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.