Safety and Justice Challenge

Nearly half of all women who are incarcerated are held in local jails. Despite work reducing the rate in which they are incarcerated, trends post-pandemic are trending upwards, especially when compared to men and significantly when looking at women of color. Looking at data from across the country, this brief provides insight into these trends and why it matters.

Many Safety and Justice Challenge sites report evidence of racial and ethnic disparities at different decision points in their case processing. Yet, they have less information about how disparities at one decision point can impact disparities at subsequent ones. It was clear that more research was needed into how disparities can compound across decision points and create cumulative effects.  

Courts play a central role in local criminal legal systems, shaping the experiences and outcomes of people who face legal charges. Using data collected as part of the Safety and Justice Challenge, ISLG researchers explored how case processing time changed during and after the COVID-19 pandemic in response to public health restrictions and reduced court operations with data from 10 participating SJC jurisdictions.

As part of the SJC, New Orleans and Lucas County, Ohio, implemented tailored strategies to safely reduce jail populations, including a Public Safety Assessment. The Center for Justice Innovation examined whether the PSA managed to reduce jail populations without sacrificing community safety; they found that not only did it not increase crime, but recidivism rates generally decreased.

The Hub connects practitioners and policymakers around the country with the research and tools they need to innovate and improve the fairness and effectiveness of pretrial and jail-related decision-making and outcomes.

To learn more about decision-making processes among public safety communications professionals and influences on responding law enforcement officers, CUNY ISLG funded Arizona State University (ASU) and the University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL) through the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) to conduct a mixed methods study.

Cities and counties in the Safety and Justice Challenge have engaged in multi-agency efforts to safely shrink their local jail populations by nearly 18,000 people. Importantly, people released pretrial were no more likely to return to jail than before the SJC, including for violent crime. In this report, CUNY ISLG analyzed individual-level jail data from 5 participating counties to explore trends.

CUNY ISLG funded Justice System Partners (JSP) to conduct mixed-methods studies in Cook (IL), Lucas (OH), and Multnomah (OR) counties, where local defense agencies had led programs to systematically enhance due process for individuals at initial appearance.

To learn more about the impact of emergency COVID-19 measures on jail reduction efforts, and think about emergency measures that could continue in the post-pandemic era, CUNY ISLG funded JSP through the SJC to conduct a mixed-methods case study on the emergency jail population reduction strategies implemented in Multnomah County, Oregon.

Two years out from COVID-19’s peak, there continues to be no apparent correlation between changes in incarceration and violent crime. Most individuals released from jail on pretrial status did not return to jail custody, and local violent crime rates varied regardless of changes to the jail population—suggesting that jail reduction reforms can be implemented safely.

In its eighth year, the SJC now supports a diverse network of more than 57 cities, counties, and states across the country in developing and implementing decarceration strategies. This report breaks down its the data-driven model of criminal justice reform, including what kinds of data were captured, how data were mobilized for change, and lessons learned when using administrative data for policy design and evaluation.

Funded by ISLG, this study sought to track the flow of people with frequent jail contact, assess the various strategies used by sites to reduce jail contact, and investigate outcomes, especially for people of color and people with behavioral health conditions.

This study aimed to decipher the system-level trends in jail incarceration for probation violations and the key pathways to jail incarceration for those individuals currently on probation.

To compliment and expand upon the data trends published by ISLG, the Urban Institute, an SJC partner, worked with a handful of SJC cities and counties to produce a series of case studies digging deeper into several SJC strategies.

The report showed that, on average, SJC cities and counties successfully reduced jail populations without jeopardizing community safety. People released from jail after the implementation of criminal legal reforms were no more likely to return to jail within a year and were extremely unlikely to return to jail for a violent crime.

One practice that defines the pretrial period is plea bargaining. Despite the wide use of plea bargaining, little is known about the practice, largely because it happens outside public view and with little documentation. In an effort to uncover plea bargaining practices, ISLG funded two studies from two research partners: the Urban Institute to conduct a mixed-methods study of plea bargaining processes in one SJC site—Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Loyola University Chicago and the University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL) to conduct mixed-methods studies of plea bargaining processes in two SJC sites: Milwaukee County, Wisconsin and St. Louis County, Missouri.

