Topic: Jail Populations

Criminal justice reform is happening all across the country—reducing jail and prison populations through alternative sentencing that may include substance abuse, mental health, or batterer intervention treatment. However, most professionals engaged in reform are focused solely on the perpetrators of crime, not the victims. During National Crime Victims Week, we must understand that crime can fundamentally alter the life trajectories of victims, and recognize the importance of victims’ needs in the criminal justice system.

It is thus critical that the needs of victims are considered in every reform strategy. The National Center for Victims of Crime, a strategic ally of the Safety and Justice Challenge, has been conducting roundtables across the country at SJC sites, in order to engage victim services professionals and criminal justice reformers in a conversation about what victims expect from the criminal justice system.

The National Center hosted a national level roundtable in Philadelphia, PA as an exploration of what can be done to address victims’ needs at a national level.  We also hosted two roundtables on the county level, in Mecklenburg County, NC and Spokane County, WA. Additionally, we sponsored a webinar, broadcast to over 150 victim advocates, which featured professionals from the Safety and Justice Challenge sites in Pima County, AZ and St. Louis County, MO.

According to the Alliance for Safety and Justice, twice as many victims prefer that the criminal justice system focus on rehabilitation instead of punishment. Throughout the roundtables, practitioners emphasized how many victims know the offender in some way—as an intimate partner, family member, or acquaintance. In these cases, victims often prefer the offender receive treatment rather than incarceration.

However, victims also want to feel safe in their communities and want assurance that services are actually available for offenders. If not, their feelings of insecurity remain. A number of SJC sites are working to address these concerns, demonstrating that it is possible to respond to victims’ needs through solutions other than incarceration. Pima County addressed the issue of available services by enrolling incarcerated individuals in Medicaid. Under the state’s Medicaid expansion plan, an increased number of mental health and substance abuse providers also made their services available to defendants who carry insurance. These services help rehabilitate offenders and keep victims safe.

Victim advocates also stated that parents of young offenders worried their child could only receive services if they were incarcerated in the juvenile system, not the adult system. In Mecklenburg County, SJC partners are working together to raise the age at which an individual can be tried and sentenced as an adult from age 16 to age 18. Juvenile offenders are able to receive pre-adjudication rehabilitative services such as substance abuse and mental health counseling and education, which may not be available in the adult system. They may also receive counseling to address trauma from other areas of their lives such as witnessing violence or experiencing abuse.

Increasing the availability of counseling was an important solution discussed throughout the roundtables and webinar. Many professionals agree that there is currently a false dichotomy between victims and offenders—and that many offenders have previously been victims. In St. Louis County, officials identified a need to pay special attention to female inmates. Most of these women had previous histories of sexual assault. To address this concern, St. Louis County partnered with the Queen of Peace Center, which provides treatment for substance abuse that includes community support, education, daycare, early childhood development programs, employment counseling, and housing for women who are transitioning from jail into the community.

Victim advocates further noted that they wanted equity in the criminal justice system. Unlike the offenders, in most cases, victims have no one consulting or counseling them through the justice process. The advocates expressed a need for such assistance and an opportunity for victims to also have access to services.

Obtaining justice is important for all victims of crime, but it is important to recognize that justice looks different for every victim. Some victims look for jail time, some look for rehabilitation options, but all look for accountability and equal access to the same services offenders can receive.

This blog post is the first in a series from the National Association of Counties—a Safety and Justice Challenge partner—highlighting SJC sites across the country working to create fairer, more effective justice systems.  

Located on Florida’s Atlantic coast, Palm Beach County is the state’s third most populous county. The Palm Beach County Criminal Justice Commission (CJC) is the lead agency in the county’s work with the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC), and is focused on taking a holistic approach towards improving the county’s criminal justice system. NACo spoke with Palm Beach County CJC members Kristina Henson, Bert Winkler, and Damir Kukec about their efforts.

What were some of the issues occurring in the Palm Beach County justice system that prompted the Criminal Justice Commission to apply for the SJC?

Prior to applying for the SJC we had mechanisms in place to review all aspects of the criminal justice system. Our Corrections Task Force meets monthly to review our jail population and make recommendations and process changes. The SJC gave us the opportunity to bring national expertise from outside of our county to help us identify areas of need and best practices to implement to reform our system.

Can you give an overview of the programs you have in place that are related to your SJC work?

Currently, the CJC is working on four key strategies. First, we are doing pretrial work because a majority of the people in our jail are held pretrial. The county is moving towards using a pretrial risk Assessment instrument, and we recognized that one size does not fit all so we are revamping our pretrial services program to provide three levels of supervision that match the risk score of the individual. We are also planning to institute a Second Look Process, for individuals who had a First Appearance Hearing and are still in jail after seven days. In this process we bring them back to the judge for a second assessment to determine what other options exist for release.

Second, we have a Community Engagement Task Force that works to enhance public safety through transparency and partnership with communities. The task force is charged with building relationships between criminal justice system players and community members in order to bridge gaps of knowledge and misperceptions.

