Reimagining Federal Grants for Public Safety and Criminal Justice Reform

By Mike Crowley and Betsy Pearl

Federal public safety and criminal justice grants are in dire need of modernization in the United States. The primary statutes funding these grants were enacted in the mid1990s during the height of the “tough-on-crime” era that espoused crime suppression through mass incarceration.1 The U.S. Congress and the executive branch have not comprehensively reviewed the goals of these grants in more than 25 years, during which time academics have widely documented the failures of tough-on-crime approaches. As the Vera Institute of Justice has noted, “Research consistently shows that higher incarceration rates are not associated with lower violent crime rates.”2 The overreliance on incarceration has instead created undue harm for communities of color, particularly Black Americans, who have been unjustly targeted by the justice system. 3 Today, the movement to end mass incarceration and police violence is gaining steam. Communities are calling for a smaller justice system that is no longer the primary response to many social issues, from behavioral health disorders to homelessness to school discipline. These are not new priorities; rather, national public awareness has started to catch up to what many communities have been advocating for years. Yet federal funding mechanisms are still stuck in the 1990s. Instead of pushing jurisdictions toward justice reform, the largest available justice-related grants incentivize deference to law enforcement and criminal justice agencies, which have historically perpetuated approaches that drive up arrest and incarceration rates. Dedicated funding streams for reform-minded strategies are much smaller and are generally awarded on a competitive basis, thereby limiting the number of jurisdictions that can use federal funds to promote change.

Washington, DC: Center for American Progress, 2020. 15p.