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.

This edition of the Review summarizes research that took place in 2023, including new Research Consortium member organizations and reviewers, updates on newly funded work, recently published research products, and what has been learned to date across research projects about racial and ethnic disparities in the criminal legal system.

Research on conditions of confinement has historically been limited by a lack of access to the perspectives of individuals residing in jail. To understand the factors driving inequity in jail culture, CUNY ISLG funded Justice System Partners to partner with Wellbeing & Equity Innovations (WEI) to conduct a mixed-methods study in an SJC site using community-based participatory research methods.

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.

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.

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.