Topic: Featured Jurisdictions

Hear the trailer for this 10-part open-source series that looks at how residents are taking action locally.

As a staff writer at The Atlantic covering criminal justice, I often experienced a mix of fascination, rage, and sheer awe at the levels of dysfunction embedded in the overlapping criminal justice systems in the United States.

In my reporting, I wrote about policies and practices that were both antithetical to rehabilitation and incongruous with the idea of carrying out justice. Things like holding people for minor offenses because they can’t afford bail. Charging teens with status offenses and then having college applications ask about prior records. Releasing tens of thousands of people incarcerated in federal prison annually without a government-issued I.D. with which to re-start their lives. The list is exhausting.

The work of reporting on these separate but related actions helped me to see very clearly what I consider the true obstacle to effective criminal justice reform: public awareness.

Though the issue of justice reform has gained momentum in the last decade, there is still only a subset of a niche group of people who possess a working knowledge of the issues and the structures at play. They include academics, activists, policymakers, and some elected officials whose constituencies are deeply impacted. The rest of the country remains blissfully unaware.

That ignorance is the primary motivation for 70 Million—which is the podcast a team of journalists and I have created—so-named because today there are about 70 million American adults with a criminal record. That’s one-in-three-and-a-half adults.

As I was initially developing the idea for 70 Million, I tested its potential by mentioning this fact to friends and family not in the field. All of them were aghast at the figure. “Do people know this?” “Why didn’t I know that?” “Why don’t we hear about this?” These are some of the questions that followed. But I did not have all the answers and, having just launched a media company, I also did not have the funds to take on the work of finding them. That’s when I decided to approach the Safety and Justice Challenge at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

The Challenge has a strong reputation for supporting meaningful work in criminal justice. I’d also connected with them while at The Atlantic. It was a huge leap, and months of writing and submitting supporting materials. In the end, they saw the potential for a reported open-source podcast that chronicles ground-level solutions in criminal justice to help bridge the knowledge gap between the specialists and the general public.

So, on August 27, 70 Million will premiere after a team of brilliant and dedicated reporters and producers spent the last eight months traveling the country to collect stories about regular folks becoming catalysts for jail and justice reform in their hometowns. A quick shout out to the dream team, so far: Jen Chien, Luis Gil, Mitzi Miller, Kate Krosschell, Oluwakemi Aladesuyi, Amy Alexander, Jesse Alejandro Cottrell, Ruxandra Guidi, Heidi Shin, Maria Murriel, Nissa Rhee, Ryan Katz, Liza Veale, Nadege Green, and Daniel Rivero.

Today, I am so happy that The Vera Institute of Justice, whose work I have long admired and often referenced in my own reporting, is doing us the honor of unveiling our podcast trailer to its readers and supporters. It has been a singular goal of ours to create a podcast that contributes to the conversation and spurs people to act around the myriad and often intractable consequences of injustice.

For the inaugural season of 70 Million, we focused on jails because they are the revolving door into our country’s overlapping systems of incarceration. Just over 3,300 jails process about 12 million admissions every year. And some 18,000 police agencies funnel people into these warehousing systems that are outmoded, criminally ineffective, and dangerous. The result of over half a century of misguided tough-on-crime laws, racialized sentencing, and a national dragnet on the poor is that today 70 million American adults have a criminal record.

More than likely, you know someone with a criminal record. You may have a record yourself. And the lasting effects of such a mark have serious consequences for returning citizens, their families, and communities. It’s harder to get a job. (Tens of thousands of jobs that require licensing automatically disqualify people with records.) It’s harder to go back to school. (A study of a state university system found that about two-thirds of applicants with a felony criminal offense record stopped applying after their criminal history came up—compared to 21 percent of all applicants.) It’s harder to find affordable housing. (Many states make it illegal for returning citizens to live in public housing, even with their own families.)

That’s why 70 Million will tell stories about jail reform. We want to show how residents and communities are driving real change. If you’d like to learn more about 70 Million and get involved in reforms yourself, we’re proud to offer syllabi, resources, toolkits, and more on our site, 70millionpod.com. We’d love to hear from you: hello@lantiguawilliams.com or @LanWilCo.

Located on the Gulf Coast of Texas, Harris County has a population of more than 4.5 million residents making it the most populous county in Texas and third most populous county in the nation. Harris County is implementing several strategies to reduce its jail population safely, including implementing a pretrial assessment tool, starting a Responsive Interventions for Change (RIC) docket and increasing staff to address racial and ethnic disparities.

