SJC Exchange Library

The United States continues to struggle with its excessive incarceration rates, and it all starts with the local jails. Each year, nearly 11 million people are booked into this country’s jails, nearly 18 times the number of yearly admissions to state and federal prisons. In many regions, jail populations have reached crisis levels.

The primary purpose of a jail is to detain those who are waiting for court proceedings and are considered a flight risk or public safety threat. Many people admitted to jail cannot afford to post bail and as a result may remain behind bars for weeks, awaiting trial or a case resolution. This overreliance on jails has negative consequences not only for those who are incarcerated, but also for their families and their communities, particularly communities of color. Black Americans, for example, are jailed at five times the rate of White Americans; their numbers in the nation’s jail population are three times their representation in the general population.

In response to this crisis, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation launched the national Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC), a multiyear initiative to safely reduce jail populations and racial and ethnic disparities in jails. To date, SJC has provided $252 million to help jurisdictions across the country use innovative, collaborative, and evidence-based strategies to create fairer and more effective justice systems. Collectively, SJC sites account for about 16 percent of the total confined jail population in the United States.

The goal is not only to reduce jail populations, but to do so safely—and this has been a pillar of the SJC initiative since its inception in 2015. While previous briefs have highlighted the substantial reductions made in jail populations across SJC sites,1 this report provides an initial look at SJC’s decarceration strategies through a safety lens. More specifically, it explores how aggregate crime rates and returns to custody among people released from jail changed after the launch of SJC and the implementation of its decarceration strategies in sites through 2019. In future briefs we will explore the intersection of decarceration strategies and safety before and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

This analysis should be viewed as a first step toward assessing how the initiative has affected public safety. The metrics employed here do not necessarily align with more inclusive definitions of safety as defined by the communities most impacted by the criminal justice system. Given the reliance on administrative data from criminal justice agencies, the definition of public safety is highly reflective of the justice system’s responses and the differing enforcement practices that have arisen as a result of these responses for Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and other people of color who are often underserved and overpoliced. The intention of this analysis is to provide a general understanding of these trends. Future investigations will explore public safety in a much more nuanced manner.

Overall, the findings suggest that decarceration strategies can indeed be crafted and implemented responsibly, without compromising public safety. In fact, public safety outcomes across SJC sites and in most individual sites remained relatively constant before and after the implementation of decarceration reforms.