Topic: Jail Populations

On any given day, there are more than 730,000 people incarcerated in more than 3,000 local jails across the United States. While many people assume that high incarceration rates are only concentrated in major cities, a recent report by the Vera Institute of Justice reveals that, in fact, small and rural counties are the main drivers of jail growth across the country. One of the factors cited in Vera’s report is a lack of resources—meaning that small and rural counties often lack infrastructure for social services, such as readily available community treatment facilities, and face a unique set of challenges within their criminal justice systems.

“Small and rural counties” references a subset of “rural to small and medium metros” as defined in Vera’s report and excludes Safety and Justice Challenge sites that are the first or second most populous counties in their state.

Despite challenges, these counties remain dynamic incubators for change, poised to quickly bring multiple stakeholders together and foster collaboration. A recent addition of Innovation Fund sites to the Safety and Justice Challenge (the Challenge) has created an opportunity to test out bold ideas in 20 new places. Through our work at the Urban Institute to support project implementation, we can witness how smaller jurisdictions seek to overcome these challenges and implement reforms that are responsive to the needs of their communities.

Innovation Sites offer a unique look into how jail growth manifests in smaller areas

The addition of six Innovation sites—Buncombe County, North Carolina; Campbell County, Tennessee; Deschutes County, Oregon; Durham County, North Carolina; Summit County, Ohio and Yakima County, Washington—greatly expanded the Challenge network in small and rural communities.

Challenges that small and rural counties face are not unique in their existence, but are unique in the way they manifest. As a result, localities must tailor solutions to best meet their needs.

Scarce resources leave little room for innovation and risk

Smaller sites have limited ability to start new programs and ensure their fidelity. The issues of staffing, finding a location to host new programs, and securing funding beyond seed investments are all major hurdles. Campbell County, a rural jurisdiction in Tennessee, planned to incorporate a gender-responsive assessment and case planning tool. However, their choices were limited to tools that are offered at a reasonable price and at an accessible location without compromising the quality of training. Campbell County successfully overcame this barrier by exploring alternative assessments that were of high quality and could provide immediate online training, which would better fit the county’s timeline and budget restraints.

Another example is Deschutes County, Oregon, which is piloting a diversionary pre-charge program for people suspected of possession of a controlled substance. Deschutes faced various implementation challenges such as staffing, finding a location to host meetings, and developing a triage center. In collaboration with multiple stakeholders, they were able to strategize other options, such as using a temporary space until they could find something more long-term. As a result, Deschutes County developed an innovative program to divert people with substance abuse needs to more appropriate community treatment options and has built a community that seeks to continue to build on their current work moving forward.

Fewer community options for behavioral health treatment bring too many people to jail

Both large and small communities are struggling to find effective solutions and stop the unnecessary incarceration of people with behavioral health needs. Because small and rural counties rarely have adequate community alternatives, an overreliance on jail persists. Yakima County, Washington is addressing this issue comprehensively by using the Sequential Intercept Model, a conceptual framework to address the community-wide interface between criminal justice and behavioral health systems. Through this model, Yakima seeks to enhance its continuum of care for people with serious mental illness and to expand its options to divert people at any point within the criminal justice system. This continuum will integrate current intervention options such as the county’s dual diagnosis court, behavioral health diversion, and pretrial services.

Buncombe County, North Carolina has been successful with timely screening and assessment. They rely on pretrial services as well as mental health and substance abuse counselors at the detention center to appropriately assess and diagnose people and divert them to community treatment. Such solutions are not yet scaled, but they are a step in the right direction and a signal to other similar-sized communities that something can and should be done about this pervasive issue.

Despite challenges, small and rural counties have a unique opportunity to affect positive criminal justice reform.

Small and rural counties have a collaborative advantage to resolving issues in their criminal justice systems: because of their size, they can often quickly bring multiple stakeholders to the table to make decisions and come to consensus. This also allows for better coordination, which can improve the way the system works for the people passing through it. For instance, Campbell County set up bi-weekly meetings with key stakeholders, including corrections staff, the judiciary, and key staff involved in the county’s drug courts to discuss and build out their Women in Need Diversion program as well as promptly review cases at the point of referral. Yakima did the same, pulling together key stakeholders from multiple departments and agencies to strategize the best way to link their systems.

Perhaps the most important opportunity that rural and smaller jurisdictions have is that their change makers are members of these close-knit communities. They are engaging in true ground-up community work creating change in a manner that is responsive to the needs of their people. When someone has a real stake in making their own community better, reforms acquire a different and more positive sense of ownership and meaning.

As Albert Einstein said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” It’s hard to imagine a better example of the need for new ways of thinking than in the difficult challenge of criminal-justice reform at the local level of government. Whether you’re driven by a passion for restorative justice, concerned about safety in your community, or looking for ways to get runaway costs under control, criminal-justice reform benefits everyone.

