for change grow louder, local governments are increasingly looking to rethink their approach to public safety to better meet the needs of residents. A new Center for American Progress report—“Beyond Policing: Investing in Offices of Neighborhood Safety”—offers a roadmap for cities to sustainably shift toward a community-driven approach to public safety, starting by establishing a civilian Office of Neighborhood Safety (ONS).

An ONS serves as a hub for nonpunitive public safety solutions, which might include violence interruption, job readiness programs, civilian first responders, transformative mentoring, and others. Crucially, such offices are situated outside the justice system and staffed entirely by civilians, setting them apart from traditional public safety agencies. By establishing an ONS, local governments officials have a unique opportunity to ensure that data-driven community safety strategies receive the sustained financial and political support necessary to create meaningful impact. And by embedding nonpunitive approaches into the fabric of government, city leaders send a powerful message about the importance of these strategies – an important step towards changing the narrative around public safety.

The ONS model was pioneered in Richmond, California, where community-driven strategies like the Peacemaker Fellowship have contributed to significant reductions in citywide homicide rates. When Richmond established its ONS in 2007, the city had the highest homicide rate in the state of California. That year, the city recorded 45.9 homicides per 100,000 people—eight times the national average. Ten years later, in 2017, the city’s homicide rate had fallen by 80 percent, to nine per 100,000.

As cities consider launching such offices, local leaders should think about the following:

• Creating a community-driven agenda: Cities should consider creating a permanent pathway for residents to engage with the ONS and shape the development and implementation of public safety policies. The city of New York, for example, is institutionalizing the community’s role in policymaking through NeighborhoodStat, an initiative operated by the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety. NeighborhoodStat is a joint problem-solving process that empowers residents of high-crime public housing developments to work directly with city agencies to craft a public safety agenda that is grounded in the community’s needs.
• Budgeting: Cities should make a sustained investment in their ONS, ideally through the municipal budgeting process. Some jurisdictions have established new taxes to create dedicated revenues streams for community-based interventions. Jurisdictions in which marijuana sales are legal may also consider earmarking a portion of tax revenue to support community safety initiatives. Other options for funding community-based safety interventions include limiting the growth of the police department’s budget, or shrinking it, and redirecting funds toward community safety priorities.
• Promoting accountability: ONSs should be held accountable for achieving meaningful improvements in public safety. City leadership must set clear and realistic outcomes and goals and then hold ONS leadership accountable for meeting these milestones over the specified period of time. City leaders should work with ONSs to set realistic public safety goals, using the evidence base from other jurisdictions as a guide.
• Creating flexibility: City officials should recognize that community-based interventions differ from traditional government programming, and the structure and function of the ONS should reflect this. Cities must consider creating flexibility for ONSs to operate outside the regulations that were developed to fit traditional government agencies. For example, an ONS must be permitted to recruit job candidates from outside the civil service sector, and to hire employees with justice system involvement.
• Engaging credible messengers: When preparing to launch an ONS, local leaders should consider how they want to engage credible messengers—community members who are able to connect with high-risk individuals based on their shared backgrounds and life experiences. Some cities have hired credible messengers directly into full-time employment with the municipal government, whereas others contract with nonprofit organizations to provide services in neighborhoods across the city. Regardless of model, cities should support the professionalization of credible messengers. Their work is difficult and potentially dangerous, and cities should invest in the professional development and support they need to succeed.

The ONS model represents a powerful tool for institutionalizing community-based interventions. By establishing an ONS, local leaders can take the first step toward shrinking the footprint of policing and making a meaningful investment in public safety beyond policing.

Charleston County sustainably reduced our jail population by 20 percent between 2014 and 2019, as part of our work on the Safety & Justice Challenge.  The efforts over the last several years underscore the importance of intentional, data-guided policies and practices that engage the community in improving the local criminal justice system. Our work has been done under the auspices of the Charleston County Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, where I serve as project director. It’s a collaborative council of elected and senior officials and community representatives that formed in 2015.

In 2019 we launched an initiative to better inform and involve the community. Currently, we have four collaborative working groups, including community representatives and system leaders, working on our next strategic plan.

The workgroups are focusing on: community engagement and disparity; diversion and deflection from the criminal justice system; bond and reentry; and the processing of cases in our court system. Each group is using identified community priorities, system trends and more recent lessons learned—from the pandemic and the growing movement for racial justice—to set goals that will guide reforms to better serve the community in the years to come.

To get here, we’ve traveled a journey. In 2018 we published a report that explored a variety of racial and ethnic inequities locally and nationally, dissected system decision points, and reviewed national examples of reform. We learned by 2017, Black individuals were brought to jail on five single, low-level charges 2.61 times as often as white individuals, a rate that was almost 30 percent lower than it was in 2014 before we started reducing bookings. Still, in 2017 we incarcerated Black individuals more than seven times the rate of white individuals.

In 2019, the council launched our Dialogue to Change project to expand community engagement while better informing and involving the community in creating our next strategic plan.

We worked closely with community representatives and Everyday Democracy, technical assistance providers to the Safety and Justice Challenge, to form a community coalition that helped to: Build an infrastructure for outreach and meaningful engagement; hold dialogues in constructive spaces to share perspectives on key criminal justice system challenges, foster relationships, and explore ideas for moving forward; and conclude with an Action Forum to determine community priorities for the next strategic plan.

The group identified parts of the community not yet engaged in the discussion, figured out how to include them, and made it happen. We engaged more than 1,000 people in the Dialogue To Change process: more than 450 people came to large community discussions; 101 people came to 11 recurring small group roundtable dialogs; and more than 650 people took part in a community survey.

Here’s a video that gives an overview of the process.

