Topic: Jail Populations

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. 

The initial decision to detain or release an accused person, either with or without financial and other conditions, is made by a judicial officer—usually pretty quickly, and often with a minimum of information. But this quick decision can have serious long-term consequences, and not just for individual detainees.

So why not take a second look?

Eight Safety and Justice Challenge sites have instituted procedures for revisiting initial detention and bail decisions on a routine basis. From a system point of view, it’s about “saving bed days”—finding ways to minimize unnecessary pretrial holding. For individual defendants, though, second looks like these can save a lot more—jobs, families, even lives. Some of the second-look approaches being taken by Safety and Justice Challenge jurisdictions are simple; some are highly complex and collaborative. Lucas County, Ohio’s is both.

It’s called the Population Review Team: about ten people as a rule, including representatives of the Toledo Legal Aid Society (which represents indigent defendants) and the City of Toledo Law Department (which prosecutes them), along with the Lucas County Sheriff’s Office, Pretrial Services, the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, and other local agencies and providers. They meet every week for a couple of hours, combing page by page through a fat printout showing charges, criminal histories, risk assessment scores and other details on Lucas County’s entire pretrial jail population.

They’re looking for deals: good candidates for a modified bond, release on appropriate conditions, or expedited case resolution. They concentrate on defendants who were recommended for pretrial release by the county’s risk instrument, the PSA Court, but who for one reason or other were held anyway, as well as defendants charged with low-level offenses but not recommended for release because of past criminal activity or failures to appear. They don’t just rely on what’s in the printout: each of the participants has access to sources of additional information about defendants—affidavits and incident reports on file, needs assessment results, community service histories, active cases in neighboring court systems, etc.

Sean McNulty, the Toledo Legal Aid Society’s Chief Public Defender and a frequent participant in Population Review Team meetings, says that “if we can predict the likely outcome of a case at the next court event, then this review provides us with an opportunity to reach that outcome in two days, not two weeks. It helps the system become more efficient, but it also affords our clients a chance to be released from custody earlier-—thereby decreasing the likelihood that their lives will further destabilize while they remain incarcerated.”

When the meeting is over and the team’s release recommendations have been recorded, the defender representative typically heads straight across the street to meet with clients in the Lucas County Jail, explain the Population Review project, and present the proposed offers. If clients agree, their cases come before a Toledo Municipal Court judge at an expedited hearing a day or two later, and they are released.

Regular deep dives into the county’s pretrial population have given Population Review Team members a chance to spot trends, detect bottlenecks and snags, and come up with simple policy fixes for chronic problems. The project has engendered useful habits of interagency collaboration and information sharing, and created a sense that there are certain basic goals and values—efficiency, proportionality, common sense—that everyone in the justice system ought to own.

Lucas County has plans to expand its Population Review Team approach in 2018, hoping to get similar benefits with a new target population: people being held for felonies who have an identified need for mental health or substance abuse treatment. The hope for the expansion—led by the Toledo Legal Aid Society and dubbed the Opportunity Project—is that a connection to services at the pretrial stage can improve court and other outcomes for a behavioral health population.

Long a global leader in incarceration rates and the subject of federal consent decrees looming over both the police department and the sheriff’s office, New Orleans is making major efforts to reduce its jail population as part of the Safety and Justice Challenge. One of these key strategies is pre-booking diversion. New Orleans will launch a Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program in early 2018. New Orleans LEAD, which is modeled after Seattle’s successful program of the same name, will allow people at risk of arrest or summons to be diverted into intensive case management and services instead of going to the Orleans Parish jail.

One of several charges that will be eligible for diversion is prostitution. Since 2014, people facing prosecution for prostitution in New Orleans have had the opportunity to be diverted out of the criminal justice system through Crossroads, an innovative, harm reduction-based diversion program. However, this opportunity depends entirely on the discretion of the arresting officer, and on whether he or she issues a municipal or a state charge. Municipal charges are made under the municipal court jurisdiction, whereas state charges are made under the criminal district court jurisdiction.

