Topic: Presumption of Innocence

Innovative strategies that cross city, county, and state lines are necessary to achieve jail reduction outcomes and to address the overrepresentation of young adults in the justice system.

In efforts to develop such strategies, the National Association of Counties (NACo), the National League of Cities (NLC) and the National Conference for State Legislatures (NCSL) convened five teams of city, county, and state representatives through the Intergovernmental Policy Academy (IGA). Over the course of a year (2018-2019), the five IGA teams focused on aligning policy and learning from peers and subject matter experts within the SJC network. This learning exchange focused on justice interventions and policies to specifically address the needs of young adults represented in the justice system.

The teams also received technical assistance on creating action and sustainability plans to complete their goals. Through this extensive collaboration, the teams (listed below) came away with significant commitments to reducing the number of young adults in their justice systems.

• Albuquerque-Bernalillo County, New Mexico
• Bellingham-Whatcom County, Washington
• Indianapolis-Marion County, Indiana
• Kalamazoo-Kalamazoo County, Michigan
• Overland Park-Johnson County, Kansas

The IGA teams leveraged the latest brain development research when making decisions on potential strategies and interventions to meet the needs of justice-involved young adults. Subject matter experts within the Challenge Network presented research supporting the need to treat this population with new and innovative responses to their behavior.

While this research outlined young adult propensity for high-risk behavior, it also reiterated the idea that growth, change, and resilience are more likely in this young adult phase, providing hope that new interventions would cause lasting change. This information, along with extensive data collection by the IGA teams, allowed each team to tailor their reform approaches to the specific needs of their area and its young adults.

While outcomes and takeaways from the initiative are varied, each of the five teams is moving toward lower reliance on their local jails and improved systems for young adults. Among the key outcomes are:

• A behavioral health diversion program for Indiana;
• Movement toward a text reminder system for court dates to reduce failures to appear in Kansas;
• The reconvening of the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council (CJCC) and changes to state data-sharing legislation for Michigan;
• Increased housing and case management services for at-risk young adults in New Mexico; and
• A mobile response team and crisis stabilization facility in Washington.

While beneficial to all justice-involved people in these communities, the strategies developed will specifically impact young adults. Prior to the IGA, the team from New Mexico admittedly had not thought about the specific needs of young adults. “The policy academy was very helpful to all of our participants in recognizing the particular needs of [young adults]. That wasn’t on our radar before these convenings, but now is incorporated into all our criminal justice, public safety and behavioral health initiatives,” said Commissioner Maggie Hart-Stebbins of Bernalillo County, N.M.

Although the model was a first of its kind for the Safety and Justice Challenge, the IGA proved to be successful in creating a forum for city, county, and state officials to collaborate and find effective solutions for young adults in their communities, an emerging policy area.

“We are so grateful for the chance to not only have mingled with the experts brought to the forum, but also the dedicated time we were able to spend with each other that helped to form trusting working relationships that have been instrumental in making local changes,” said Anne Deacon, Human Services Manager for Whatcom County, Wash. Teams also shared how valuable it was receiving guidance from partners, strategic allies, and their peers from Challenge sites who face similar barriers and challenges for addressing the needs of justice-involved young adults.

Leveraging the expertise of the Challenge Network, the work of the IGA is a launching pad for innovative justice and young adult-specific work by cities, counties, and states. NLC will continue to work across jurisdictional lines in the upcoming Young Adult Justice Community of Practice, while NACo will work with counties to address diversion of justice-involved people with mental illness through its County Justice Peer Learning Network. NCSL plans to continue the work with its legislative members and SJC strategic allies to address the overincarceration of young adults in the criminal justice system.

You can see a visual outline of each team and their concerted efforts here. And below are links to related resources.

NCSL – Front End Young Adults

NACo – Engaging County Leaders in Justice

NLC – Reducing Young Adults in Jails

We all recognize that the criminal justice system cannot be reformed without marked progress in the field of prosecution. We also recognize that prosecutors need to be equipped with data and analytics to understand their impact on the communities they serve. But building data systems without committing to measuring prosecutorial success in an objective and holistic manner gets us nowhere.

