Jail Decarceration and Public Safety: Preliminary Findings from the Safety and Justice Challenge
The primary purpose of a jail is to detain those who are waiting for court proceedings and are considered a flight risk or public safety threat. Many people admitted to jail cannot afford to post bail and as a result may remain behind bars for weeks, awaiting trial or a case resolution. This overreliance on jails has negative consequences not only for those who are incarcerated, but also for their families and their communities, particularly communities of color. Black Americans, for example, are jailed at five times the rate of White Americans; their numbers in the nation’s jail population are three times their representation in the general population. In 2015, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation launched the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC), a multi-year initiative to reduce populations and racial disparities in American jails. To track the progress of reforms in the SJC jurisdictions, the Foundation engaged the Institute for State and Local Governance (ISLG) at the City University of New York (CUNY).
The goal of the SJC is not only to reduce jail populations, but to do so safely—and this has been a pillar of the SJC initiative since its inception. While previous reports 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.