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Jail Admissions and Violent Crime in the Years Following COVID-19

By Shannon Magnuson posted 12-18-2024
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Jails book and confine more than 10 million people every year in the United States. People incarcerated in jails can experience overcrowding, lack of resources, exposure to violence, and deteriorating physical and mental health. In response to these harsh conditions and impacts on individuals, practitioners and policymakers have pushed to reduce the size of US jails. As part of this national movement to rethink jails, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation founded the Safety and Justice Challenge to provide support to local communities to tackle the misuse and overuse of jails. With financial and technical assistance support from MacArthur, ...
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Transforming Reentry: A Human-Centric Approach

By Kimberly Richards posted 10-02-2024
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At the heart of every policy change, every system overhaul, and every reform initiative are the lives of real people. There are the individuals who drive the systemic change forward and the individuals whose lives are fundamentally altered by its implementation. Criminal justice reform is no different. As part of its national work to reduce jail populations across America since 2015, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) has affected people’s lives in real ways. By reducing reliance on jails, SJC makes it easier for people to be an active part of their families’ lives, work and go to school, all of which contribute ...
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Safety, Justice & Research: Tapping into a Decade’s Worth of Criminal Legal Reform Research

By Diana Spahia posted 06-10-2024
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Since 2015, we’ve worked with the Safety and Justice Challenge in communities across the country to develop, implement, and study tailored strategies to safely reduce jail populations. Now, we’re embarking on a new effort to synthesize that research into the next generation of reform priorities—and better understand how to effectively reduce racial and ethnic disparities. The Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC), funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, has been commissioning research in communities to answer the question of “what works?” in criminal legal reform across the nation for nearly a decade. From its inception, the SJC has relied ...
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Toward Community Justice: Upstream Investment Is Criminal Legal Reform

By Chidinma Ume posted 06-06-2024
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Criminal legal reformers are increasingly adopting a more holistic conception of safety, one where the goals of reducing crime, violence, and recidivism are necessary but not sufficient. This means extending the parameters of public safety investment beyond the traditional boundaries of the criminal legal system. A new policy brief from the Center for Justice Innovation makes the case for why investment “upstream” of justice-system involvement—investment in and tailored to communities— is criminal legal reform and promotes community safety. Los Angeles County, for example, may have quietly rolled out the next generation of criminal legal reform. ...
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Five Best Practices for Trauma-Informed Reentry

By Katy Maskolunas posted 05-16-2024
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Reentering the community after incarceration is a complicated, lengthy process, made more difficult by system failures and lack of support and services. Many survivors have specific needs, but these are rarely considered in reentry programs. Experts suggest making the process more trauma-informed and centering the needs of survivors. The National Center for Victims of Crime recently convened a group of experts with lived experience with victimization and incarceration to discuss how to make the reentry process more trauma-informed. We want to extend a special thank you to Tanisha Murden, Rylinda Rhodes, and Jason Witmer for their participation, which was essential ...
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Why It Matters That Women Are Disproportionately Locked Up in America’s Jails

By Wendy Sawyer posted 05-16-2024
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Data is a key part of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge, in its efforts to reduce local jail populations across the country. Likewise, a new data-based report by the Prison Policy Initiative highlights a stark reality: Women are disproportionately incarcerated in jails across the country. In stark contrast to the total incarcerated population, where state prison systems hold twice as many people as are held in jails, more incarcerated women are in jails than state prisons. The outsize role of jails has serious cascading consequences for incarcerated women and their families. Gender-based data is inconsistent ...
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Looking Deeper at The First Four Months of Illinois’ Bail Reform

By Don Stemen posted 01-18-2024
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January is Poverty Awareness Month in America, so it is an appropriate time to look at the early implementation of Illinois’ Pretrial Fairness Act (PFA), which eliminated cash bail for all criminal cases. It became effective on September 18, 2023, three years after its passage. Part of the impetus for the law was to eliminate wealth-based pretrial release and detention. While the public may hear about criminal cases involving wealthy celebrities posting millions of dollars in bail to secure their pretrial release (for example Robert Durst, Bernard Madoff, Wesley Snipes, Phil Spector, and Martha Stewart all posted eye-watering bail amounts ), the majority ...
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The Importance of Prosecutorial Independence

