Topic: Pretrial Services

We can learn a lot from the city of Long Beach in California about how best to keep people from falling through the cracks in our criminal justice systems. That’s the crux of an extensive new case study by the Urban Policy Institute on a Connection to Care (C2C) program focused on the city’s municipal jail.

John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation funded the initiative and the case study through its Safety and Justice Challenge.

The Safety and Justice Challenge seeks to reduce jail populations in communities around the country. Many participating cities and counties have jails that can hold thousands of people, but Long Beach’s municipal jail holds just 200 people who are often released in fewer than 72 hours before going to a county facility. They are in many cases people without housing who cycle in and out of the city’s jail and back onto the streets. They often struggle with behavioral health issues like substance abuse disorders and mental health diagnoses. And they are arrested for low-level crimes on a repeated basis.

Long Beach’s initiative is simple, yet, at the same time, quietly revolutionary. It doesn’t involve high-priced consultants or elaborate new care models. It is often as simple as getting people a taxi from the city jail in Long Beach to drug treatment or to a homeless shelter when they are released. Yet in some cases the C2C model pioneered in Long Beach has been sufficient to help people who have languished in the same destructive cycle for decades, getting them off the streets and into supportive services.

More than anything else, the program encourages people in the criminal justice system who have historically been operating in silos to talk to each other. It gets them to collaborate and work together in new, mutually beneficial ways.

In the case of this program, two of the biggest challenges to overcome were signing a contract with a taxi firm to provide rides, which took several months; and figuring out how to release people from the city jail to coincide with intake at the shelters and rehabilitation centers.

In other places, people are given a bus pass or a metro card when they are released from city jails. The idea is to get people on their way, and in many cases to get them to drug treatment or supportive housing. But some people do not follow through, instead falling through the cracks.

The C2C pilot was one element of a broader collaborative strategy developed by the City of Long Beach. The goal was to work more effectively with people who were repeatedly arrested, often because of a lack of housing. In 2015 the city developed the Public Safety Continuum, a collaboration between the Long Beach Police Department, the Long Beach Fire Department, and other municipal government partners including the city prosecutor’s office and Long Beach Department of Health and Human Services. Its research led to the city creating the Justice Lab at the start of 2018, to improve approaches for people who were cycling in and out of jails.

Foundational to the Justice Lab’s overarching strategy was the creation of the Multidisciplinary Team (MDT), which the Justice Lab manager oversees. It brings together city and county safety, social service, and behavioral health departments monthly to better coordinate the provision of mental health, substance abuse, and homelessness services for high-frequency users (HFUs) of the system.

The nine-month C2C pilot was a key strategy to enhance the city’s continuum of responses, and a way of addressing a critical gap in that continuum. Since 2015, Long Beach had been cultivating a range of responses to the needs of people coming into frequent contact with the city’s justice system, human services, and behavioral health systems. It based this effort on the Sequential Intercept Model, which helps jurisdictions systematically address how community-based responses can serve people with mental and substance use disorders involved in the justice system.

The foundational intervention for engaging HFUs at the jail intercept is the “clinician in jail” pilot program, which began in April 2018. The program embeds a mental health professional in the Long Beach City Jail to assist people incarcerated there and connect them to services to prevent additional jail bookings. The clinician is employed by the Guidance Center, a community-based mental health services provider. During the initial six-month pilot, the clinician met with 297 people and provided 214 referrals, primarily to mental health services (33 percent of referrals), substance abuse services (19 percent), and homelessness services (32 percent; Long Beach Justice Lab 2019).

The Long Beach Police Department, which operates the jail, committed to funding the clinician program during its second year. However, despite the good work the clinician did, the actual rate of connection to referred services upon release was disappointingly low because of challenges like the lack of transportation at the point of release. The C2C pilot was conceived to address this gap. And the results were impressive, even through COVID-19.

147 rides were provided in the program’s first ten months, primarily to emergency shelters and behavioral health treatment centers.

You can download and read the case study, Connection to Care in a Municipal Jail Setting, by clicking here. It includes client success stories and more detail on overcoming challenges.

The Multidisciplinary Team meetings provided a forum for strategic and client-level collaboration. Perhaps the greatest testament to the strength of the C2C collaboration was the partnership’s ability to reallocate resources and become more successful in engaging clients even as the city’s pandemic response disrupted the pilot’s jail-based components.

By replicating Long Beach’s step-by-step work, other jurisdictions can use data to understand their own challenges and develop the collaborative relationships and add priority system capacity to better meet them.

