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.

Research has uncovered that community safety cannot be treated in a one-size-fits-all manner, and conversations about safety should be locally oriented, bearing in mind the unique local contexts and nuances.

The evaluation, which covered all four of the key areas of reform, aimed not just to document what the rollout looked like, but also to understand the factors and circumstances that facilitated or hindered success. Importantly, it centered the perspectives of those closest to the process—namely, administrators, practitioners, direct service providers, and people involved with the criminal legal system.

To examine how criminal legal system agencies put these reforms into practice, ISLG , through support from Arnold Ventures, is conducting a process evaluation of these implementation efforts through combination of interviews, focus groups, document reviews, and data analyses. This series of fact sheets digs into each of these reforms.

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.

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.

In effort to learn more about the impact probation revocations have on jails, and promising strategies to address it, ISLG funded the University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL) to conduct a mixed-methods study on probation revocations as a driver of jail incarceration and the impact of a program aimed at addressing technical probation violations in the county, called the St. Louis County Expedited Probation Program (EPP).

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.