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

In 2010, our jail population was more than 10,000. This required immense outsourcing of services to sustain the jail with little return on investment. Harris County formed a Criminal Justice Coordinating Council (CJCC) to address the high jail population and push systemwide improvements. While our numbers began to trend down, we still wanted to improve justice and promote public safety by reserving jail beds for high-risk individuals. Our CJCC recognized we needed to implement a new risk assessment tool to make better-informed pretrial decisions based on solid risk data and judicial discretion. We also wanted to continue building upon the collaborative effort among our criminal justice stakeholders created by the CJCC and realized the MacArthur opportunity would allow us to take a look at the jail, the system, and the drivers of the jail population.

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

We put three strategies into place to improve the way we do justice. The first strategy was pretrial reengineering and implementing a pretrial risk assessment tool. The key to this was the Public Safety Assessment (PSA). Our previous risk assessment was never used in a way that made people feel confident in it. We also increased our capacity for pretrial services, including increased staffing, and added defense counsel at first appearance in July 2017. The counsel at first appearance was not initially a part of our strategy, but research showed how vital it is in determining bail. These improvements have led to a  165 percent increase in the number of personal bonds granted.

Our second strategy is a newly designed docket system called Responsive Interventions for Change (RIC). It launched in October 2016. The goal was to reduce over-reliance on jails, high recidivism rates, and racial and ethnic disparities stemming from state jail felony cases.  This docket is able to address a large volume of cases, all possession cases of up to four grams of a controlled substance, and process them out of the courts and into community services swiftly. The strategy used is a therapeutic, team approach.  An essential component of this docket is the use of “peer navigators.” They are in contact with defendants from the beginning and help them understand the process.  The vast majority of docket participants are people of color. Prior to being placed on the RIC docket, most would have received convictions and done significant jail time, so this strategy is one that really helps us continue to focus on racial and ethnic disparities in our justice system. As of June 2018, RIC has consolidated more than 8,500 cases typically distributed across Harris County’s 22 criminal district courts. To date, over 5,700 of the RIC participants’ cases have been disposed and less than 500 resulted in convictions.

Our third strategy was to hire a staff member dedicated to eradication of disparities in our justice system. We hired a Racial Disparity and Fairness Administrator to facilitate and focus on the issue of RED in May 2017. The administrator acts as the liaison between the community and the CJCC and works in both the office and the community acting as a representative and voice between key justice stakeholders and various communities within Harris County.  We focused the first year on building an infrastructure devoted to RED and exploring gaps and barriers.  We are now looking toward the future with a focus on training, wider community engagement and productive RED data analysis to drive decision making.

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?

The Harris County CJCC took the lead on initiating the Safety and Justice Challenge efforts. The CJCC includes representatives from our county commissioners court, the sheriff, county attorney, district attorney, public defender, district clerk, judges, and the mayor of Houston. The support for engaging in the Safety and Justice Challenge was strong and the commitment has not wavered, even as new stakeholders have come to the table through election cycles. Many times, new administrations come in and do not want to continue the work of previous administrations, but that has not been the case here. Sheriffs and district attorneys, past and present, have all been backers of the Challenge and the level of commitment across the justice system is second to none. I have been privileged to work with remarkable justice leaders across the country, but Harris County is home to a collection of doers and collaborators who inspire me and my team each day.

What are the main drivers of your jail’s population?

Harris County has a dangerous and violent jail population: 75 percent of the jail population is pretrial and approximately 70 to 80 percent of the pretrial population has serious and violent felony charges. This population is difficult to address during pretrial release hearings when one must balance public safety and liberty.  Another key driver is a significant portion of the jail population with these aggravated robbery, aggravated assault and higher-level sex crime charges also have lags in time to disposition due to the complexity of their cases. To address this, we are actively working on case processing improvement strategies to make justice as effective and efficient as possible. That is so we may reduce the pretrial jail population through disposition, in addition to releasing lower-risk defendants pretrial.

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

The court and administration receive daily jail reports from the sheriff. The process is done manually and the reports are in a basic format due to the county’s aging justice data system. Harris County is currently in a five-year process of transferring all our court data to an updated system. This will lead to more functionality and increased efficiency with data pulls and improved data analysis. The reports do, however, offer quality information that we can share with other agencies.  One of our goals in 2019 will be to better collect data on Latino and Hispanic individuals in the justice system. This has posed a challenge because current systems were designed around race demographics rather than the nuance of race and ethnicity.

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

Prior to Hurricane Harvey, we began to see meaningful jail population reductions in our target populations through adoption and use of the pretrial risk tool and corresponding risk-informed release decisions. We have also saved more than 100,000 jail bed days through our RIC docket. Focusing on how we can efficiently process cases in a way that is respectful to both the defendants and the victims and how we can address racial and ethnic disparities have been key components that have led to these outcomes. Long term, we would like to do a racial impact analysis on an annual basis to measure the effects of our racial and ethnic disparity initiatives. We want to be able to track the disparities and discontinuities in our justice system and community, but also celebrate where we are successfully delivering safety, justice and equity.

