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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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Digging Into The Data on Jail Populations, Violent Crime, and COVID-19

By Sana Khan posted 03-21-2023
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New research findings directly address recent claims about the role of criminal legal reforms in violent crime trends. In response to the rapid spread of COVID-19, jails across the country implemented emergency strategies to reduce jail populations and mitigate the virus’s spread. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, public data show that violent crime and homicides have increased nationally. These increases have put a spotlight on criminal legal reform efforts, with growing public discourse in some political and media circles suggesting that reforms are causing these increases. These claims often speculate that people released due to efforts ...
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Lessons About Criminalizing Women’s Poverty from A Study of the Buncombe County, North Carolina Jail

By Tara Dhanraj posted 03-01-2023
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A recent research project by the Vera Institute of Justice offers lessons for jail systems around the country on the dangers of criminalizing women’s poverty. The picture for women in America’s jails remains troubling. Women in the United States only make up 4% of the world’s population, but the United States itself incarcerates 30% of the world’s population of women behind bars. A stark example of the challenge in Buncombe County is that most of the women who were incarcerated at the Buncombe Country Detention Center in 2020 hadn’t even been convicted of a crime. More than two-thirds of women on average were jailed pretrial; fewer than 10% were ...
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Over-Incarceration of Native Americans: Roots, Inequities, and Solutions

By Matt Davis posted 01-13-2023
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A new national report from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation highlights that Native people are disproportionately incarcerated in the United States. The report , commissioned as part of the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC), shows that in states with higher Native populations, incarceration rates are up to seven times that of White people, and that Native people are sentenced more harshly than White, African American, and Hispanic individuals. Moreover, American Indians and Alaska Natives (AI/AN) were incarcerated at a rate 38 percent higher than the national average and were overrepresented in the prison population in 19 states compared ...
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Expediting Probation to Reduce Length of Stay in Jail

By Beth Huebner posted 01-12-2023
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—This blog was co-authored with Lee Ann Slocum, a professor at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. Jurisdictions across the country can learn from efforts to study probation violations in-depth. A new report on probation violations as a driver of jail time in St. Louis County , Missouri shows that expediated probation programs have much to offer and can work to reduce racial and ethnic disparities in the system. Probation matters. More people are under probation supervision in America than any other correctional sanction. One in 84 adult U.S. residents is on probation right now, which increases the risk for later imprisonment. As an initiative of the ...
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Addressing Ableism In Criminal Justice Reform

By Matt Davis posted 12-01-2022
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December 3 is International Day of Persons with Disabilities . We spoke to leaders working in the area involved with the MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) about what needs to change, and where there has been progress. ( From left to right: Chris Huff, Supreet Minhas, Candace Coleman and Jalyn Radzminski). Chris Huff (he/him) is Diversion and Reentry Policy Analyst at Access Living —a center of service, advocacy, and social change for people with all kinds of disabilities, based in Chicago. In this role, Chris leads policy efforts centered on supporting people with disabilities impacted by the criminal justice system. ...
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A Q&A On Hispanic Heritage Month With 70 Million Creator Juleyka Lantigua

By Juleyka Lantigua-Williams posted 12-01-2022
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Q: What does Hispanic Heritage Month mean to you? A: It means that we’re trying to squeeze too much into a single month. As with any designated month or week to celebrate a huge swath of history and the contributions of a broad range of people, the notion falls absurdly short. But the month-long bookmark does have its utility inasmuch as it focuses the limelight on the rising-majority population of the country, thereby surfacing updated information, demographic trends, and political forecasts that, in the hands of people who want to shape the future of the US, can be very helpful Q: 70 Million , LWC Studios’ podcast about criminal justice reform, was ...
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