By David LaBahn posted 12-21-2023
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Prosecutors are elected by voters to protect the safety and wellbeing of the communities they serve. Removing prosecutors from office can have a chilling effect on the rule of law. It blurs the separation of powers and upends the checks and balances the three branches of government were designed to ensure. The removal of Florida State Attorney Monique Worrell from her elected prosecutor position is one recent example, but threats to prosecutorial independence are emerging nationwide. Georgia, Tennessee, and Texas have already passed laws making it easier to remove prosecutors from office, and currently there are more than 24 bills in 16 states that would limit ...
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Redefining Community Safety in Three Local Counties

By Beth Huebner posted 12-12-2023
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Everyone wants to feel safe in their community. Yet, we know little about how people make sense of what community safety looks and feels like to them. Discussions among policy makers and the media often center on a very specific and limited conception of safety. It emphasizes crime rates as a key measure, and the criminal legal system as the primary means of achieving this goal. But aspects of safety captured by criminal legal system data may not align with community priorities or values. Allowing communities to define what safety means to them enables them to tailor this definition to their needs and values. It allows them to identify their own priorities ...
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Elevating Crime Victims’ Voices in Safety and Well-Being Investment

By Matt Davis posted 11-03-2023
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Bria Gillum, Senior Program Officer, Criminal Justice for the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and Aswad Thomas, Vice President of the Alliance for Safety and Justice (ASJ) , appeared at The Atlantic Festival 2023 in Washington, D.C., in a talk entitled “How to Invest in Safety and Well-Being.” It was part of a session underwritten by the MacArthur Foundation on criminal justice reform. Bria interviewed Aswad, who survived a robbery attempt that left him with two life-altering gunshot wounds, about his experience as a survivor of violence, and his journey to embrace the Trauma Recovery Center (TRC) model of addressing the needs ...
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Why Isn’t the Media Reporting on Falling Crime Rates? The Negative Consequences for Reform

By Jim Austin posted 10-05-2023
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As summer concludes, it’s increasingly clear that there was no so-called crime wave. The FBI reported that over-all crime dropped by 10% in the first quarter of 2023 as compared to the first quarter in 2022. In particular, the number of murders dropped by 17%. A national expert in criminal justice data, Jeff Asher, published a piece about it in The Atlantic . Looking at the first six months of 2023 as compared to 2022, the murder rate fell by double digits across America. It was "astonishing", he wrote. Yet with few exceptions the media either seems unaware or is uninterested in these downward murder rates because they don’t tend to grab readers’ attention ...
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Measuring The Success of The First Year of 988

By Travis Parker posted 09-27-2023
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It has now been just over a year since the U.S. government allotted approximately a billion dollars to roll out a new nationwide phone number, 988, to call when people need help with a mental health crisis or behavioral health support. The goal of the initiative is to divert individuals in crisis to community-based services, including stabilization centers, rather than encounter law enforcement. Over the past year, my organization has run a bimonthly virtual learning community for criminal justice systems around the country to help them with this transition. Twenty-eight sites involved in the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice ...
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Illinois Bail Reform Makes Justice System More Equitable and Fair

By Laurie Garduque posted 09-27-2023
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The justice system in MacArthur’s home state of Illinois is set to become more just, equitable, and fair without increasing crime, thanks to the Pretrial Fairness Act. While many people and organizations worked towards this landmark reform bill for years, MacArthur’s Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) helped support non-partisan analysis and research and education around key parts of the bill. The Pretrial Fairness Act makes a range of reforms to the criminal justice system in Illinois. One of the most significant changes is eliminating cash bail and redesigning the pretrial process and decision-making. Illinois is the first state in the nation to ban cash ...
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Peer-Support Programs for Domestic Violence in Jail—A Starting Point

