Topic: Jail Populations

Yakima County, Washington has been actively working to improve our criminal justice system with analysis-driven, evidence-based system change. One of the significant ways in which we are doing this is by focusing on some of the most vulnerable people who are involved in the justice system: people with severe mental illness. By actively working to develop a continuum of care for people with mental illness, we hope to limit or even end their future system involvement.

Our focus on this population evolved from initial work to develop an innovative pretrial release program. Prior to our selection for a Safety and Justice Challenge Innovation Fund grant, Yakima County was one of three selected Smart Pretrial demonstration sites in the country. The Smart Pretrial initiative, funded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, aimed to provide a pretrial system that is safe, fair, and effective, and that maximizes public safety, court attendance, and appropriate use of release, supervision, and detention.

With Smart Pretrial support, we implemented a pretrial assessment for all newly booked people, reduced the use of secured money bail, and developed a dedicated first appearance hearing on our docket. We further adopted the Arnold Foundation’s Public Safety Assessment (PSA) tool, a risk assessment tool that helps judges make accurate, efficient, and evidence-based decisions about which defendants should be detained prior to trial and which can be safely released. As a result, pretrial detention rates decreased from 47 percent to 27 percent over one year and racial disparities were reduced significantly. All of this was accomplished without sacrificing public safety or court appearance rates.

Early data from these reforms, however, indicated that individuals with serious mental health issues were experiencing challenges with the pretrial release program. To help address these challenges, we decided that developing a continuum of care was the next logical step to ensure a reduction in over-incarceration, particularly for this vulnerable group. Our work to develop this continuum of care was supported by the Innovation Fund.

We were well positioned to implement these efforts. Yakima County already had many of the required components in place, including a Mental Health Crisis Stabilization Unit, Crisis Intervention Training for Law Enforcement, a Behavioral Health Diversion Program, and a Mental Health Court. Yakima County is also one of the few sites in the country to implement a Dual Diagnosis Mental Health/Drug and Alcohol Court. While each sector had successes and innovative programs, Yakima County needed to assess the system as a whole to have effective change.

The Yakima County Collaborative Diversion Policy team—comprising criminal justice system stakeholders and local mental health providers—conducted this assessment with an approach known as the Sequential Intercept Model (SIM). SIM involves assessing available resources, determining gaps in services, and planning for community change through the development of a map that illustrates how people with behavioral health needs flow through the criminal justice system.

Through a workshop facilitated by Policy Resource Associates (PRA), team participants identified opportunities for linkage to services and for prevention of further penetration into the criminal justice system. This workshop included stakeholders from across multiple systems, including mental health, substance abuse, law enforcement, pretrial services, courts, jails, community corrections, housing, health, and social services, as well as peers, family members, and many others.

The SIM was invaluable in providing stakeholders with a framework to assess the current system and enabling the community to identify action steps moving forward to address system change. Yakima County is currently working to address those gaps to divert these individuals from the criminal justice system into community-based treatment.

In 2014, MacArthur began to shift the focus of its justice reform grantmaking from the juvenile to the adult system. As the Foundation evolved its work to concentrate resources more deeply in fewer fields for greater impact, mass incarceration emerged an undeniable priority. The facts speak for themselves: more than one-and-a-half million Americans are incarcerated in prisons, there are nearly 12 million admissions to jail each year, and the “land of the free” is home to a quarter of the world’s incarcerated people. This is an enormous challenge with prohibitive economic costs and profound social repercussions.

But how to go about tackling this issue in a way that would allow the Foundation to make a significant contribution was less obvious. After much research and expert consultation, we felt our limited resources could have the greatest impact through a focus on the often overlooked front end of the system. More specifically, this meant a focus on jails and the local justice systems in which they operate, which function as the “front door” of mass incarceration. Our next challenge was to assess the appetite among jurisdictions across the country to take a hard look at their local justice systems and to reform them to be fairer and more effective.