In Spokane, Wash., we’re dealing with the same criminal-justice issues that jurisdictions throughout the nation face. Our regional criminal-justice system is expensive, yet we’re collectively not getting the results we want: Our jail continues to be overcrowded, and recidivism rates are too high. System-level change is necessary, yet also very difficult. Our regional philosophy is to lead the necessary change instead of letting change lead us, and as regional government executives our collaborative leadership is crucial.

Recognizing that our local governments can no longer afford to continue performing services that are duplicative or fail to deliver desired outcomes, Spokane County and the city of Spokane have jointly committed to a regional partnership to find a better way. Our mission is to effectively change our predominantly offense-based, punishment-focused criminal-justice system into one that is offender-based and rehabilitation-focused.

As senior leaders, we like to stress the point, “You can’t face it if you can’t see it.” So we’re using a very structured, project-based approach to identify areas for improvement, taking the necessary time up front to clearly “see” each problem through facts and data. Further, we demand solutions from our project teams that will deliver better system outcomes without requiring more taxpayer money. A recent example: In the past year, we spent less than 50 percent of the original estimate on our new computer-aided dispatch/records management system for 911 services. That equated to millions of taxpayer dollars saved.

After defining and agreeing upon a specific system problem, we formally charter a project to address it that defines the sponsor, project manager, allocated budget, team members and stakeholders, objectives and deliverables, assumptions and risks, and timeline. Our Spokane Regional Law and Justice Council (SRLJC) approves these charters, provides overall governance and receives frequent updates on projects.

Aligning our vision to that of the Safety and Justice Challenge, a national, foundation-supported effort to reduce over-incarceration, has made all the difference in this effort. Our SRLJC has recently hired a regional criminal-justice administrator who has brought us a nationally recognized skillset and is effectively working with our key stakeholders, including community members, to implement our improvements. And thanks to our partnership with the Challenge, our pretrial services team has been expanded by six members and has recently implemented an innovative tool called the Spokane Assessment for Evaluation and Risk (SAFER) to reduce unnecessary incarcerations.

As a result, we’ve significantly expanded monitoring services across all three of our courts to safely supervise individuals in our community instead of housing them in jail. Last month we conducted 841 SAFER risk assessments, which recommended that we release and/or monitor 65 percent of these individuals. And we’ve reduced our average daily jail population by 6.7 percent over the past five months.

Of course, a key part of any reform effort like what we are undertaking is to make sure that taxpayer money is spent wisely and effectively. The county and the city share the burden of a $220-million-a-year criminal-justice system. If we can collectively be just 10 percent smarter, more efficient and more creative, we can reinvest $22 million annually to improve our criminal-justice system while also enhancing public safety. Cost savings generated from smarter ways of delivering higher-quality service, along with investments from non-government partners, will allow us to create new, evidence-based programming and support facilities, which will result in reduced recidivism and accelerated rehabilitation.

Just building an effective multi-jurisdictional, regional team to solve our criminal-justice challenges has proved to be a herculean effort in innovation. We’ve learned that it is impossible to touch one part of the criminal-justice system without impacting other parts. It’s only through the collaboration of our county and city forces that we’re able to make these commitments to new, dynamic investments in an environment in which each of our individual agencies is severely financially constrained.

We’ve already made impressive progress. But there is so much more to do, and many years of difficult decisions and actions lay ahead. With the foundation we’ve built around a shared vision, we believe that we will be able to lean into the effort together and build a far better criminal-justice system for our community.

This post was also published on Governing. 

As the project director of Charleston County’s Criminal Justice Coordinating Council (CJCC), I know firsthand the challenges counties face in improving their criminal justice systems and changing jail use. I also know the opportunities CJCCs present in building coalitions of government and community leaders to tackle these problems head-on. Thanks to our involvement in the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC), Charleston’s CJCC is a success story—and an example—on building and maintaining momentum for reform.

In 2010, Charleston County completed the third expansion of the Sheriff Al Cannon Detention Center (SACDC) at a cost of $100 million. Many taxpayers barely blinked.

Prior to construction, the jail was originally rated for 661 people—yet it housed nearly 2,000. Severe overcrowding and unsafe conditions documented by local reporters were rampant, and construction of a new jail was imperative.  In 2010, the SACDC became the largest jail in South Carolina with a rated capacity of 1,917 and infrastructure built in to grow if needed.

While the new jail greatly improved conditions, many of the same underlying challenges that contributed to overcrowding in the first place remained—such as high rates of recidivism, lack of adequate information to accurately assess risk at bond hearings, high caseloads, and too few options other than jail. Business as usual resumed as the urgency of the overcrowding crisis went away.

