Topic: Jail Populations

A special public defenders office set up to help women is keeping families together.

When Linda Meachum was arrested in Tulsa, OK last year for not paying her court fees and fines, she prepared to say goodbye to her two young granddaughters.

“I was doomed,” Linda told me. “I was fixing to be sent to prison to do the term of four years.”

Women are the fastest growing population behind bars in the United States today. And like Linda, nearly 80 percent of women in jail are mothers, according to a 2016 report by the Vera Institute of Justice. The same report says that women are now held in jails in nearly every jurisdiction across the country. Most of them are single mothers or the primary breadwinners for their families.

The devastation wrought by this trend is apparent in Oklahoma, which has the highest incarceration rate in the world. For over 25 years, Oklahoma has put more women behind bars per capita than any other state.

In Tulsa, the jail has gone from housing an average of 8 women per day in 1970 to over 300 women per day in 2017. Most of the women have been charged with low-level, nonviolent crimes like shoplifting or failing to pay court fees.

Separated from their families and forced to leave their work, these women sit idle in large “pods,” watching TV or chatting as they wait for their cases to be resolved. It was in the Tulsa County jail this spring that I met Kami Barrett, a 30-year-old mother of three.

“Not being able to see my kids, that’s the hardest thing,” she told me. “I had them every day. Now I don’t have them at all. That’s what sucks.”

Her youngest daughter, aged five, was staying with Kami’s sister while her former partner was taking care of her  eight and nine-year-old. Such separation of siblings from mothers can have serious consequences. Kids with parents behind bars aresix times more likely to enter the criminal justice system themselves, and the numbers are worse for children of incarcerated mothers than fathers.

Kami could have walked out of the jail that day if only she could afford the $5,000 bond prescribed by the judge. But without the money, she was stuck behind bars, waiting for the court to decide whether she was guilty. Nationally, women are less likely than men to be able to bond out of jail.

Women behind bars are also more likely to have a history of trauma and abuse and have higher rates of mental health and substance abuse disorders.

For Linda Meachum, that combination meant her fate was all but sealed. The 57-year-old had been in prison twice before and her health was failing. A survivor of domestic violence, she told me she struggled with substance abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder while living on less than $250 a month.

When the court mandated that she pay the government $40 every month as part of her probation in addition to the court fines of a previous case, she said she reached a breaking point. When Linda stopped paying the court fee, the sheriff issued a warrant for her arrest.

But Linda was one of the lucky ones. She ended up spending just eight days in jail. With the help of Still She Rises,  a mother-focused law firm in Tulsa, she was able to convince the judge to give her a second chance. Since being released in January, she has completed a 60-day rehabilitation program and is doing community service in lieu of paying the court fines. She even has plans to start a prison ministry to help women behind bars.

But not every woman arrested is so lucky. There are 212,000 women incarcerated in prisons and jails today—30 percent of the total number of incarcerated women worldwide. It is time we start hearing their voices and helping them find their way back to their families.

*Nissa Rhee is a reporter based in Chicago whose work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Reader, and Radio Netherlands Worldwide. She reported on women in Oklahoma prisons for 70 Million, an open-source 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.

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.

In Multnomah County, Oregon, we are committed to addressing racial disparities in our local justice system, and to addressing the unique needs of those most directly impacted by jail incarceration.

One population that is particularly vulnerable to justice-system involvement is people with mental illness. In 2015, we conducted a study to identify ways in which we could safely divert these people away from jail and into other treatment services. Through our Mental Health Jail Diversion Feasibility Study, we discovered that African Americans who struggle with mental illness are over-represented in the local jail.

This was compounded by an additional report in 2016—released by Multnomah County in partnership with the MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge—that found African Americans in the county were six times more likely than whites to be in jail, despite only representing 6 percent of the local population.

Further, data provided by the county’s Department of Community Justice in 2017 showed that women with mental illness were sanctioned to jail more frequently on probation violations than women who were not struggling with mental health concerns. And, once in jail, women with mental illness stayed longer.

Based on these findings, Multnomah County’s public safety partners realized that we needed to develop more tailored responses to women—particularly women of color—who are involved in the justice system and suffering from mental illness.

This Fall, we are excited to launch one of these strategies: the first-of-its-kind transitional housing program in the county for adult women involved in the criminal justice system. The Diane Wade House will provide gender-responsive, trauma-informed services that are also Afrocentric. This means that residents, who must be referred to the program, will have access to culturally specific mental health stabilization and support services.

In addition to dormitory-style housing, the Diane Wade House will offer a variety of daytime services, including mentoring and life-skills programs. It is intended to be a low-barrier, transitional housing program, meaning that its eligibility requirements aim to reduce barriers to entry rather than place undue burdens on those who need housing and services.

The home will serve 38 justice-involved women referred by the Multnomah County Department of Community Justice and Multnomah County Mental Health and Addiction Services. Twenty-one of those beds will be funded by the Safety and Justice Challenge, which supports efforts like ours to reduce unnecessary incarceration without compromising public safety—particularly for those struggling with mental health or addiction issues.

Diane Wade has a special connection to Multnomah County. A parole and probation officer with the county’s Department of Community Justice, she was a leader in the African American community and best known for her advocacy and passion for justice-involved women. Wade worked with adults in Multnomah County from May 1999 until she passed away in October 2010. Most of her work was with women of color as a lead parole and probation officer with the African American Program as well as the Gang Unit.

As part of community-involvement requests from both the Safety and Justice Challenge and the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners, community members are providing input and feedback for the women’s program. This includes women who are currently or previously involved in the justice system. The Department of Community Justice will also launch a Community Advisory Board, made up of justice-involved women, to help guide ongoing program development and operations. The Advisory Board will include a current resident of the Diane Wade House.

Through these efforts, Multnomah County seeks to reduce the overrepresentation of women with mental illness in the criminal justice system, and help women develop a foundation for future stability and success.

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.