That is why, in 2017, criminologists from Florida International University and Loyola University Chicago partnered with prosecutor’s offices from Chicago, Milwaukee, Jacksonville, and Tampa, and engaged with thought leaders in the field of criminal justice reform to reimagine and redefine success in prosecution. The work is supported by the MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge which aims to reduce unnecessary incarceration and racial and ethnic disparities at the front end of the criminal justice system.

The Prosecutorial Performance Indicators—or PPIs, as we call them—are an office management, performance measurement, and accountability and transparency tool. We imagine the tool being used by community members, advocacy groups, researchers, and reporters to hold elected prosecutors accountable. But we also want the tool to help office executives and especially mid-level management to understand trends of their decision making. Making the best possible decisions on each case does not guarantee the best outcomes overall. So, prosecutors need to do both—assess each case and make the best possible decision on it, and examine the cumulative effect of these decisions. For example, consider the medical field: while to a doctor every patient is unique, good doctors also observe trends and research to come up with individualized treatment plans.

The Prosecutorial Performance Indicators were developed over three years and painstakingly piloted in the four partner jurisdictions. They are currently being applied in two additional prosecutorial offices in Philadelphia and Charleston, SC.

The idea of creating indicators of success in prosecution is not new. In 2004, the American Prosecutors Research Institute (APRI) produced a landmark report, Prosecution in the 21^st Century: Goals, Objectives and Performance Measures, which argued that prosecutors should ensure justice in a fair, effective, and efficient manner. We have embraced these goals and expanded them to: (1) improving capacity and efficiency, (2) ensuring community safety and wellbeing, and (3) advancing fairness and justice. Good measures capture impact on the community as well as the system as a whole. Prosecutorial offices need to have capacity to maximize positive impact.

The Prosecutorial Performance Indicators are a menu of 55 measures, which assess office-wide performance on a monthly, quarterly or yearly basis, depending on the issue measured and the size of a jurisdiction. Advancing racial justice is a big component of the PPI framework. There are seven measures dedicated to assessing racial and ethnic disparities at case filing, pretrial detention, diversion and sentencing. Examining the treatment of defendants and victims by their socioeconomic status is another important dimension.

But we also have more traditional measures looking into assisting crime victims, managing caseloads, and preventing recidivism, because all of these things are important too. Furthermore, some measures are more predictable than others. Conviction rate for violent crimes (Indicator 4.2) is a more traditional metric of public safety. Other measures, like ability to identify dismissible cases at filing (Indicator 2.1), which compares the rates of case rejection at filing versus dismissals after filing, require asking questions that most prosecutors may have not yet considered. For example, what is the right filing or dismissal rate, to what extent do these two discretionary decisions relate, and what policy changes will improve the prosecutors’ ability to eliminate dismissible cases as early as possible?

We encourage prosecutorial offices to consult community and advocacy groups as they identify local priorities and develop policy solutions, particularly around community engagement, racial disparities, substance use and drug overdose, and mental health diversion. Community groups can also help select and customize specific indicators for a given jurisdiction. Not only will such groups provide useful perspectives on how to deal with problems, but these partnerships will also strengthen community buy-in and trust as prosecutorial offices implement new policies. Prosecutors should also consider establishing a community advisory board to regularly discuss trends in PPIs.

How can interested prosecutors access the tool? In the era of DIY, we are making the PPIs as user-friendly as possible. We produced an implementation guide, which provides step by step instructions for selecting specific PPIs for a given office and overcoming logistical and political challenges. Partner jurisdictions have already produced or are working towards public-facing dashboards that show PPIs in action. Collecting and presenting data should lead to identifying red flags and positive trends. The PPI website also provides training materials to assist managers with using the indicators to translate numbers into changes in policy and practice.

Doing this work, we realize that prosecutor’s offices have more data and greater capacity to use data than we might think, but someone still has to do the data assessment and analysis. If hiring a researcher is not an option, forming partnerships with local research and academic institutions can be a great way to build sustainable capacity to implement this work.

In the next phase of the project, our team will seek new partners—both prosecutorial offices and researchers—interested in implementing PPIs and bringing data culture into the field of prosecution. While still rare, researcher-practitioner partnerships hold the key to improving the justice system through data-informed decision making, and improving academic research through fresh data and valuable insights from practitioners. We would like to hear from you if you share this vision.

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.