Measuring Progress: Exploring Jail Trends in Safety and Justice Challenge Communities

In the fight to reduce the misuse and overuse of jails across the United States, communities must be able to accurately track and analyze trends in their jail populations to identify and evaluate solutions. Since 2015, cities, counties, and states have joined the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) to identify and implement data-driven jail reduction strategies developed alongside stakeholders, experts, and the community.

Earlier this year, in partnership with the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, ISLG launched an interactive tool that can help stakeholders and the public track progress achieved by SJC sites. Measuring Progress explores the impact of those strategies by highlighting trends in overall jail populations, bookings, and associated racial and ethnic disparities. Each view in the tool explores a different jail trend and enables users to drill down to individual SJC jurisdictions.

Using data from Measuring Progress, 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. Check out both briefs below, and keep an eye out for continued updates to Measuring Progress.

The Fall & Rise of Jail Populations During the Pandemic

Across the country, counties seeking to curb jail populations have looked to a common entry point: their front doors. By January 2020, just prior to the onset of the pandemic, bookings had declined in SJC communities overall by 13 percent. Once the pandemic hit, SJC communities began implementing emergency measures to reduce jail populations resulting in even sharper declines in bookings. As operations resumed with some normalcy in the later months of the pandemic, bookings began to rise.  This brief takes a closer look at COVID-19’s effect on jail bookings across SJC communities.

Declining Populations, Rising Disparities

Attempts to reform the criminal legal system are often driven by calls to fix the pervasive racial and ethnic disparities within it. However, these reforms, despite their intentions can fail to improve or even exacerbate the same disparities they sought to fix. Despite SJC’s success in reducing jail populations, racial and ethnic disparities persist in many communities. So, while improvements have been made in reducing populations of all racial and ethnic groups, the benefits have not borne out equally. This brief explores the racial and ethnic disparities in SJC communities and the continued challenges in reducing and eliminating them.