Topic: Jail Populations

Taking stock of the open-source podcast 70 Million and its impact as season two launches

70 million adults in the United States have a criminal record. That’s one in every 3.5.

Although I’m not among them, these 70 million have become a significant part of my life thanks to our “70 Million” podcast, for which I am the creator and executive producer. I wrote about the launch of season one for the Vera Institute of Justice last year, and was humbled by the opportunity to work with some of the most talented audio producers in the country, as they reported on entrenched contradictions that make meaningful justice reform seem impossible. This included:

• A rigged bail system;
• The criminalization of poverty;
• Defendant-funded courts;
• Counties incentivized to incarcerate;
• Nonexistent mental health services;
• For-profit corrections companies;
• The warehousing of immigrants;
• Foster-care-to-prison pipelines; and
• The rise in women behind bars.

These are among the alarming trends that 70 Million chronicled in its award-winning first season. With season two, which premieres July 15, we’re taking the investigation a step further by bringing a sustained focus to how lives and communities are maligned by an ineffective, expensive, and at times corrupt network of judicial systems.

We made 70 Million because most people who have never been personally impacted by a brush with the law have a naive, almost fictionalized, understanding of the dragnet effect of the legal networks at work in the U.S., most of which function to criminalize poverty. Luckily, this is the best time to produce 70 Million because there’s a growing national awareness about the need to undo the decades of damage caused by misguided policies, intentionally harmful laws, and racialized social and economic exploitation of generations of Americans.

Our open-source digital approach has proven effective, as the first season of 70 Million was a success critically and commercially. At the time of this writing, we’re past the 35,000 download mark, wit each episode surpassing industry averages for similar podcasts in terms of unique listens, impressions, and listen-through rates. 70 Million has also been recognized for its quality, depth and narrative strengths by multiple industry authorities. Most recently, we received Bronze in the Narrative/ Documentary Podcast category at the New York Festival Radio Awards, a category that included ESPN Films, Vox Media, and Panoply.

What’s more, the response from people in the justice reform field has been effusive, with professors and researchers enthusiastically endorsing and recommending the podcast. We even learning that professors at LSU, Harvard, and Vanderbilt universities have included the podcast in courses.

By gathering deeply reported stories of successful reform-oriented programs, season two of 70 Million will hopefully offer tangible examples that can be replicated, as well as provide important lessons on potential roadblocks.

We learned so much from our first season. We learned that there’s a demand for coverage of stories that focus on actionable ideas for local criminal justice reform. We learned that digital audio is an ideal medium for disseminating these necessary stories. Every smart phone comes preloaded with a podcast app, so accessing 70 Million only requires clicking on an app on your phone. That has made it easy to spread the word and gain listeners, even as a highly focused podcast.

Our format also makes it really easy to share episodes via email, social media, even texts. And that has been a great advantage in a field where personal and peer recommendations are still the leading way people find new shows to listen to. In season two, we expect to have more evidence of these two factors, as our podcast further penetrates into academia, activist circles, and even public policy spheres.

Season one had listeners in 33 countries; and we received nearly 1,000 listens by currently incarcerated people using the Edovo app. Most importantly, our episode listen-through rate falls between 77-81 percent, which is higher than the 60 percent average for podcasting in general.

So the message is clear: people want solutions-oriented story-driven examples of criminal justice reform.

I cannot leave without introducing the tremendous group of people who make up the season two team: Jen Chien, Luis M. Gil, Casey Miner, Mitzi Miller, Kate Krosschell, Adizah Eghan, Cher Vincent, Nissa Rhee, Kenia D. Serrette, Sarah MacClure, Emma Forbes, Eve Abrams, Cheryl Green, Pamela Kirkland, Laine Kaplan-Levenson, Rowan Moore Gerety, Carolina Hidalgo, Jenny Casas, and Sabine Jansen.

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. 70 Million is made possible by a grant from the Safety and Justice Challenge at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which also supports the Vera Institute of Justice.

Law enforcement policy has too often been decided in a data vacuum, in large part due to a lack of sophistication and transparency in how policing data are publicly released.

At the same time, safety-related jail releases of defendants charged with low-level felonies to protect them from the spread of the Coronavirus offer an unprecedented discrete opportunity to test common assumptions about whether releasing people before trial necessarily leads to an uptick in crime.

In the absence of crime data, such early concerns were raised about a possible crime wave related to Coronavirus jail releases, but it turns out that those fears have not been borne out by actual statistics, which we’ve been tracking in Chicago on a weekly basis and reporting on a website.

Instead, the data in Chicago shows a marked drop in overall crime since Coronavirus jail releases began, with total reported incidents down more than 30 percent.

At the same time, since March 15, the Cook County jail population is also down 28 percent, to a level not seen since the early 1980s:

The data also show statistically significant reductions in seven out of 12 of the most frequent offense types, particularly arrests for non-marijuana drug offenses:

Chicago and Cook County Justice agencies began containment policies on March 17, when Cook County began a reassessment of bond for primarily non-violent offenders. On March 24^th, the Chicago Police Department directed officers to reduce police stops and issue citations in lieu of low-level misdemeanor arrests.