Until recently, most people were charged with state misdemeanor or felony prostitution—which prevented them from accessing the social services and other assistance Crossroads provides. Despite Crossroads’ proven track record of reducing re-arrest and failures to appear—and improving participants’ health and wellness—officers continued to use the state and felony charges, making people ineligible for the program.

Two years after local law enforcement, the public defender, and community advocates collaborated to launch Crossroads—and while New Orleans was still in the planning phase for LEAD—the Vera Institute of Justice sought to help the city align the objectives established in Crossroads with those of pre-booking diversion. We convened the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) and local organization Women with a Vision, and our three agencies set about examining the arrest trends, drafting a new policy, and wrestling with the most appropriate and effective ways to respond to people engaged in sex work.

On May 12, 2017, The NOPD’s Superintendent released a policy directing officers to use the municipal prostitution charge instead of harsher felony or state misdemeanor charges.

Since this policy’s release, New Orleans has seen a significant reduction in both arrests and lengths of stay in the jail for prostitution charges. In the 81 days before the policy was implemented, there were 57 arrests for prostitution, an average of 0.7 arrests per day. Only two percent of those cases went to municipal court, while a striking 98 percent went to criminal district court. On average, each person spent 21 days in jail.

In the 81 days after implementation, prostitution arrests dropped to a total of 33—an average of 0.4 arrests per day. Of those, 91 percent went to municipal court and just 9 percent went to criminal district court. The average length of stay dropped to eight days in jail.

The total number of “bed days,” a measure sometimes used to better understand the various populations in a jail, for prostitution arrests went from 1,220 down to 270; or an average of 3.3 beds each day, down from 15.

Because of the collaborative efforts between Vera, Women with a Vision, and NOPD, the post-implementation period saw a 95 percent reduction in prostitution cases going to the higher court, and a 62 percent reduction in the average length of jail stay for persons facing prostitution charges.

When the LEAD pilot launches, municipal prostitution will be eligible for diversion to intensive case management earlier in the process, before a person is taken to jail. The promising results of the recent shift from misdemeanor and felony charges to municipal charges gives us hope for continued progress through LEAD. With the support of the Safety and Justice Challenge, Vera will continue to work with local leaders to reduce the harm of arrest and provide an effective, community-based intervention to improve public health, safety, and order in New Orleans.

After more than four decades of continuous growth, the U.S. jail population has been on the decline since 2008. In 2015, the most recent year for which data is available, the average daily jail population declined yet again, slightly, by 2.4 percent.

The Vera Institute of Justice’s recent report Out of Sight: The Growth of Jails in Rural America found that during the decade prior to 2013, jail populations had been on the decline in large urban counties, but rose steeply in rural counties. Newly released 2015 county-level data, which Vera has just added to its Incarceration Trends data tool, reveals that these trends continue: nearly nine in 10 large urban counties experienced declines and, together, the jail population in the nation’s 61 large urban counties fell by 18,392 people between 2014 and 2015. That’s equivalent to emptying the Los Angeles County jails.

What the overall downward trend in the total U.S. jail population masks, however, are rising jail populations in 40 percent of suburban and small and midsized counties, and in more than half of rural counties (See Figure 1, below). The source of this data, the Annual Survey of Jails (ASJ), does not cover every jail in the United States however. Its main purpose is to estimate the national jail population. The survey covers all large jails, but only a sample of smaller jails.

The jail population grew in 195 out of 482 suburban and small and midsized counties surveyed in 2015, while 156 of the 272 rural counties surveyed had more than 8,700 additional people in jail combined. While these jails are individually small, the growth in these places adds up.

Though rural counties have the highest incarceration rates, the ASJ collects data in only 14 percent of rural counties. So while the rural jails that participated in the 2015 survey experienced sharp increases, the ASJ does not provide a tally of the jail population change in all 2,000 rural counties.