By Katy Maskolunas posted 09-27-2023
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One in four women experience domestic violence in their lifetime. But three in four women who have been, or are, incarcerated have experienced it. Despite these disparately high rates among incarcerated women, jails too often lack organized domestic violence-specific services for women. Very few jails have programs to address women’s needs related to abuse and trauma. It is time to change that because more research shows providing such services is a good idea. They can help increase the success of reentry services and improve well-being. And that is an important part of efforts to reduce jail populations across the country. Peer-support groups are the focus ...
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Understanding and Reframing an Individual’s Failure to Appear in Court

By Shannon Magnuson posted 09-27-2023
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Failure to appear in court is often a disproportionate driver of jail populations. It is important to understand it better and to reframe it, as part of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC)—which is reducing jail populations across America. Justice System Partners (JSP), a technical assistance provider to the Safety and Justice Challenge, recently conducted an in-depth study about why people do not get to court as scheduled in Lake County, Illinois . Leadership there know even one night in jail can be disastrous for some people. It can lead to a host of negative consequences including loss of employment. ...
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Reducing Frequent Jail Contact to Lower Jail Populations

By Sarah Desmarais posted 09-27-2023
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If they go to jail at all, most people in America only do so once. But in communities across the country, there is often a small group of people who account for a large number of jail admissions. They also account for a large portion of total jail expenditures. A new two-year research project sought to better understand this population in three communities and makes policy recommendations from which others can learn. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation funded the study as part of their Safety and Justice Challenge , which seeks to reduce jail populations. How Did the Researchers Work and What Did They Find? The study incorporated ...
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Providing Transitional Housing Support to Reduce Jail Incarceration Among People on Probation in Pima County, Arizona

By Ammar Khalid posted 09-27-2023
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A new study–“ At The Intersection of Probation and Jail Reduction Efforts ”–is a building block in understanding how probation, jail, and housing challenges intersect, and how providing transitional housing support can help reduce jail incarceration. Probation populations have been a major driver of prison and jail incarceration in the United States through arrests for new crimes and technical violations, contributing substantially to mass incarceration. One recent national analysis found that a third of all people in jail were on probation at the time of arrest; 27 percent of the people in jail were there due to technical violations of probation. There ...
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From Taxi to Takeoff: Planning and Implementing Early Diversion in Los Angeles

By Chidinma Ume posted 06-15-2023
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The last several years have ushered in a seismic shift to Los Angeles County’s criminal justice landscape. Home to the world’s largest jail system , LA County achieved an unprecedented 25 percent decline in its jail population–the largest in the nation during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. While the overall number of people in jail decreased, the percentage of people of color and people with mental health needs behind bars in LA increased. This changing composition mirrored a national trend and illustrated a key lesson: without a parallel effort to promote racial equity and provide safe, community-based care for people who need it, reducing jail populations ...
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Focusing on Latinos in the U.S. Criminal Justice System

By Nancy Rodriguez posted 06-12-2023
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Three new policy briefs have major implications for Latinos in the justice system, including in American jails, based on data and research from sites supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge . The briefs explore how to better track Latino involvement in criminal justice systems, the role of language accessibility in criminal justice systems, and the value of adopting a nuanced approach to immigration enforcement policies at the local level. A Review of Data Collection Practices and Systems-Involvement The first brief, " Exploring Latino/a Representation in Local Criminal Justice Systems ," is a review ...
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Behavioral Health IMPACT: Addressing Mental Health Disparities in Local Jails

By Ashley Krider posted 05-23-2023
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Since 2015, Policy Research, Inc. (PRI) has partnered with MacArthur’s Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) to reduce the number of individuals involved, or at risk of involvement with, the criminal legal system who have mental illness, substance use, and other complex needs. Studies highlight the importance of concentrating on this population as communities work to tackle the misuse and overuse of jails and create more equitable systems: About 5% of the general population has a Serious Mental Illness (SMI), compared with 5% of men and 31% of women incarcerated in local jails . An even greater percentage of both groups lives with broader ...
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