A successful misdemeanor diversion program at a Safety and Justice Challenge site in Durham County, North Carolina, can serve as inspiration for jurisdictions across the country as they seek to reduce jail populations and preserve public safety.

The diversion program shows collaboration between law enforcement and community groups in Durham County, and is the subject of an initial process evaluation by the Urban Institute, which you can download here.

The Urban Institute has not yet completed an accompanying outcome evaluation to see how the perceived impacts reported by relevant stakeholders align with measurable impacts available through local metrics —it is forthcoming in fall of 2021. But the county has been tracking its own numbers and it estimates that just under 800 people have gone through the program since 2014, with 99 percent of participants completing it. Of those, about 95 percent remain out of trouble after a year. Again, the Urban Institute—which is renowned for its rigorous, independent research—has yet to verify those numbers as an independent evaluator of the program. But in the meantime, the county is displaying them on its public-facing website as early evidence of the program’s success.

The Misdemeanor Diversion Program (MDP) began in 2014 to keep children out of the criminal justice system, because North Carolina had such antiquated laws related to minors. Until the ‘Raise the Age’ legislation passed in December, 2019, the state was automatically charging 16 and 17-year-olds as adults in the justice system and giving them adult criminal records.

The program allows law enforcement officers in Durham County to redirect people accused of committing their first misdemeanor crime(s) to community-based services in lieu of citation or arrest. What is unique about the program is that it occurs prearrest and pre-charge, meaning someone law enforcement officers may believe has committed a crime is not arrested or charged and does not formally enter the justice system in any way.

The program expanded to benefit adults up to 26, with older adults at law enforcement discretion. And other jurisdictions have replicated it across the state. It was based on a simple foundational principle: The need to avoid involvement in the justice system, where possible. It aimed to be as unrestrictive as possible while providing participants with the support necessary to move forward positively.

In the first week, the program got just two referrals. But a key element of the program’s success came in 2016 when the Durham Police Chief at the time created an executive order, taking discretion away from Durham Police officers and making referral of eligible individuals to the program mandatory for the Department.

The need for a program like the MDP in Durham County was well articulated by county stakeholders and participants who participated in the process evaluation. All stakeholders feel that people—youth in particular—do not need to be arrested and deserve “a second chance,” as some put it, if they do not pose a threat to public safety. Members of local law enforcement also believe the program has been useful and impactful. However, many local stakeholders believe that the community still needs more prearrest diversion opportunities whenever possible.

The program is cost effective and began with a grant, but it is now part of the county’s regular budget, demonstrating that it is replicable in other jurisdictions, with the right support and buy-in from local authorities.

Racial equity was also discussed during the conception of the program—given the disproportionate numbers of Black people in the county’s jail. Around three quarters of participants in the diversion program have been people of color.

Through interviews, we found that community stakeholders and program participants believe the MDP is impactful, particularly in that it diverts people from being charged with a crime and entering the justice system. Interviewees also generally believe the program was deeply needed in Durham County because too many people were being unnecessarily arrested and incarcerated.

Our process evaluation yielded four key takeaways for jurisdictions interested in replicating the MDP. First, buy-in from law enforcement is critical because it is needed to start the diversion process. Second, support from local leaders, such as elected officials, will help develop local law enforcement buy-in and support. Third, qualified program staff with deep community connections are essential. And fourth, a philosophy of keeping people out of the justice system altogether will lead to increased participant satisfaction and reduce collateral consequences associated with any justice involvement.

None of the interviewed stakeholders expressed resistance to the program, but several noted that when it was being developed, there was notable resistance from law enforcement agencies and law enforcement associations. Most of that resistance involved concern among local law enforcement officers that the program could take away their ability to determine whether an arrest could be made in certain situations, an ongoing concern during the early years of program implementation. In addition, numerous officers believed this type of program would infringe on their ability to perform their duty and would override their power to use discretion. Over time—through trainings, interactions with the program staff and participants, and changes in law enforcement leadership—law enforcement agencies generally became more supportive of the program.

Several stakeholders strongly support the program but believe it does not “do enough” (in the words of one interviewee) to reduce countywide arrests and incarceration. They want it to expand eligibility requirements to include more offenses, including additional misdemeanor charges and some felony charges. Simply put, many stakeholders feel the program has positively impacted participants but that too few people have been able to participate, leaving more people involved in the local justice system than necessary.

Some stakeholders criticized the program for making eligibility requirements too restrictive and not allowing enough access the program, which they consider essential to diverting people from the criminal justice system pre-charge. Many interviewees believe other communities would benefit from implementing similar programs to divert people from the justice system.

We encourage people to read the full process evaluation and to develop their own diversion programs based on what has been learned in North Carolina.