Concerns of a crime wave have been raised primarily by law enforcement agencies, although early analysis by the Marshall Project suggested the opposite trend, with reported crime down across the country in major cities. And our own analysis bolsters that.

However, there is also interesting nuance in the data that aligns with underlying structural issues that COVID-19 have illustrated in regards to public health.

The Chicago Tribune found, for example, after filing a public records request, that the police department issued more Coronavirus dispersal orders in Chicago’s West Side neighborhoods, which are markedly more populated by African American people on lower incomes. These neighborhoods also have the highest violent crime rates in the city and the most concentrated areas of economic and social disadvantage.

There are structural inequities, including racial inequities, at play in Chicago’s geography. The statistics show a markedly higher reduction in crime in Chicago’s central business district and in many of the more affluent neighborhoods with fewer people of color:

The area where we’ve seen the biggest drop in crime is The Loop—the central business district in downtown Chicago where the businesses, the shopping district, and the financial district are located. And nobody’s there right now—the accountants and attorneys are all working from home, and almost all of the stores are closed to shoppers.

Meanwhile in the areas with higher crime rates, homicides and shootings have been relatively unaffected by the crisis, remaining relatively steady in their week-to-week fluctuations.

The data suggest that we may have reached a statistical baseline, in terms of how much it’s possible to impact crime statistics and the jail population alone.

At this point, if we want to further reduce crime or the jail population, then it’s going to need deeper work from a public health perspective to protect the population at greatest risk for shootings and homicides. There are some more intractable issues at play that aren’t interfered with, even by a pandemic.

So far, there’s been limited replication of this kind of statistical analysis, nationally. But we encourage it because it illustrates the powerful impact of police decision making on the system.

By reducing the number of drug arrests in Chicago, for example, police have had a profound impact on the system, and on the jail. There is a systemwide interconnectedness revealed in the numbers.

The question is, once restrictions have been eased, will the Chicago justice system remember what it’s learning from all this? 

—Dr. Don Stemen is an Associate Professor and Chairperson in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology and a member of the Graduate Faculty at Loyola University, Chicago.

—Professor David Olson is a Professor in the Criminal Justice and Criminology Department at Loyola University Chicago, where he is also the Graduate Program Director, and is also the Co-Director (with Diane Geraghty, Loyola School of Law) of Loyola’s interdisciplinary Center for Criminal Justice Research, Policy and Practice. 

Improving the criminal justice system is about changing behavior—but not just changing the behavior of offenders through discrete interventions proven to reduce an individual’s likelihood of committing crime, which is often the focus. No intervention program exists in isolation, no agency operates alone, and relevant political, social, and financial forces are constantly shifting. To be truly effective, most interventions need to take place within a framework that supports ongoing excellence, even under varying circumstances.

System actors must be willing to examine their own behavior and the behavior of their organizations in order to do business in a new way. To this end, we wrote Ten Steps to System Change, a brief for leaders in criminal justice systems who are committed to a systemic approach to change and ready to take a critical look at their own practices.

With the broad goal of reducing over-incarceration and changing the way America thinks about and uses jails, the Safety and Justice Challenge requires participating jurisdictions to do just what the brief suggests—examine practices, policies, and data throughout the system with a deep dive at each decision point to assess performance and results. To be successful, jurisdictions need to be informed by the research, but also take steps to innovation.

Justice System Partners (JSP) is proud to be a partner on this important, groundbreaking initiative. “Follow the evidence—change the system” is JSP’s approach to technical assistance, both in support of the Safety and Justice Challenge and in all of the work we do. Fortunately, the staff at JSP have decades of experience with local system change—both as practitioners in local agencies, and as technical assistance providers in multi-jurisdictional initiatives such as the Bureau of Justice Assistance’s Justice Reinvestment and Smart Pretrial initiatives, and the development of the now widely used Integrated Model for Evidence-based Practices in Community Corrections with the National Institute of Corrections. This combined experience has allowed us to distill key strategies for measurable change. Ten Steps to System Change is a quick reference guide to those strategies and a worthwhile read for local leaders.

Changing systems is hard work, and it’s a long-term commitment. However, the only way to realize the desired results—less repeat offending, fewer victims, increased public safety, better use of taxpayer dollars—is to look in the mirror and examine what we see.

Contrary to what fearmongers would have you believe, the Coronavirus has shown that crime doesn’t rise when jail and prison populations go down. This was well known even before COVID-19 caused cities to rethink their criminal justice policies.

The current COVID-19 crisis provides a real-time blueprint on how to vastly streamline our criminal justice system. Removing misdemeanor and traffic violations from the criminal code would reduce the number of arrests, jail bookings and court filings by at least 50%. Expediting the disposition of criminal charges for those jailed will reduce the jail and prison populations. And we now know that crime rates will be reduced as we shrink the $300 billion criminal justice system footprint.

