[From Our Partners] Trends in Jail Incarceration for Probation Violations: Findings from Pima County, Arizona
In 2021, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, through the Safety and Justice Challenge and with guidance from ISLG, funded a research initiative from the Urban Institute examining the effectiveness of housing support programs in reducing jail populations—in particular, disrupting pathways into local incarceration for people on probation in Pima County, AZ. As part of this larger initiative, and in partnership with the county’s Adult Probation Department, this research brief presents findings from the initial context-setting phase of this work, the goal of which was to better understand the pathways into local incarceration for people on probation.
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.
Select findings include:
From 2015 to 2020, almost 10% of jail bookings included at least one probation violation, with or without other charges. Among probation violation-related jail bookings, 29% were for technical violations only.
The average length of stay for people in jail for probation violation-related bookings was 66 days, nearly three times the average length of stay for the pretrial population and five times that for the sentenced population.
Only 4% of PTRs resulted in a formal revocation to jail, suggesting that reliance on jails as a PTR outcome is low. However, Native American and Hispanic people were disproportionately represented in jail outcomes, with Native Americans revoked to jail at a much higher rate, and the coterminous outcome (when a judge imposes a jail sentence as a probation violation disposition outcome and the probation sentence ends at the end of the jail term) more prevalent among Hispanic and Native American people, compared with people from other racial and ethnic groups.