A focus of the Safety and Justice Challenge is reducing racial disparities amongst the pretrial jail population. We have made progress on reducing overall jail populations, but racial disparities remain pervasive and need our collective focus. Thus it is important that we collectively understand the difference between equality and equity.

We at the W. Haywood Burns Institute work to achieve racial equity and eliminate racial disparities as a technical assistance provider to the Safety and Justice Challenge. I personally have worked with several sites, including Palm Beach County, Florida, Harris County, Texas, New Orleans and East Baton Rouge in Louisiana, and Buncombe County, North Carolina.

Some of our racial equity work has been featured here on the Safety and Justice Challenge blog over recent months. Here’s a post by Yolanda Fair, a public defender in Buncombe County, for example, describing those efforts. Here’s another post on community engagement in New Orleans by Emily Rhodes and Natalie Sharp, who serve on the Community Advisory Group there.

Together, we have been able to highlight the importance of centering community in the SJC’s work. That means going beyond the traditional ‘community engagement’ efforts.

Community engagement, as it is traditionally attempted, tends to involve seasoned justice reform stakeholders reaching out to community stakeholders to say, “Hey, we just wanted to let you know we are doing this.”

But equity requires something more. It would ensure that those overrepresented in justice systems have access to collaboratives where policy is made. It is asking: “Who’s not here in the room?” It means prioritizing experts who have experienced the justice system and sharing decision-making power with them.

Nationwide, since the extrajudicial police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, among many others, we have seen organizations large and small take well-manicured verbal stances in solidarity and calling for change.

I appreciate the words and sentiments put forth in press releases and the like. The vast majority of them call for equality. There’s nothing wrong with the word or concept of equality. But given this nation’s history, equality is not enough.

Here’s why we must push for equity:

It starts with defining the terms. Merriam-Webster defines equality as “the quality or state of being equal.” Think of this as “treat me just the same as anyone else.” Equity, however, is defined as “justice according to natural law or right, specifically: freedom from bias or favoritism.” Think of this as “respond directly to what I need, even if I need more than others to be made whole.”

I’m not saying equality is not our ultimate goal. I am saying that to start treating, say, the Black community “the same as everyone else” at this point in history will not go far enough in terms of achieving true equality.

In racial justice, equality should be the interpersonal standard. On an individual basis, we should all treat each other the same regardless of race. However, on a systemic level—including individuals acting in official capacities within systems—the standard must be equity.

The history of this nation’s relationship with Black lives begins with slavery—complete racial subjugation of people’s every human right and dignity for profit or whim, which we have updated in various ways since. Examples of this updating over the eras include sharecropping, lynching, convict leasing, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration.

However, these are among the more overt ways the Black community has been marginalized. There are many pervasive ways Black people have been discriminated against, and those policies/practices impact the Black community to this day.

For instance, the GI Bill and its benefits were largely denied to Black people despite their qualifications. It was one of the largest wealth creation policies ever, and a primary catalyst to the development of America’s “middle class,” as well as the expansion of the wealth gap between White and Black people. Similarly, redlining was a practice by which banks would refuse to lend to Black people attempting to move into predominantly White neighborhoods in order to promote segregation. It kept Black people and other people of color in economically depressed areas.

We must understand that exclusionary practices like those listed above impact education funding and quality, job access, and upward mobility. The concentration of poverty and chronic disinvestment drives health and quality of life disparities and, ultimately, disparities within the justice system.

We have a history of intentional, strategic, and systemic racialized oppression which has weakened communities of color through no fault of their own. We must address the intentionally oppressive policies which have upheld this country’s racial caste system for far too long.

We can no longer demand communities of color ‘pick themselves up by the bootstraps’ without providing the support which has been systematically denied them. Here is what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had to say about bootstraps: “White America must see that no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil.”

Equity means responding directly to the needs of each community, group, or individual. It means that while the response may look different depending on the need, the end result or goal would be to put each community on even footing.

Justice from an equity lens means acknowledging that cash bail systems on average ensure that communities of color, which experience significant wealth inequality compared to White people, will stay in jail and suffer life changing consequences because they can’t afford to pay, or might be more willing to take plea deals when they did not commit a crime, among many other examples.