This post originally appeared on the National Association of Counties website. NACo would like to thank Leah Garabedian, Harris County’s Chief Criminal Justice Strategist, for speaking with us about their efforts.

As the City of New Orleans marks its tricentennial, Mayor Mitch Landrieu announced today that the city’s jail population has reached its lowest level in nearly 40 years. This is a remarkable accomplishment for a city that just a few years ago held more people in jail per capita than any other urban jurisdiction in the country.

For the last 12 years, Vera has worked collaboratively with New Orleans community advocates and policymakers to rethink the use of the Orleans Parish jail and cap the number of existing jail beds, with the understanding that if we build them, we will fill them. Momentum for reform has grown considerably in the last three years, spurred by the MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) initiative. Today, the Challenge is a network of 34 counties, four cities, and two statewide systems across the country, all working to safely reduce their jail populations and the ethnic and racial disparities that persist within them. In the spring of 2016, New Orleans was one of just 11 jurisdictions selected to receive funding to implement an ambitious strategic plan to reduce its jail population by 21 percent in three years, from 1,545 people to just 1,277 people. Promisingly, by December 2017, the jail population had been reduced to 1,427—already reaching 56 percent of the final goal.

In a report released today, city leaders detailed progress toward their plan to reduce the jail population, with various initiatives, spanning almost every stage of the criminal justice system. The following successes were highlighted:

• Piloting a pre-booking diversion program, Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD), that allows New Orleans police officers to redirect people facing arrest for behaviors related to mental illness, addiction, or trauma away from jail and into intensive case management;
• Basing pretrial release decisions on risk instead of money by increasing releases on recognizance for low-risk defendants; implementing a new risk assessment instrument and decision-making framework that does not rely on money bail; conducting routine bond reviews; and investing in dedicated public defenders who advocate for pretrial release—all of which led to a 40 percent increase in the number of low-risk defendants released on their own recognizance when eligible;
• Hiring a jail system administrator in the Sheriff’s office, commonly known as a jail facilitator, tasked with identifying people who do not need to be detained and addressing systemic inefficiencies that lead to over-detention;
• Developing a pilot to quickly bring people to court if they’re suspected of violating their probation so the judge can consider release pending the violation hearing; and
• Creating a diverse community advisory group to hold decision makers accountable and ensure New Orleans achieves the goals set out in its plan. Three representatives from the Community Advisory Group have full voting rights as members of the Jail Population Management Subcommittee, which is coordinated by the Mayor’s Office and oversees implementation of the plan.

New Orleans has come a very long way, but still has work to do. Some initiatives, such as a new tool to assess defendants’ ability to pay prior to imposing fines and fees, have stalled. Others are still evolving – like the transition to a new pretrial risk assessment – or will need to be expanded and institutionalized, such as a citywide expansion of LEAD. The work that remains will fall to the new mayor and council, all set to enter office in early May.

This progress, however, comes with a sobering truth: When New Orleans reaches its current goal of 1,277 people in jail, our jail incarceration rate will still be 40 percent higher than the national average. Policy makers and the general public will need to come together under the city’s new leadership to sustain existing gains and find new ways to reduce the harms of over-incarceration on all our residents. This year marks the city’s tricentennial. We must seize this unique opportunity to envision a different criminal justice system.

Dealing with the court system can be stressful and difficult for anyone. For people in St. Louis County, keeping track of court dates, fine amounts and payments is a labyrinthine process at best, deliberately opaque at worst. However, the experience in St. Louis County is not unique. It echoes the national conversation on citizens’ interactions with the judicial system. The St. Louis Civic Tech and Data Collaborative (CivTech St. Louis)—supported in part by the MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge—is a partnership between Rise, St. Louis County, Globalhack, and LaunchCode. We’ve gotten an in-depth look at the difficulties residents face in accessing this data about complaints against them, and are developing practical tools to bridge the information gap.

Here in St. Louis County, these challenges came to light after neighboring municipality Ferguson received national attention for civil unrest and a decades-long conflict between residents and law enforcement. The Ferguson Commission, through their reports and on-going efforts to work within the community, have sought to implement ways to tackle many of these issues. The Civic Tech and Data Collaborative has focused its efforts on a single issue: the jailing of people who have committed non-violent traffic offenses. The current law takes people from a simple traffic stop into a downward spiral of warrants, fear, and fines with limited information available publicly to help.

With the generous in-kind help of social work students at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, CivTech STL surveyed residents and court clerks and determined that one of the biggest issues with court-resident relationships was confusion. Citizens were not being given understandable, clear information about court procedures, their rights in the courtroom, and—critically—how to track court dates and ticket fine amounts. If a citizen loses track of a ticket or isn’t sure where to pay it in the county’s sprawling municipal court system, they could be subject to compounding fines, loss of their driver’s license, or arrest.