The press has focused on a few isolated surges in shootings but in fact, a new study by Thomas Abt and Richard Rosenfeld shows that American homicide rates declined dramatically in April and May based on data from 64 U.S. cities: Homicide rates declined by 21.5 percent in April and 9.9 percent in May compared with the previous three-year average for those months. We’ve also seen abrupt drops in theft and burglaries since the Coronavirus took hold, and that’s against a backdrop of crime rates already dropping by over 50% since 1995.

The crime drop has also produced an arrest drop, and that’s been compounded as law enforcement has decided not to pay as much attention to misdemeanor crimes. Those arrests have dropped dramatically, producing reduced jail bookings and fewer people in jail.

As we talk about reducing the footprint and cost of police agencies (over $140 billion a year), the number one thing for us to learn is that we don’t need to physically arrest people for a misdemeanor crime. Instead, police should give them a field citation, with the exception of domestic violence and DUI charges. And police shouldn’t be doing routine traffic stops for the sole purpose of raising money for more policing. As an alternative, we should maximize use of cameras, and develop a corps of traffic officers who aren’t armed with guns but with tablets. If they catch you speeding, they take a picture of your license plate, and then send you the picture and a bill. That’s all.

The big challenge we’re now facing is people’s court appearances being delayed because the criminal courts have been shut down, or are working at a slower pace. Courts need to expedite the processing of cases for those folks who are still in jail. Defenders and prosecutors will have to change their old business practices of delaying sentencing until they get a deal they like. In particular, needless and lengthy court continuances need to be eliminated.

Courts may also need to declare a one-time amnesty for those who fail to appear over coming months on misdemeanor and traffic citations issued during the Coronavirus crisis. Otherwise, there’ll be a sizable backup of failure-to-appear warrants which will clog the courts, increase jail bookings, and do nothing to improve public safety.

—Dr. Austin has over twenty-five years of experience in correctional planning and research. He is the former director of the Institute on Crime, Justice and Corrections at George Washington University in Washington, DC. 

Earlier this month, the Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform released A More Just New York City, a report detailing its recommendations for reforming New York City’s criminal justice system. Based on a full year of inquiry, the Commission unanimously recommended closing Rikers Island jail, reducing the city’s jail population by half, and moving towards a borough-based jail system.

The Commission’s report marks a landmark moment for criminal justice in New York City. Mayor Bill de Blasio has announced that it is now the city’s official policy to close the Rikers Island jail.

Written with support from three members of the Safety and Justice team—the Center for Court Innovation, the Vera Institute of Justice, and CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance—the report embodies many of the core elements of the Safety and Justice Challenge, namely the strategic use of data to keep individuals out of jail at every step of the justice process.

The Commission was convened in April 2016 following City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito’s call for an entity to explore “how we can get the population of Rikers [Island] to be so small that the dream of shutting it down becomes a reality.” Chaired by former New York State Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman and comprised of 27 members from a wide range of backgrounds, the Commission spent a year analyzing local data, engaging with experts and stakeholders, and studying national models for justice reform.

Due in large part to a well-documented culture of violence and the Island’s isolation, Rikers has become notorious as a national symbol of broken justice, making its closure a monumental step not just for New York City, but for the country. The Island’s seclusion from New York City communities has promoted an out-of-sight, out-of-mind mentality, created enormous operational inefficiencies, and taken a powerful toll both in financial terms—it costs $247,000 to incarcerate a person for one year—and in human impact, disrupting the lives of thousands of individuals along with their families, housing, education, and employment opportunities.

A More Just New York City outlines concrete strategies for reducing the current jail population from 9,700 to fewer than 5,000—a size that would enable the city to shutter Rikers Island and replace it with a borough-based system over the next ten years. On any given day, three quarters of the city’s jail population is detained pretrial without having been convicted of a crime, largely because they cannot afford bail. The report proposes reforms to the bail system, including the elimination of cash bail, and investments in pretrial diversion services that can substantially reduce the number of individuals detained in jail while awaiting a disposition.

A significantly reduced jail population would enable the city to transition to a community-based model with facilities located in close proximity to existing courthouses in each borough. Moving away from the outdated design of the Island’s current facilities, borough-based facilities would embody state-of-the-art principles in jail design that foster a healthy and humane environment for the people detained and working within them. The Commission also undertook a robust study of the future of the Island beyond its use as a jail facility, focusing on pathways to transform the Island from a place of harm to a site of progress and benefit for the city. The report recommends using the Island to expand LaGuardia Airport and locate greatly-needed green infrastructure that would meet the city’s growing needs, while producing significant economic activity and employment opportunities.

Despite national trends, over the past twenty years New York City has shown that it is possible to simultaneously reduce crime rates and the use of incarceration. Yet as has been well-documented, much more work is needed. Exemplifying the goals of the Safety and Justice Challenge, A More Justice New York City provides a roadmap for New York City and jurisdictions around the country to significantly reduce and re-envision their jail systems to embody basic human and civic values of fairness and justice.

New York City is a Safety and Justice Challenge partner site.