It is only through racial equity—responsiveness to specific needs in communities of color because of the many forms of historic oppression—that we can ever all be equal.

Relishing the dream of equality without understanding the need for equity will doom us to repeat history—even the history we’re living today.

—Christopher James is a member of the Social Justice and Well-being team with the W. Haywood Burns Institute.

New York Times staff writer Emily Bazelon moderated a lively discussion of the Safety and Justice Challenge recently, featuring panelists from challenge sites in St. Louis County, MO and Charleston County, NC.

The discussion coincided with release of a report by the Institute for State and Local Governance (ISLG), showing declines in jail populations by a significant percentage across the challenge’s sites. You can watch the full 51-minute video here.

“I think the main thing to take away is that we have seen a lot of progress in our sites,” said Reagan Daly, Research Director with ISLG. “This progress started before the pandemic. We’ve seen even more dramatic reductions in jail population since then.”

“We have seen improvements in outcomes across different racial and ethnic groups,” Ms. Daly said. “When you look at people of color who are who are in the systems in these sites, we’ve seen that they have also benefited from these jail population reductions.”

Success begins with getting different stakeholders around the table, said Beverly Hauber, District Defender at the Missouri State Public Defender’s Office.

“We have so many different stakeholders in our meetings, it has allowed us to see change and to have really thoughtful conversations,” she said. “And nothing is going to change if you can’t sit in a room and be honest and discuss some of the things that the folks bring to the table and the opinions that they already have.”

“That’s one thing that I noticed,” said Ms. Bazelon from the New York Times. “Observing MacArthur’s work, the grant gives everyone a reason to take part in this, including people in the system who, you know, may be perfectly satisfied with the status quo and not super interested in changing it. But they have to sit down and be there once the grant has been accepted. And I think that it’s a carrot, I guess, instead of a stick. It’s interesting to think about that dynamic.”

These processes are helped by the presence of community representatives, said Keith Smalls, a previously incarcerated individual, and a representative on Charleston County Criminal Justice Coordinating Council.

“When you are able to have community representatives like myself to these conversations, and you can give opinions, and ideas, and even hear people’s complaints about the system, then take those back to the drawing board, it brings people back to the table even more,” he said. “The most important thing is we can get results and then take those back to the community.”

Laurie Garduque, Director, Criminal Justice with the MacArthur Foundation said there have been challenges along with the “quick wins.”

“One thing the process really impressed upon us was that these are local problems that require local solutions because the criminal justice system operates at the discretion of those lawmakers,” she said.

The panel also discussed challenges with diagnosing the cause of increasing length of stay at some sites. They also touched on frequent utilizers of local jail systems.

Ms. Bazelon, who authored the book, Charged, about transforming the criminal justice system, said that prosecutors often told her, when she was discussing the issue of frequent jail users around the country, “we’re not social workers.”

But tackling the issues faced by frequent jail users is a matter of having community will, said Wesley Bell, St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney.

“I think that this country, with the most resources in the world, just has to have the will,” he said. “And when we decide to address the underlying causes of why that person is a frequent utilizer – generally drug addiction, substance abuse, and mental health issues – it’s not hard to do, it’s about having the will to do it.”

Reporters who joined the call asked whether COVID-19 has taught lessons about reducing jail populations that can be drawn on, into the future. It has, said the panelists, for example, jurisdictions have further reduced jail populations by reducing bookings and arrests, changing bail protocols, increased use of technology, and a focus on behavioral health for improving reentry chances.

Another reporter asked about the possible risk of withdrawing funding from a jurisdiction. Ms. Garduque responded by pointing out that the grants do not make up significant portions of any recipient’s overall budget. What they do is provide incentives for stakeholders to sit down and work together to solve common problems. And that once the relationships have been formed, the idea is to make them sustainable into the future.

The grant dollars give stakeholders a reason to sit down and form lasting relationships, said Ms. Hauber. But if the dollars were to go away, the relationships would sustain, she said. Reducing jail populations also saves jurisdictions money, the panelists agreed.

“When your jail population reduces by 30 percent, there’s an opportunity to reallocate funding in different ways,” said Kristy Danford, coordinator of Charleston County Criminal Justice Coordinating Council. Ms. Danford’s SJC site sustainably reduced its jail population by 20 percent between 2014 and 2019, and has placed community engagement at the heart of its decision-making.

