Population Review Teams Start Collaborative Conversations About Reducing Jail Populations
The following is an excerpt from a blog by our partners at the Center for Court Innovation discussing their report, Population Review Teams: Evaluation Jail Reduction and Racial Disparities Across Three Jurisdictions. For the full post, see here.
Data analysis in criminal justice reform helps prevent us from acting on unexamined and invalid assumptions. It helps us check whether reforms are having the intended results. A great example of this is recent data analysis by my colleagues and me at the Center for Court Innovation. We looked at Population Review Teams (PRTs) in three sites supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge: Lucas County, Ohio; Pima County, Arizona; and St. Louis County, Missouri.
The PRTs generated good will at these SJC sites. They bring diverse stakeholders together and engage them in conversations they would not otherwise have. But digging into the numbers shows a more complicated story. In fact, PRTs do not substantially reduce jail populations on their own. Indeed, while they do help release some people, in some instances they release a disproportionate number of White people.
But the PRTs also foster deeper conversations. Those conversations focus on other ways stakeholders can change the justice system, and this is where teams can unlock more significant long-term value. The value of these conversations became clearer during COVID-19, for example. Jurisdictions were able to use the PRT structure to make quicker decisions about whom to release. As a result, there were fewer people in the jails during a dangerous time.