This week, the Manhattan DA’s office is partnering with CUNY’s Institute for State & Local Governance (ISLG) to award 10 community-based organizations with $20,000 each. These investments will engage young New Yorkers with supportive services and work in the community — methods proven to keep young people, and their neighbors, safe from gun violence.

The research presented in ISLG’s newly released report, Justice in Decision-Making: Studying Racial & Ethnic Disparities in the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office, represents a crucial first step towards developing a more holistic understanding of where racial and ethnic disparities exist in the Brooklyn District Attorney’s (DA’s) Office. This report is the culmination of a years-long partnership between ISLG and the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office and highlights the value of these types of collaborations and what can be learned from them.

As part of their work to fill the gaps in data regarding probation revocations, ISLG, in partnership with Arnold Ventures, is excited to announce both the launch of the second phase of the Reducing Revocations Challenge and the release of the research brief that informs it, Pathways to Success on Probation: Lessons Learned from the First Phase of the Reducing Revocations Challenge.

Today, we announced the second cohort of the Kriegel Fellowship for Public Service Leaders. The Kriegel Fellowship is a leadership and professional development program for chiefs of staff of city and state legislators serving the New York City area.

The Lindsay Fellowship recognizes promising New York City leaders who have been elected to the city and state legislative bodies in the past four years and introduces these leaders to experts across a variety of policy areas and provides a space for ongoing dialogue and learning.

As the extensive impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic became clear, many municipalities—including those participating in the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) — implemented emergency measures to reduce their jail populations. This brief describes how those measures influenced jail populations in SJC sites between February and October 2020—and how jail populations and racial and ethnic disparities changed during the pandemic’s early months.

Building on significant momentum for evidence-based reforms to local justice systems, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation provided $18 million in grants as part of its Safety and Justice Challenge, a national initiative to reduce over-incarceration by changing the way America thinks about and uses jails. In this report, we measure and describe the effectiveness of strategies to reduce jail populations over the first three years of the initiative.

Named for Jay L. Kriegel, long-time chief of staff to New York City Mayor John Lindsay, the Kriegel Fellowship is a leadership and professional development program for chiefs of staff of city and state legislators serving the New York City area. The program aims to support and empower legislative chiefs of staff to excel in their current positions, and grow confidently into the next generation of elected officials and public service leaders. In this news release we announce the inaugural class of fellows.

Our leadership and staff have decades of on-the-ground public service experience and have led the Lindsay Fellowship in Government Leadership and Practice—for New York City and State elected officials—since 2017. Based on research and interviews with NYC and NYS legislators, we launched the Kriegel Fellowship for Public Service Leaders to support and empower legislative chiefs of staff to excel in their current positions, network with other chiefs of staff and experts, and grow confidently into the next generation of elected officials and public service leaders. Here we provide more information on the mission and vision behind the initiative.

On April 1, 2019, NYS passed comprehensive criminal justice legislation representing a major shift. Most notably, the legislation eliminates money bail and pretrial detention for the majority of misdemeanor and nonviolent felony defendants, but these reforms will also usher in major changes for law enforcement. Arnold Ventures committed $5.5 million to help four expert organizations document how statewide changes to the criminal justice system are implemented — and how effective they are — amid a challenging landscape.

With support from Arnold Ventures we announced the selection of 10 jurisdictions to participate in the Reducing Revocations Challenge, a national initiative dedicated to transforming probation supervision and reducing the number of unnecessary failures. The Challenge was launched in response to the growing recognition that those failures are a major contributor to mass incarceration, responsible for almost half of state prison admissions nationwide, and need urgent reform.