When the Challenge launched in 2015, criminal justice leaders in Charleston came together to finally tackle these underlying issues head-on. To do this, learning from past experiences was essential. For example:

• Many good programs failed to survive after time-limited funding ran out. Sustainability of the effort had to be a focus from the start.
• Finding ways to mitigate our data challenges had to be a critical area of focus in order to study the systemic challenges and address issues driving jail use.
• Collaborations fade when the sense of urgency goes away. It was going to take an actively functioning, sustained group of leaders and staff from across the system working together and specifically dedicated to the effort in order to address pervasive and enduring system issues.

As a result, system leaders and community representatives in Charleston came together, structured, and activated a Criminal Justice Coordinating Council (CJCC). With support from the Challenge, we invested in one employee and in building a base for system-level data capacity. The CJCC used those resources and the technical assistance provided by the Challenge to critically assess the system, understand what was happening at key decision points, and find ways to address the underlying and pervasive systemic challenges that building a bigger jail could not solve.

Two years later, with a “whatever it takes” mindset, the CJCC’s journey continues to advance the importance of rethinking jail use and lowering disparate impact on communities of color and the poor.  Some essential highlights include the following:

• expanding CJCC membership to include a large and diverse group of system leaders and community members;
• establishing a defined vision, mission, guiding principles, and clearly chartered set of responsibilities;
• drawing on the collective expertise of system leaders and community members to find common ground in discussions of data findings and lived experiences, to determine priorities and focus strategies accordingly;
• building from the ground up six reform strategies, including a centralized database to pull together and analyze data from 12 different data systems for ongoing analysis and feedback, to guide implementation efforts toward desired outcomes; and
• growing a presence in the community through community partnerships, speaking engagements, print, social and news media, and commitment to transparency with open meetings and regular reporting.

Thanks to the Safety and Justice Challenge, in a state were CJCCs are not common, Charleston’s CJCC is thriving and actively implementing comprehensive reforms that rethink jail use and help to improve the local criminal justice system.  While we know we have our work cut out for us in the years to come, we remain grateful for the Challenge and excited about the possibilities.

Jails and prisons are rolling out emergency policy changes — such as $0 bail and expedited parole hearings — to prevent needless coronavirus deaths in dense correctional facilities. Encouragingly, there’s reason to hope that some of these changes could become permanent, reducing this country’s unparalleled use of incarceration.

But if the actions taken by states and counties are cause for hope, they are also cause for alarm. States and counties are showing that they are willing to implement life-saving reforms, but unwilling to extend these reforms to the 40% of incarcerated people locked up for violent offenses.

Many states and counties have excluded people serving time for violent crimes from release during the pandemic, categorically denying protection even to those who are old and frail. Of course, letting people convicted of violence apply for life-saving opportunities requires political courage, just as it has for decades. But with a pandemic threatening to turn long sentences into death sentences, the time has never been riper for policymakers to reconsider excluding “violent offenders” from reforms.

Perhaps surprisingly to some, the research and evidence show that states should include people convicted of violence in criminal justice reforms. Our new report, Reforms Without Results, explain six major reasons why:

1. Long sentences do not deter violent crime.
2. Most victims of violence, when asked, say they prefer holding people accountable through means other than prison, such as rehabilitative programs.
3. People convicted of violent offenses have among the lowest rates of recidivism — belying the notion that they are “inherently” violent and a threat to public safety.
4. People who commit violent crimes are often themselves victims of violence, and carry trauma that a prison sentence does nothing to address.
5. People age out of violence, so decades-long sentences are not necessary for public safety.
6. The health of a person’s community dramatically impacts their likelihood of eventually committing a violent crime — and community well-being can be improved through social investments rather than incarceration.

Demonstrating how common it is for people convicted of violence to be left behind, our report includes an interactive U.S. map showing 75 examples of state criminal justice reform laws that have excluded them.

The map reveals that:

• At least 16 states have passed laws excluding people convicted of violent crimes from veterans’ courts, mental health courts, diversion programs, and other alternatives to incarceration.
• In at least 10 states, people convicted of violent crimes have been “carved out” of laws designed to ease the reentry process.
• At least 20 states have passed laws that expand parole, good time, and other mechanisms for early release — but offer no relief to people convicted of violent offenses.

Unless states are willing to change how they respond to violence, reducing U.S. incarceration rates to pre-1970s levels will be impossible.

Lawmakers serious about ending mass incarceration — or limiting the toll COVID-19 takes behind bars — can no longer afford to ignore people serving time for violent crimes. Now they have the data and arguments they will need to craft more courageous and effective criminal justice reforms.

—Wanda Bertram is the Communications Strategist at the Prison Policy Initiative