Participants reacted positively throughout, and in the end five broad themes emerged:

• Racial bias and socioeconomic factors, such as poverty and low educational attainment, exacerbate disparity in the justice system.
• The everyday conduct and behaviors of system agents, such as police officers, defense attorneys, prosecutors, and judges, impacts perceptions of trustworthiness, accountability, and transparency of the criminal justice system.
• There are major challenges for individuals returning to the community from incarceration, such as system-related financial obligations, housing, different kinds of treatment, transportation, employment, and regaining community trust.
• Outcomes produced by the local criminal justice system need to be improved.
• Engagement strategies such as transparent reporting, public forums, and community conversations are helpful in improving the local justice system.

The community survey also showed common perceptions of the local criminal justice system: People agree that improvements are needed, have concerns over safety, and want to know more. People want more to be done to improve fairness and address disparities, bonding practices, the time it takes to bring cases to justice, and recidivism.

At the action forum, we identified these priorities:

• Increase education, training, and awareness for justice system stakeholders
  • Special trained units for special populations (mental health)
  • Training (sensitivity), substance abuse, language/human
• Create more opportunities for community members to become actively involved and engaged
  • Community buy-ins
  • More involvement between the council and the community
• Build on efforts and activities that the council is doing
  • Provide adequate funding for council based on qualitative results
  • Focus on the challenges of re-entry from prison and jail
• Establish partnerships and collaborations that will support local justice reform
  • Prevention before intervention
  • Find community leaders to be the face and voice of this advocacy

Our strategic plan will be finalized this summer and is shaping up to keep community engagement at the forefront. We anticipate it will include a combination of low or no-cost objectives that can be enacted with minimal financial or policy hurdles, as well as more ambitious goals for collaborative reform through community engagement.

—Kristy Danford is the Project Director at Charleston County Criminal Justice Coordinating Council.

In one Arizona county, a new justice initiative allows those with minor offenses to face a judge and resolve outstanding warrants without facing time. It’s also significantly reducing the local jail population.

In 2016, Pima County, Arizona—which includes the city of Tucson—started holding evening and weekend court sessions for folks who haven’t committed a severe crime but who have outstanding warrants for failure to appear in court.

These warrant settling courts were created in part by the Community Collaborative, a group of judges, police, prosecutors, defense attorneys, community activists, and formerly incarcerated people who work together on local justice initiatives.

I reported on the collaborative and their work for 70 Million, a new open-source podcast about the criminal justice system in the United States.

One day while visiting the court—known as the Pima County Consolidated Justice Court—I met Carlos Olivas. In a hurry to leave, he walked down the court’s hallway as quickly as he could without drawing attention to himself. I didn’t think he’d stop when I jumped in front of him to ask for an interview. None of the dozen other people I’d tried to speak to at court had stopped. But Carlos did, and agreed to talk to me. I noticed that he was drawing shallow breaths. He looked pretty shaken.

“I was convicted for having possession of paraphernalia,” Carlos explained when I asked him why he was in court that day. “And, I missed a couple court dates.” He was embarrassed to admit that, but he shouldn’t have been. Many of the other people scurrying through the courthouse halls that day had also missed their dates and had come to court for the same reason Carlos had: to face a judge and hope to not get thrown in jail.

Months before I met him, police had found a marijuana pipe on Carlos. He thought that he didn’t have to go to court for such a minor offence. He was wrong. After Carlos missed three court dates, the presiding judge ordered a warrant for his arrest. Carlos argued he never received notice of the warrant, so he had no idea that it existed. If a cop had pulled him over for speeding, Carlos could’ve gone to jail.

Even if Carlos had known there was a warrant out for his arrest, it would’ve been difficult for him to handle it. Court hours are usually regular business hours. And Carlos worked everyday as an HVAC repairman. Going to court would’ve meant losing a day of work and maybe even losing his job.

Instead, the day I met him in late April, Carlos had just pled guilty to a misdemeanor, was ordered to see a drug diversion counselor, and could walk away a free man. More importantly, Carlos didn’t have to miss a day of work. His court session took  place in the evening.

Two years ago, Pima’s jailhouse was near capacity. Local politicians were considering building a new jail to house the growing population of incarcerated people. While reporting in Pima County at that time, I met Francisco Juez, a man who in 2015 had a warrant out for his arrest for failing to appear in court to deal with a bike riding ticket. Like Carlos, Francisco didn’t know that the warrant existed. Then one day, a police officer pulled him over for illegally riding his bike around a construction zone.

The officer realized that Francisco had an outstanding warrant and placed him in custody, where Francisco would sit for nine months because he couldn’t afford to post bail. Eventually a judge determined that Francisco wasn’t riding his bike illegally around the construction zone and set him free. But the damage was done. Francisco lost his job, and his teenage daughter hasn’t spoken to him since. When he told me about his daughter, he wept.

The Community Collaborative was created with the intent of averting stories like Francisco’s and preventing Pima County from having to build another jail. Since the warrant resolution court held its first session in June of 2016, 1,500 warrants have been quashed. As a result of this initiative and others promoted by the collaborative, Pima County’s incarceration numbers have fallen steeply.

By the end of our interview, Carlos seemed less stressed. The realization that he wasn’t going to jail sank in. He even smiled when I asked him what he planned to do with the rest of his day. “Just kick back at home,” he said. “Do some cleaning, drink a beer, chill with my kids.”

Jesse Alejandro Cottrell is a reporter based in San Francisco whose work has appeared in NPR’s Latino USA. He reported on the specialty court for 70 Million, a podcast from Lantigua Williams & Co., made possible by a grant from the Safety and Justice Challenge at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.