Earlier this year, ISLG launched Measuring Progress, an interactive tool that can help stakeholders and the public track progress achieved by Safety and Justice Challenge sites. ISLG has dug deeper into two of the findings so far relating to the effects of COVID-19 on jail populations and racial and ethnic disparities. These briefs provide additional important context to the trends shown in the tool.

Towards the goal of reducing the jail population, New York City expanded the City’s Supervised Release Program (SRP) several times by altering the eligibility criteria to include a wider range of individuals. The first large expansion of SRP since 2016 occurred at the beginning of June 2019.

In an effort to better understand the impact of expansion of SRP as a jail-reduction strategy, ISLG and the SJC Research Consortium funded the Center for Court Innovation to examine the impact of the June 2019 expansion.

For this brief, the Urban Institute analyzed trends in jail incarceration for the probation population using datasets for jail bookings in the county from 2015 to 2020 and petitions-to-revoke (PTRs) for people on probation from 2016 to 2020. In addition to describing overall trends in jail bookings and PTRs, this brief analyzes average lengths of stay in jail for the probation population, as well as racial and ethnic disparities in these data.

Currently implemented in more than a dozen cities around the country, jail Population Review Teams (PRTs) are one strategy to reduce jail populations. Funded by the SJC and with guidance from ISLG, the Center for Court Innovation conducted a quantitative research study of the PRT model and its impacts in three sites through the spring of 2020: Lucas County, Ohio; Pima County, Arizona; and St. Louis County, Missouri.

The Urban Institute, a Safety + Justice Challenge Research Consortium Member, conducted an in-depth process and impact evaluation of the Misdemeanor Diversion Program (MDP) in Durham County, North Carolina, which resulted in a series of reports on the program’s implementation and effectiveness. The first report was released in July 2021 and focused on The Urban Institute’s exploration of the MDP’s implementation, successes, challenges, and perceived impact. The second report, released in November 2021, focused on program outcomes, including enrollment, completion, recidivism, and system-level impacts. Overall, the findings show fewer new criminal justice contacts and reductions in racial disparities; findings also emphasized the need for local law enforcement buy-in, the need to scale the MDP, and the need to improve data collection as critical for MDP’s continued success. A policy brief synthesized results from both components of the evaluation and offered policy implications for these types of efforts, specifically in the context of young adults.

The goal of the Safety and Justice Challenge is not only to reduce jail populations, but to do so safely—and this has been a pillar of the initiative since its inception in 2015. While previous briefs have highlighted the substantial reductions made in jail populations across SJC sites, this report provides an initial look at SJC’s decarceration strategies through a safety lens. More specifically, it explores how aggregate crime rates and returns to custody among people released from jail changed after the launch of SJC and the implementation of its decarceration strategies in sites through 2019. Overall, the findings suggest that decarceration strategies can indeed be crafted and implemented responsibly, without compromising public safety. In fact, public safety outcomes across SJC sites and in most individual sites remained relatively constant before and after the implementation of decarceration reforms.

This interim report focuses on performance three years into the Safety and Justice Challenge (through April 2019), an initiative supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to reduce populations and racial disparities in American jails. Three years of data from SJC sites across the United States shows it’s possible to successfully reduce jail populations.

A new brief highlights jail population trends during the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout 2020, 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. Here we describe how those measures influenced jail populations in SJC sites between February and October 2020.

To lend an objective review of 2017 justice reforms in Cook County, IL, the Safety and Justice Challenge Research Consortium issued a RFP for researchers to assess the relationship between bond court reform and crime in the County, grounding local debates in a meaningful and robust analysis that addressed the limitations of prior analyses. Researchers from Loyola University’s Center for Criminal Justice Research, Policy, and Practice conducted the study and this report summarizes their findings: that the new policy significantly increased the number and rate of pre-trial releases, reduced bail amounts for defendants where bail was still ordered, and had no effect on new criminal activity or crime.