MacArthur, Seeing Success in Reducing Jail Time, Boosts Funding for Criminal Justice Overhaul

Convinced that it is making, progress reducing the time people spend in jail awaiting court action, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation added $22 million in criminal-justice grants to its Safety and Justice Challenge, bringing the total commitments under the three-year-old program to more than $148 million.

Since 2015, when the challenge began, 52 states, counties, and cities have received support from the Chicago grant maker to reduce local jail populations. In the most recent round of grants, 13 sites were given additional money, and 12 new jurisdictions were added to the network.

Last week the localities that received funding held their eighth gathering to share ways they’ve changed the processes for arresting, booking, and prosecuting defendants. Their goal is to reduce the number of people held in jail awaiting processing by the courts, a key driver in the increase in the nation’s jail population.

Laurie Garduque, MacArthur’s director of criminal-justice reform, sees a lot of promise in the local efforts. She said the grant maker plans to gather crime, arrest, and court processing data from the network to assist organizations including the National Conference of State Legislatures, the National Association of Counties, and groups representing prosecutors, defense lawyers, and police chiefs.

“It’s our aim to elevate these jurisdictions and the leadership in these communities to serve as sentinels, or models, that other jurisdictions can learn from and emulate,” she said.

Declining Jail Populations

MacArthur’s commitment is part of a larger philanthropic effort to tackle problems in the criminal-justice system. Since 2011, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation has made more than $107 million in grants. Last year Google.org gave 10 nonprofits a total of $11 million to combat racial inequality in the prison system. And this summer the Ballmer Group put $20 million behind an effort to develop alternatives to youth prisons.

In some cases, jail populations declined after cities received the challenge money. Philadelphia, for instance, recorded a 36 percent drop in the past three years. It used about $3.6 million from MacArthur to put in place new systems to prioritize processing for people with low bail amounts and release people on their own recognizance. The city’s renewed grant is for $4 million, which it will use to further expedite case processing.

Charleston County, S.C., instituted triage centers where people with mental-health issues are sent after arrest, where they can be directed to local service providers. Officials there also developed a way for the police to calculate the risk of giving a person a citation or summons instead of making an arrest.

Federal Efforts

The grant makers’ efforts have focused primarily at the state and local levels. Meanwhile, at the federal level, efforts to change policing, sentencing, and prison policies have stalled during the Trump administration.

Nicholas Turner, president of the Vera Institute of Justice, said that a lack of progress in Congress, and efforts by Attorney General Jeff Sessions to take a more punitive approach, means there is less hope for progress at the federal level than in states and municipalities.

That’s where most of the action is, said Turner, noting that about 90 percent of the prison population is managed at the local level.

“Would it be better if the federal government were more engaged in reform — unquestionably, yes,” Turner said. “It’s an important signal to the rest of the country. But it’s not a deal breaker.”

Over the past two years, Vera has received about $60 million in foundation support. With grants from MacArthur, it helps “coach” several of the Safety and Justice Challenge jurisdictions on how to institute changes and helps develop and publicize performance benchmarks.

Emphasizing Dignity

Vera’s most recent effort is a report released this month called “Reimagining Prison” that calls for prison officials to emphasize human dignity in the way they treat incarcerated people. Dignity can be restored, the report says, by calling inmates by their names rather than a number, providing high-quality health services and hygienic products, allowing people in jail to choose their own clothing, and letting them take part in the creation of certain rules.

Like Vera’s effort to get prison authorities to rethink how incarcerated people are treated once in the system, MacArthur is challenging local law-enforcement agencies, judges, and prosecutors to re-evaluate their jobs at the system’s front end.

Much of the work behind MacArthur’s Safety and Justice Challenge is based on changing policies. Garduque says it’s also critical — but much more difficult — for local leaders to reorient the way they exercise discretion in deciding when to release people or put them in jail. “That’s as much a cultural change as it is a change in specific policies and practices,” she said. “That’s a longer haul.”

But Garduque sees reason for hope.

Politically, people look at criminal justice in a number of ways, but people of various political backgrounds can agree on the need to reduce jail populations, she said.

Fiscal conservatives can see overcrowded jails as a waste of taxpayer money. Others, particularly people in the political center, are motivated by what they view as overpunishment for relatively minor infractions. And people concerned with racial or economic discrimination want to change a system they see harming the country’s most vulnerable populations.

“They might have different ways of framing the problem, but at the local level they’re into problem solving,” she said.