Using Data to Change the Use of Jails Implementation Lessons from Charleston County, South Carolina, and St. Louis County, Missouri

By Jesse Jannetta and Storm Ervin

Millions of people enter and exit local jails in the United States each year, making jail incarceration the country’s most common type of incarceration experience. Even brief periods of jail incarceration have a wide range of negative effects (such as disruption to employment and family connections) on people who experience it (Dobbie, Goldin, and Yang 2018; Lowenkamp, VanNostrand, and Holsinger 2013; Stevenson 2018s).1 Moreover, jails in many places are antiquated, understaffed, and unsafe, resulting in high rates of victimization for people incarcerated in them. And although racial disparities in jail populations have decreased in recent years, these disparities are still very high, as Black people are jailed at a rate of 600 per 100,000 Black US residents, Latinx people at a rate of 176 per 100,000 Latinx US residents, and white people at a rate of 184 per 100,000 white US residents (Zheng and Minton 2021). For these reasons, many local justice reform efforts are focusing on rethinking how jails are used and reducing jail populations and disparities. Among the most prominent of these reform efforts is the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC), a multiyear, multisite effort funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to change how jails are used in the United States (box 1). The central goals of the SJC are reducing jail populations and reducing racial and ethnic disparities in jail populations. For SJC sites to realize those goals locally they need to understand what drives their jail populations, where to target interventions to address those dynamics, whether interventions are functioning as intended, and whether interventions are generating system impact. They also need to communicate what they are doing to the broader public to secure and maintain buy-in and support system accountability. Effective use of data is necessary for all of these efforts

Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2022. 39p.