When imagining a new, user-friendly system, we’ve found several key pieces of information that individuals need: ticket amount, options for them to resolve the ticket, possible warrants, and associated court dates. By engaging with the technology staff and court clerks, CivTech STL team learned that these data are kept by courts and by the vendors who process that data, but are not easily accessible—six vendors process data for 81 municipal courts in St. Louis County.

Our new human-centered website and text tool, YourSTL Courts, means that individuals can easily access information about their outstanding tickets and avoid having a simple ticket escalate to more serious consequences. While we are starting with data from the St. Louis County courts, the system is ready to accept data from multiple jurisdictions in the future, so individuals won’t have to hunt among multiple websites if they don’t know which jurisdiction issued the citation.

Users have two options for interfacing with this tool—online or by text message.  Online, users can search for ticket information, or find information about a court they need to attend. They can input a ticket number or user information, or they can use an online geography tool to find out what municipality they got a ticket in. At this point, they can get information about their outstanding tickets, plus information related to active arrest warrants currently affecting them.

Via text-message the process is similar, but with a more simple process. Text message reminders are also available for those who opt to use this system.

This project will bring an improved experience to the municipal courts system of St. Louis County. By modeling the payoff from collaborative problem-solving, the work of CivTech STL can also open the door to more sharing of criminal justice data for broader analysis in ways that protect individuals’ privacy. Good information would assist the community in tackling the difficult questions about the overall pattern of warrants and differential treatment for people of color.

The St. Louis Civic Tech and Data Collaborative demonstrates how mobilizing talent across sectors can use data and technology in fresh ways to improve public systems. We hope our county can leverage the lessons and new relationships from this project to examine how data and tech can help us address the many other challenges that face our county.

The Civic Tech and Data Collaborative is a partnership of Code for America (CfA), Living Cities, and the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership and is supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The national organizations are working with seven communities around the country to understand how to harness the power of data and technology to increase efficiency, equity, and effectiveness in order to benefit the most vulnerable residents in our urban communities.

An earlier version of this blog post was posted on Living Cities.

Prior to Hurricane Katrina, the city of New Orleans’s jail population exceeded 6,500 inmates. When we came into office in 2010, we made a commitment to the people of New Orleans to reform our criminal justice system and reduce the jail population.

So we got to work.

We launched initiatives like the NOLA FOR LIFE strategy and the Network for Economic Opportunity to connect people to opportunity. We started focusing on pre-trial risk assessment and supervision, issuing summonses instead of arrest, fast-tracking low-level offenders and working to address the racial and ethnic disparities in the system.

Additionally, New Orleans has made great strides to reduce the jail population with the help of the MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge and the Federal Bureau of Justice Assistance. Since the challenge’s implementation in 2016, we have seen successes.

We have launched the Community Advisory Group to hold myself and other local officials accountable for our commitments, and to represent community interests. The Sheriff’s Office hired a Justice System Administrator who is responsible for identifying people who fall through the cracks and stay in jail too long. The Criminal District Court approved a protocol to increase use of Release on Recognizance for defendants who don’t pose a risk to public safety.

Through this hard work and collaboration with a number of agencies across New Orleans, we have been able to reduce the jail population to around 1,400 inmates. While we are proud of this success, the fact is New Orleans remains the most incarcerated city in the most incarcerated state in the most incarcerated country. There is still more work to do.

Specifically, as it relates to offenders with mental illnesses and substance abuse disorders, we have found that our New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) officers have few options available to manage this population. In New Orleans, we recognize the challenges that the criminal justice system faces to provide a solution for this population and will launch the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program, an alternative to arrest, in 2018.

Modeled after Seattle’s LEAD program, New Orleans’ LEAD program will allow people at risk of arrest or summons to be diverted to wraparound services in lieu of entering the jail. Upon encounter, officers redirect individuals to an intensive case manager who connects them to services such as behavioral and mental health treatment.

Often, jail time for individuals experiencing a crisis can exacerbate the problem without ever getting to the root cause, and lead to repeat jail and hospital stays. By diverting individuals to services that address the underlying issues, LEAD participants become more connected to the community and less likely to reoffend.

As a precursor to LEAD, through the Safety and Justice Challenge, the Vera Institute of Justice assisted the city in coordinating with NOPD, Women with a Vision and other local organizations to reach shared goals for those facing prostitution charges. In May 2017, we released a policy instituting the use of municipal prostitution charges instead of felony or state charges, making the charge eligible for the Crossroads Diversion Program.

In the first 81 days after implementing this policy, arrests for prostitution decreased, with 91 percent of arrests handled in municipal court.

In New Orleans, we are proud to launch the LEAD program because it allows us to connect individuals to necessary holistic, community-based services. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with our brothers and sisters in need to ensure they are connected to the right opportunities is the right thing to do. It is how we are building the city of our dreams.

*This post originally appeared on the National League of Cities’ blog, Cities Speak.