We conceptualized a competition that would make funds available to support leaders of local justice reform, creating on-the-ground enhancements to their justice systems while amassing a body of knowledge about what works in achieving local reform. The Safety and Justice Challenge, a more than $100 million commitment to addressing mass incarceration by changing the way America thinks about and uses jails, was launched in February 2015.

Our initial uncertainty as to what the response would be quickly evaporated. We received applications from nearly 200 jurisdictions in 45 states and territories, from which we selected 20 geographically diverse jurisdictions to participate in the Challenge Network beginning in May 2015. Since then, our support for these jurisdictions has deepend as they grow their reform efforts, and the Network has added 20 new jurisdictions participating in the Challenge through an Innovation Fund.

Local leaders involved in the Challenge are proving it is possible for cities, counties, and states to rethink local justice systems from the ground up with forward-looking, smart solutions that safely reduce jail populations and eliminate ineffective, inefficient, and unfair practices. The jurisdictions’ plans employ an array of local solutions, such as diversion programs to steer people who are not a public safety threat away from the criminal justice system; expanded community-based treatment options; and improvements to case processing efficiency to reduce people’s time in jail before trial. For example, 13 jurisdictions are working with community-based treatment providers to provide targeted crisis interventions, detox or residential treatment, and other proven models of substance abuse and mental health treatment. The diversity of sizes, geographies, demographics, and challenges represented in the Challenge Network will produce a variety of creative approaches and models for reform that jurisdictions across the country can adopt.

Our criminal justice work has its origins in a decades-long commitment to justice reform in the United States, but its execution represents a sea change in MacArthur’s history. As one of the Foundation’s Big Bets, this work exemplifies a shift toward more concentrated grantmaking to drive transformative change in an area of profound concern. It entails risk: the criminal justice space is complex, influenced by political shifts and national events, and reform is hard-won. Our work will test the hypothesis that a key to addressing mass incarceration lies in local justice reform. What we have seen thus far is a heartening commitment from leaders across the country who agree with us and are will to lead the charge.

Since 2015, MacArthur has awarded more than 130 grants and over $116 million through the Safety and Justice Challenge. This post was original published on the MacArthur Foundation website. 

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.

Prosecutors and public defenders are adversaries in the courtroom.  Yet—they do not have to be adversaries outside of it. In fact, prosecutors and defenders have unique leverage to collaborate to change public opinion and reduce the over-use of jail.

The Association of Prosecuting Attorneys (APA) and the National Legal Aid & Defenders Association (NLADA) are leading the way in encouraging cooperation between these natural courtroom foes, who are key stakeholders within the criminal justice system and are best positioned to advance sustainable reforms. Our latest joint project, Beyond the Adversarial System: Achieving the Challenge, provides tangible recommendations for prosecutors and public defenders to effectively collaborate.

We recognize the legitimate challenges facing both prosecutors and public defenders when they take on this new role of collaborators. Both parties must uphold their constitutional roles in the adversarial system and also manage public perception challenges. Public defenders must be concerned about appearance when they are perceived as “working with the prosecutors”—instead of being loyal to their clients—while prosecutors are similarly challenged when they are involved in reforms that might not be included as part of their traditional roles in the courtroom. To work through these perceptions, we advise that prosecutors and defenders be understanding to the other’s limitations and obligations.

Our recommendations include avoiding placing blame on the other party, identifying commonalities and shared goals, using data for objective analysis, and working with local criminal justice coordinating councils and state agencies that manage criminal justice grants and information. These recommendations have already been used successfully by some jurisdictions, and have fostered collaborative relationships between unlikely allies to bring about justice reform.

From recommending mediators for difficult conversations—and soliciting media experts’ assistance for unified messages—to providing intentional actions for positive relationships amongst attorneys, the report provides practical steps to establishing effective collaborative models.

By implementing tangible ideas from the report, prosecutors and defenders in Pima County, Arizona; Mecklenburg County, NC; Spokane County, WA; and Milwaukee County, WI—who are all part of the Safety and Justice Challenge network—have been able to strengthen relationships for collaborative reform. We are optimistic that these ideas, in practice, will pave the way for future justice reform as well.