—Matt Davis is a communications consultant supporting the Safety and Justice Challenge blog.

The results are in: Three years of data from Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) sites across America show it’s possible to successfully reduce jail populations by a significant percentage.

The numbers show significant declines in overall and pretrial jail populations, and improved outcomes for people of color across the sites. Jail bookings are down, particularly for people charged with misdemeanors. But there is still work to do to build on the progress we have made. Racial and ethnic disparities persist in jail populations, and we have made limited progress on reducing length of stay and felony bookings.

Jails are intended to hold people who are awaiting court proceedings and are considered a flight risk or public safety threat. Today, 75% of people across our nation’s 3,100 local jails are being held for nonviolent offenses, and three out of five are legally presumed innocent. While many people admitted to jail are released within hours or days of their booking, many cannot afford to post bail and may remain behind bars for weeks or even months.

These and other burdens of jail fall disproportionately on communities of color: Black Americans are jailed at five times the rate of white Americans.

In 2015, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation launched the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC), a multi-year initiative to reduce populations and racial disparities in American jails. To date, the SJC has provided $217 million to help 51 jurisdictions in 32 states use innovative, collaborative, and evidence-based strategies to create fairer, more effective justice systems. To track the progress of reforms in the SJC jurisdictions, the Foundation engaged the Institute for State and Local Governance (ISLG) at the City University of New York (CUNY). Our latest report focuses on performance three years into the Challenge (through April 2019). Additionally, we have released a brief examining monthly jail population trends since the pandemic struck in 2020.

Digging into the Data

Our report tracked progress in 14 jurisdictions that have submitted case-level data for analysis from May 2016 to April 2019.

From 2016 to 2019, the Average Daily Population (ADP) declined significantly across the SJC sites, especially for the pretrial population. The decrease was 18% across all sites, combined. And for those who were being held pretrial, or were waiting action on their case, the decrease was 19% across all sites, combined.

While many outcomes for people of color improved, disparities persisted. Booking rates for people of color were down 5% or more in 10 of the 14 sites.
There was also an 11% overall decline in the over-representation of People of
Color in jail for misdemeanors. Despite that progress, the booking rate for people of color relative to that of White People was down 5% or more in only three sites.

Sites have made progress reducing the representation of misdemeanors in their jails. This trend was most apparent among bookings, where nine of the 12 sites providing data reduced misdemeanor bookings by 5% or more. However, there is room for improvement on felonies: only four of the 12 saw such reductions for felony bookings.

Length of stay is mostly increasing, but the interpretation is complicated. When looking at the average length of stay at time of release, six sites saw an increase of 5% or more while four saw a decrease of 5% or more. When measuring average length of stay among everyone in jail on a given day (also referred to as the “in-custody population”), nine of the 14 sites experienced an increase in average length of stay (ALOS), with six of them experiencing an increase of 20% or more. The increase in ALOS may mean longer case processing times, but may also reflect a reduction in bookings among people who are in jail for short stays. More in-depth analysis of these trends is needed to better understand what they mean.

Recent Jail Population Trends in light of COVID-19

Throughout 2020, as the reality of the COVID-19 pandemic set in nationwide, many municipalities—including SJC sites — implemented emergency measures to reduce their jail populations. Since COVID-19, Average Daily Population (ADP) and bookings were still below pre-COVID levels in most SJC sites.

There Is Still More Work To Do

After three years of implementing strategies to reduce jail populations, our findings suggest that jail populations can, in fact, be substantially reduced; and over the last year the COVID-19 pandemic has led to even further reductions in jail populations across sites and racial and ethnic groups. With all of that said, there is room to go further, especially in reducing racial and ethnic disparities which persist and in some cases are exacerbated as jail populations decline. There will be a deepening focus on addressing these challenges as the initiative moves forward. There also needs to be more focus on length of stay, which is a huge driver of the jail population in many of the challenge sites.

The early progress represents significant cause for optimism for reducing the over-reliance on jail across America. With further progress, we expect to see a further reduction of negative impacts on communities and families.

You can download a summary of the analysis here (link). Or you can download a link to the full analysis here (link.)

—Reagan Daly is the Research Director at CUNY’s Institute for State and Local Governance.