Third, we are working on an implementation plan for a Frequent Users Systems Engagement program (FUSE). We have a contract for technical assistance from the Corporation for Supportive Housing to help us with this plan, which entails identifying about 100 people that most frequently cycle through public systems including our jail, homeless and behavioral health systems. Our primary goal through this program is to provide permanent supportive housing with wraparound services to stabilize these individuals. Finally, we are working to increase capacity to access necessary data and build a “data dashboard” that we will use to inform decisions and policy about the system and project initiatives. We have also developed analytics for key data points in the system and for project initiatives that will allow stakeholders to know what is happening in the system and take action to address issues that are identified through the data. Through the dashboard we are also able to identify racial and ethnic disparities and develop remedies.

Who is involved in your SJC Efforts?

The CJC has 32 members, 21 of whom are public sector members from local, county, state, and federal criminal justice and governmental agencies. Ten are private sector business leaders nominated by the Economic Council and appointed by the Board of County Commissioners. We also have one at-large member of the clergy. The full membership of the CJC is listed on the CJC’s website. Just about everybody is involved, and this provides different viewpoints and expertise. The CJC works through a variety of committees charged with specific missions. For the SJC, we have a MacArthur Core Team, a Pretrial Project Team and a FUSE Core Team, each made up of stakeholders and subject matter experts that represent the judiciary, prosecution, defense, clerk of court, law enforcement, probation, social service and community providers.

What are the main drivers of your jail’s population?

We are constantly monitoring and reviewing the number of individuals we have housed in our jail system.  In general, we know that jail admissions and the length of stay in our jail system drives the jail population. In the first year of the SJC grant we found that approximately 70 percent of the people in our jail system were there pretrial—meaning that their case has yet to be resolved by the courts. Roughly 23 percent of the people in our jail are there as part of their sentence or due to violations of probation. We also saw evidence of people being admitted for offenses related to driving under a suspended license and for technical violations of probation.  We believe that in some cases, offenders stay in jail for longer periods of time because they are unable to raise funds associated with their pretrial release with a bond.  Our hope is that through the implementation of the pretrial risk assessment we will see a decrease in that population.

What are some solutions you are implementing to address issues you have encountered?

In addition to the changes to our pretrial system and the data dashboard we’ve talked about, we’re have also worked with our clerk & comptroller’s office on a data-sharing agreement. This level of access to court data enables us to now have direct access to court data and court case outcomes.  It has also eliminated any costs associated with building and completing queries of the court case data management system.

What outcomes have you seen so far and what do you hope to see long term?

We are especially pleased to see the Criminal Justice Commission and its members continue to be willing to examine and question current practices in an effort to safely reduce our local jail population without jeopardizing public safety.  We continue to examine current practices that embrace scientific evidence and evidence-based practices and policies that rely on data rather than solely on anecdotal evidence.  While we have seen dramatic decreases in our average daily population over the last decade, we also recognize that we still need to be vigilant on many fronts. Over the long term we hope to see more system reform leading to the smart use of our jail system, a reliance on data to inform systemic change and a growing ability to identify and remedy any racial or ethnic disparity in our system.

*A version of this post originally appeared on the National Association of Counties blog.

An abiding challenge of justice reform in the United States is the decentralization of criminal justice operations. Reforming how we deliver public safety entails making changes in how thousands of independently operated justice agencies do business. This is certainly true of changing how jails are used, which must be tackled county by county, and city by city. Meeting this challenge is necessary, because that status quo of jail use is costly in terms of fiscal impact, unintended harms, and contribution to the racial and ethnic disparities that are endemic to the American justice system,

The upside of decentralization is that it generates innovation. Elected officials, justice and human service professionals, and community leaders of all kinds are wrestling with how to address crime, victimization, addiction, mental illness, and homelessness while using costly incarceration as sparingly as possible. These local reform thinkers are generating new ideas to address these difficult problems, and also represent an audience eager to consider and adapt innovative solutions designed elsewhere.

The Safety and Justice Challenge is creating a growing network that weaves local change efforts into a movement to transform the way jails are used throughout the country. On February 1, the Safety and Justice Challenge Network, a collaborative of counties, cities, and states modeling and inspiring reforms to create fairer, more effective local justice systems across the country, expands with the announcement by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation of a cohort of 20 jurisdictions participating in the Innovation Fund. Administered by the Urban Institute, the Innovation Fund further enhances the reach of the Challenge Network as it inspires and supports local innovation, experimentation, and peer learning across the nation.

The Fund sites’ innovations focus on areas such as behavioral health, diversion at the point of arrest, data integration and analysis of jail population drivers, and pretrial release and supervision. Partners include sheriffs, prosecutors, public defenders, police departments, the courts, community organizations, researchers, county and municipal governments, and many others. You can find brief descriptions of the Innovation Fund sites and the work they’ll be undertaking here.

Creating change locally can be isolating. Becoming part of a peer network like the SJC is energizing. The Innovation Fund sites will draw inspiration from one another and the Challenge Core and Partner Sites. They’ll exchange knowledge, learning from and advising on the work of their colleagues.

Rethinking jail everywhere in the United States takes a broad movement. The 20 Innovation Fund sites are excited to contribute to that movement through the Safety and Justice Challenge.

This post originally appeared on the Urban Wire blog.