The overall picture painted by the 2015 jails data is one of tremendous declines in large, urban jurisdictions being eroded by sharp increases in jail populations in a large proportion of suburban, small and midsized, and rural counties. In urban areas such as Philadelphia and Houston, significant reforms are under way through national initiatives like the Safety and Justice Challenge. There are also more localized changes occurring in urban areas —like bail reform in New Jersey and the move to close Rikers Island in New York City. But smaller and more rural counties continue to lag behind. In order to bring these counties further into the fold of reform, governments and their partners can use the available data to examine what’s happening in their communities, contribute to filling the gaps in data and knowledge and, ultimately, initiate plans for change.

*This blog is cross-published from www.vera.org. Photo credit: Spencer Means/ Flickr

Like many other courts nationwide, outstanding warrants present challenges in Spokane’s Municipal Court. Warrants contribute to court inefficiency, and they are costly from a monetary and social justice perspective.  As the second largest municipal court in the state of Washington in the biggest city between Minneapolis and Seattle, it is not surprising that the court has accumulated over 4,600 outstanding misdemeanor warrants from people failing to appear at court hearings. The court, however, is taking steps to address this backlog as part of the city’s efforts to safely reduce its jail population.

A warrant for arrest is issued when someone fails to appear for a court date. Once a warrant is issued, any contact the person has with law enforcement will result in an arrest on the outstanding warrant, even if that new contact is unrelated to any criminal conduct. For example, if a person is pulled over for speeding, she could be taken to jail for an outstanding warrant. Because of jail overcrowding, many people who are arrested on misdemeanor warrants are booked into jail and quickly released. Despite the fact that these defendants do not spend the night in jail, such cases are still costly for local taxpayers.  Each booking into jail increases the city’s proportionate share of the jail costs based on the jail’s average daily population. While the cost varies annually, taxpayers have paid about the same rate per day to incarcerate a misdemeanant as they would pay for him to stay in one of the finer local hotels.

To help address this issue, the core team from Spokane Municipal’s Community Court—which is a problem-solving court handling quality-of-life offenses such as trespass or pedestrian interference in the downtown area—recently held a “WarrantFest.” The event allowed people facing misdemeanor charges to have their warrants recalled—or canceled—and to renew participation in resolving their cases. To mitigate participants’ transportation challenges, the team—a judge, prosecutor, public defender, and court clerk—visited multiple locations in the city where many people who are homeless and vulnerable traditionally congregate:  a large, downtown homeless shelter; the regional bus and train station; and the hub for the city’s bus system.  In order for a location to serve as a WarrantFest site, all that was needed was internet access and chairs or benches for individuals to sit. Because Spokane’s Municipal Court uses an electronic case management system, the team was able to address all cases our court handles and set new court dates for participants within a week.

While the warrant backlog wasn’t eliminated that day, the event had a significant impact on those who participated.  Take, for example, the young woman that arrived at the WarrantFest’s “court” with her nine-month-old baby in a stroller. She has lived in desperate fear of getting arrested on an outstanding theft warrant from five years earlier and going to jail. Over the past few years, the young mother had completely changed her life and wanted to address her past mistake, but she was terrified to go to jail without anyone to care for her baby.  At the event, she was able to reconnect with an attorney to address her old shoplifting charge.

Another example involved a man who had, at one point, appeared frequently in criminal court on minor charges, in large part because of substance abuse and mental illness issues. However, he had not been seen at court for quite some time, which led him to have a warrant out for his arrest. He set a new court date at WarrantFest, and when he appeared at the new court date a week later, he was sober, following his prescribed medication regime, and employed. Like the young mother, he had made significant positive changes in his life. After reconnecting with his attorney, he is in the process of finishing what he needed to do in order to be held accountable—all without going to jail and losing his job and support system.

Just one day afforded opportunities for many other success stories like these. Tracking data is important for our team, and from the electronic case management system we found that very few people whose warrants were recalled at WarrantFest failed to appear at their next court hearing. The court plans to continue the success of WarrantFest, with some modifications to expand opportunities to participate, which will likely increase the number of success stories. We also anticipate inviting additional courts to join in future efforts so that more warrants can be addressed. As we witnessed , giving people the opportunity to finally take  care of these cases—and simultaneously reducing the use of jail—is far more productive than having the warrants sit in drawers.