By Brandon Martinez, Rebecca Tublitz. Emily West

The majority of people in local jails around the country are awaiting their criminal trial. This means they have not been convicted of the crimes that brought them in. Many also do not pose a danger to public safety, nor a significant risk of flight, but remain in custody because they cannot afford bail or bond—making incarceration a fact of financial ability, not of safety.

In fact, keeping those in jail who could be better served in the community can cause long-term instability. Well-established research demonstrates the harms of pretrial detention, including worse criminal legal system outcomes, disruption in employment, poorer mental and physical health, and strained social and familial relationships. Unnecessarily overcrowding jails also means those who actually do need attention—especially for risk factors such as mental health, substance use, and housing instability—aren't given the resources they need to avoid landing back in jail.

Given this research, cities and counties involved in the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) have engaged in collaborative, multi-agency efforts to safely shrink their local jail populations and increase equity across the system. This includes using resources to promote fairer and more just pretrial decision-making, address the needs of system-involved people, and establish a robust array of alternative options.

These efforts have yielded impressive results: in these SJC cities and counties, nearly 18,000 fewer people are in jails today compared to the start of the initiative. This reduction was driven largely by fewer people being booked into jail. Progress has been slower on reducing racial and ethnic disparities, though in many sites there are fewer people of color in jail than there were prior to the start of the initiative. Importantly, SJC research has established that throughout nearly a decade of the initiative, people released pretrial were no more likely to return to jail than before the SJC, including for violent crime—demonstrating that data-driven and cross-agency collaborative planning efforts can lead to positive outcomes for individuals while keeping communities safe.

Looking back at 10 years of work, CUNY ISLG analyzed individual-level jail data from five participating counties to explore trends in three key indicators:

1. Who gets booked into jail;

2. How they are released from custody (e.g., money bond, pretrial supervision);

3. How long they stay.

We also examine whether change in these domains varied for different racial and ethnic groups. The sites included in this analysis are Allegheny County, PA; Charleston County, SC; Palm Beach County, FL; New Orleans, LA; and Pima County, AZ. This brief presents the findings from the analysis.

New York: CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance. 2025. 

By Kellyann Bock & Michael Rempel

Following a statewide corrections officer strike in February 2025 and the termination of over 2,000 officers, New York State prisons have been unable to accept timely transfers of people sentenced to state time. This brief analyzes the resulting surge in the “state-ready” population on Rikers Island—those awaiting transfer to prison—which rose more than eight-fold from 101 to 875 people from February to June 2025. As of the end of June 2025, these individuals accounted for 11% of the total jail population and are responsible for 89% of February-to-June 2025 jail population growth. In short, the jail population would have changed little in the first half of 2025 if not for the ripple effects of the corrections officer strike.

New York : Data Collaborative for Justice, 2025. 7p.

By Michael Rempel

This research brief summarizes what we know about New York City’s jail population since the COVID-19 outbreak. The data point to a 30 percent reduction in the city’s daily jail population from March 18 to April 29—attributable to urgent efforts to gain people’s release as well as to declining arrests, as people sheltered indoors at the start of the pandemic. Since then, the use of jail re-increased, reversing over half of the prior reductions. If the current trend continues, the jail population will return to its pre-COVID-19 level by mid-February 2021. The COVID-19 era has also seen considerable variations in the jail trends applicable to different subgroups, with the numbers held in pretrial detention progressively rising, even as incarceration has remained low among people convicted and serving sentences of one year or less. After reviewing key emergency release strategies adopted at the outset of the pandemic, this research brief documents overall jail trends and more specific changes in the composition of the jail population from mid-March to the beginning of November 2020.

New York: Center for Court Innovation, 2020. 22p.

ByTodd D. Minton, Zhen Zeng and Laura M. Maruschak

From March to June 2020, about 208,500 inmates received expedited release in response to COVID-19. „ During the pandemic, jail facilities became less crowded, as indicated by the decrease in occupied bed space from 81% at midyear 2019 to 60% at midyear 2020. „ The number of inmates held for a misdemeanor declined about 45% since midyear 2019, outpacing the decline in the number of inmates held for a felony (down 18%). „ The percentage of inmates held for a felony increased from 70% at midyear 2019 to 77% at midyear 2020. „ From March to June 2020, jails conducted 215,360 inmate COVID-19 tests. More than 11% of these tests were positive. „ Jails in counties with confirmed residential COVID-19 infection rates of 1% or more tested nearly 21% of persons admitted to their jails from March to June 2020. „ From March to June 2020, nearly 5% (10,850) of all local jail staff (233,220) tested positive for COVID-19.

Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs ,Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2021. 28p.