Topic: Jail Costs

Prison Policy Initiative’s new report Following the Money of Mass Incarceration looks at the big picture and concludes that the government and families of justice-involved people spend $182 billion each year on mass incarceration and over-criminalization. But for this report, Prison Policy Initiative also calculates an important cost hidden within this figure: the cost of locking people up before trial.

This population which has recently grown to be the majority of people in jails, has not been convicted and is legally innocent. Some people were arrested a few hours or days ago and have not been brought before a judge, and others are too poor to afford money bail and must wait for trial.

On any given day, this country has 451,000 people behind bars who are being detained pretrial. In Following the Money of Mass Incarceration, Prison Policy Initiative puts a price tag on how much it costs local governments nationwide: $13.6 billion.

Jail policies matter. There are lots of strategies that individual jurisdictions can adopt to reduce their jail populations. The MacArthur Foundation is sponsoring a number of these strategies via its Safety and Justice Challenge—providing funding to jurisdictions around the country to develop community solutions aimed at reducing use of jails and high rates of pretrial detention.

In Spokane, WA for instance, the city and county court systems are testing a new risk assessment tool—the Spokane Assessment for Evaluation of Risk, or SAFER—to calculate whether someone can be released safely pretrial without leveraging bail. Lucas County, OH is developing a similar assessment program to evaluate people as they enter the jail. And Houston’s Harris County is piloting a program to provide public defenders to some defendants at bail hearings.

And, for more on how the poverty of people detained pretrial makes money bail unaffordable and spurs pretrial detention in the first place, check out Prison Policy Initiative’s 2016 report, Detaining the Poor: How money bail perpetuates and endless cycle of poverty and jail time.

*This post originally appeared on Prison Policy Initiative 

Providing programs in jail that teach job skills and prepare inmates for employment will reduce the chance that they will return after they are released—saving money in the long run and improving public safety. However, meaningful inmate programming can be costly. Creative use of existing staff and vendors can, nonetheless, yield impressive results, as we found in Milwaukee.

The Milwaukee County House of Correction (HOC), which supervises most of the county’s sentenced population, historically has not offered any substantial inmate educational activities, pre-employment programming, or job training. When County Executive Chris Abele took over management of the HOC in May of 2013 and began working with advocates and experts across the criminal justice system, the HOC was able to implement several programs that give inmates a chance to break the cycle of incarceration and give back to the community.

Although some of the inmate programming activities implemented at the HOC since May of 2013 are paid through the HOC operations budget, many were established by using the expertise and dedication of existing staff, leveraging vendor contracts, and by partnering with community groups. These programs use a small amount of the budget, but provide a significant impact that can assist inmates to become more employable and prepared for reentry upon release.

When using vendor contracts and staff roles to build new programs, it can be particularly effective to involve staff or vendors in the development of a program from the beginning. The Preparation for Success Program, a six-week pre-employment training program implemented in late 2014, was conceived, developed, and implemented by an HOC programs officer. Our program officers typically schedule events or presenters, supervise inmates on work crews, escort them to activities, and make sure programs run on time, in addition to being available for various other tasks as needed. The Preparation for Success program is presented as part of these regular duty activities and only requires a small amount of materials, but successfully promotes self-esteem, empowerment, and confidence by assisting inmates in practical job preparation skills such as filling out applications or drafting cover letters and resumes.

In another case, during a process to hire a vendor to run foodservice operations at the HOC, each vendor was required as part of their bid to propose a culinary job training program for inmates at no cost to the HOC (i.e., the cost of the program would not be paid through a portion of fees paid to the vendor). The successful bid vendor proposed—and has been conducting—a nationally recognized restaurant and food safety training and certification program for the inmates, IN2WORK, since January of 2014.

Other programs do require dedicated financial support, but it can often be obtained by a combination of grants, community partnerships, and small initial investments from existing budgets. For example, the Home2Stay program provides job training in welding, applied mathematics, and machining through a United States Labor Department grant obtained by Word of Hope Ministries. The HOC assists with the screening of participants and provides transportation for inmates to the instruction and training sites.

Earlier this year, the HOC established a Vermiculture operation—or worm farm—on HOC grounds.  The program produces worms to feed reptiles at the Milwaukee County Zoo as well as worm casings to be used as organic fertilizer by groups such as local garden organizations. It develops job training skills, demonstrates entrepreneurship, and provides inmates with an opportunity to give back to the community and make productive use of their time during confinement. The HOC made an initial purchase for supplies and stock from existing programming funds to get the program started, but after that, a portion of the casings that the worms produce are exchanged with a vendor for fresh materials for further processing at no cost to the HOC.

Through the dedication of HOC staff as well as the collaboration of justice system stakeholders, advocates, community organizations, and businesses, in less than three years we have been able to grow from virtually no substantive programming to offering dozens of programs that provide meaningful reentry support, with nearly 78% of eligible inmates involved in at least one (all inmates who are sentenced to the HOC are eligible). We now look forward to making other collaborative changes to the way we use the HOC as one of the jurisdictions selected to participate in the MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge, a national initiative to change the way America thinks about and uses jails. As our experience shows, budget concerns in strapped local jails across the country should not prevent the development of reentry programming, but encourage it, as creative collaboration will result in supportive options for individuals that can reduce recidivism, improve public safety, and save costs.

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.