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Rethinking the First Step: Why Meaningful Initial Appearances Matter for Justice and Equity

By Shannon Magnuson posted 3 days ago
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By: Shannon Magnuson, Lore Joplin, Jen Lerch, Kimberly Richards In the intricate web of the American criminal justice system, the initial appearance – the first time an individual appears before a court after an arrest – often flies under the radar. Yet, this preliminary stage holds profound implications for an individual’s life and the fairness of the entire system. Shockingly, unlike later stages of prosecution, there is no federal constitutional right to a defense attorney at these critical initial appearances, where charges are presented and crucial pretrial release decisions are frequently made. This responsibility falls upon individual states ...
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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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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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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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Counties Enhancing Racial Equity in the Criminal Justice System through Grantmaking

By Chelsea Thomson posted 09-12-2022
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The National Association of Counties, in partnership with the National Criminal Justice Association and with support from the Bureau of Justice Assistance, has released a toolkit for counties interested in addressing racial and ethnic disparities in the criminal legal system through grantmaking. The toolkit outlines eight principles, developed by a working group of county stakeholders, state administering agency representatives, and community-led organization leaders, to help enhance equity in the criminal legal system. It features several communities participating in the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) that are undertaking initiatives such as grants ...
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Why Law Enforcement Should Be Doing More Deflection as A Primary Response

By Shannon Magnuson posted 08-17-2022
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New research by Justice System Partners supported by the MacArthur Foundation ’s Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) shows the positive impacts of police-led deflection strategies on jail reduction efforts. Overall, “deflection first, arrest rare” as a primary policy for eligible offenses helps reduce criminal legal system involvement and improve equity by connecting individuals to the services they need. It no longer makes access to treatment conditional or contingent on arrest. Download the report here. Deflection is different from diversion. Diversion programs make use of pending criminal charges as the mechanism to elicit treatment initiation ...
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Reflections on My Time Reducing Jail Populations in Charleston County and the Journey Ahead

By Kristy Danford posted 08-03-2022
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As I step down from a Safety and Justice Challenge role I’ve served in since 2015, I’m proud of what we achieved together in Charleston, SC and hopeful for the future of justice reform. I am optimistic the progress can provide a path for other communities to sustainably improve their local systems while safely reducing the misuse and overuse of jails. As reported in our 2021 Annual Report , Charleston County’s local jail population was reduced 40 percent from our initial baseline in 2014 to 2021. Municipal and Magistrate charges booked into our jail were cut by 80 percent. The rate of local bookings among our adult population decreased by 67 percent. ...
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Conservative Jurisdictions Champion Pre-Arrest Diversion Strategies

By Lisel Petis posted 07-28-2022
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A new R Street Institute report supported by the MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge explores the successful implementation of pre-arrest diversion strategies in three conservative communities. Such strategies respond to challenges facing law enforcement agencies across the country including staffing shortages, negative public perception, overpopulation in jails, increases in violent crime, and court backlogs. While criminal justice reform can be a politically charged term, we found that several conservative jurisdictions champion pre-arrest diversion as a way to support law enforcement and to remain fiscally disciplined. These jurisdictions ...
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Reckoning With the Legacy of the Tulsa Race Massacre

By Matt Davis posted 05-31-2022
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Members of the Safety and Justice Challenge learned during their annual convening in January 2022 about how Tulsa, Oklahoma has struggled to reckon with the legacy of its 1921 Race Massacre. The discussion showed how Tulsa’s history impacts its present. It also demonstrated the complexity any jurisdiction must face in navigating ongoing inequities as it seeks to lower its jail populations sustainably and fairly. Today in 1921 mobs of White residents of Tulsa killed as many as 300 Black people. City officials had deputized some of the mobs and given them weapons. The mobs burned and destroyed 35 square blocks of homes and businesses in the Greenwood District. ...
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How to Use Our New Jail Trends Tool

By Cecilia Low-Weiner posted 05-31-2022
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There is great news for people looking to understand how jail populations are changing across the country: The Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) has a new tool enabling anyone to track progress of SJC site jails. The jail trends tool distills all the progress achieved across SJC sites since the Challenge began. Users can click through to different tabs to explore key trends across SJC sites and can drill down in each of these trends to view them on an individual site basis for a more nuanced local perspective. We are also planning a series of accompanying briefs over the coming months, which will be available here as they’re released. Each brief will ...
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Two Years Since George Floyd: The Challenge of Sustaining Momentum for Reform

By Matt Davis posted 05-25-2022
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Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd two years ago today on May 25, 2020. People protested racial injustice in the criminal justice system across the country and beyond, and as a result, some cities and counties pledged to make significant changes to law enforcement. But in recent conversations with people involved with the MacArthur Foundation ’s Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC), many reflected on how not enough has changed in the last two years and how the landscape for criminal justice reforms is now becoming more challenging. And yet, they also pointed to areas of progress. Jose Bernal , an organizer with the Ella Baker ...
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Funding Housing Solutions to Reduce Jail Incarceration

By Kelly Walsh posted 05-18-2022
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Too often across county government there are siloes between efforts to reduce jail incarceration and efforts to house people. But a recent report by the Urban Institute funded by the Safety and Justice Challenge shows how cross-governmental collaboration can break down these siloes and address historic injustice which has contributed to the jail-homelessness cycle. The report is based on learnings from three private roundtables we held in 2020 with practitioners, people with lived experience of jail incarceration, and subject matter experts across housing, behavioral health, and criminal justice. The purpose of the roundtables was to understand how gaps and ...
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A New “Tap In Center” Aims To Restore Community Trust

By Miranda Gibson posted 04-14-2022
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There is new hope in St. Louis County for people afraid to move on with their lives or engage with the criminal justice system because of unresolved warrants, municipal code violations, or having missed a court date. The center, which is part of a national effort to lower jail populations in jurisdictions across the country as part of the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC), aids in responding to concerns raised by the Department of Justice (DOJ) about racial injustice related to municipal court practices in its 2015 investigation into the Ferguson Police Department —which is located in the northern part of St. Louis County. The DOJ commissioned a report ...
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Linking Mass Incarceration to Black History in Los Angeles and Beyond

By Matt Davis posted 04-07-2022
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Members of the Safety and Justice Challenge grappled with questions about how mass incarceration is linked to Black history at a recent fireside chat during the annual convening of SJC network members. Bria L. Gillum , Senior Program Officer, Criminal Justice with the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation hosted the conversation with Kelly Lytle Hernandez , a professor of History and African American Studies at University of California, Los Angeles. She is also a member of the SJC Advisory Council and a MacArthur Fellow. Bria asked Kelly how she uses her journey as a historian and professor to think about mass incarceration. Kelly began by acknowledging ...
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We Can Do Much for Women in Jails

By Wanda Bertram posted 03-22-2022
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March is Women’s History Month, and the picture for women in America’s jails remains troubling. Focusing on women in jails is an important part of the work of the Safety and Justice Challenge as it seeks to reduce jail populations across the country. Here are just a few examples of the challenges women face in jail. We Lock Up More Women Than Any Other Country Only 4% of the world’s female population lives in the U.S., but the U.S. accounts for 30% of the world’s incarcerated women. Such an alarming disparity should prompt us to consider how our policies and practices are contributing to it. Nearly half of the 231,000 women and girls locked up in the ...
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