By Ammar Khalid, Rochisha Shukla, Arielle Jackson, and Andreea Matei

Pima County, Arizona, has implemented multiple reforms to address probation-related drivers of jail incarceration through its participation in the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge, including strengthening transitional housing support intended to provide short-term housing options for people experiencing housing instability. The Urban Institute conducted a study, in partnership with the Pima County Adult Probation Department, to describe probation pathways to jail incarceration and system-level trends, as well as the effects of providing transitional housing support to people on probation, particularly in terms of jail use.

WHY THIS MATTERS

Many jurisdictions across the country have implemented strategies to reduce jail incarceration for people on probation because probation violations contribute significantly to rising jail populations in the United States: 33 percent of all people incarcerated in jails were arrested while on probation, and 27 percent of the people in jails for probation violations were incarcerated for technical violations alone. Housing instability can heighten the risk of criminal legal system involvement, particularly for people on probation.

WHAT WE FOUND

Our main takeaways include the following:

Roughly 10 percent of all jail bookings in Pima County were due to probation violations, representing an overall low share of jail admissions. However, average length of stay for people in jail for probation violations was considerably longer at 66 days, nearly three times as long as that for the pretrial population (25 days) and five times as long as that for the sentenced population (13 days).

Probation violations resulting in jail incarceration represented 16 percent of all terminated probation cases and were largely driven by technical violations, which include absconding charges.

There were some observable racial and ethnic disparities in jail use as a formal probation revocation petition outcome. Native American and Hispanic people had higher odds—by 97 percent and 46 percent, respectively—of being revoked to jail compared with white people. Black people were 24 percent more likely to receive coterminous outcomes compared with white people.

Between January 2020 and June 2022, 331 people received financial assistance to access transitional housing. The number of people receiving assistance increased over time and the probation department prioritized people with higher risk and needs when making decisions about funding for transitional housing.

The odds of a probation termination to jail were not significantly different for people who received funding for transitional housing and those who did not. These null effects, however, could owe to the small number of people served and the limited data available on people who received transitional housing support. Interviewed stakeholders, though, perceived this support for people on probation to be a crucial stabilizing force and extremely meaningful to their well-being.

Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2023. 63p.

By Madeline Bailey and Jennifer Peirce

In many places in the United States, perspectives on the necessity of jail incarceration are changing. There is now significant public discussion on the failures of traditional policing, the importance of bail reform, and the urgency of shifting investments out of jails and law enforcement and towards mental health, drug treatment programs, and other community services. These discussions have been centered in large, urban areas such as New York City, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, where high-profile criminal justice reformers have developed themselves as champions for doing things differently. Indeed, their pushes for policy change, and the work of community advocacy groups that have held them accountable, have made an impact on the number of people in jail in cities: From 2013 through 2019, urban areas saw an 18 percent overall decrease in their jail populations and a 22 percent decrease in the rate of jail incarceration. Overall, U.S. jail populations have dropped from a high of 785,533 in 2008 to 758,420 in 2019. Even still, the scale of jail incarceration is enormous: 10.7 million people were booked into a jail during 2018. In the wake of reactions to the COVID19 pandemic, jail populations reached a low of 575,500 in mid-2020, which has since crept back to 633,200 in late 2020. But this national trend contains two diverging tendencies: As urban jail populations declined, many rural localities have instead expanded their carceral footprint. This means that jail incarceration in the U.S. is now increasingly a rural phenomenon. Rural places comprise approximately two-thirds of all U.S. counties and about 14% of the national population, while people in jail in rural counties represent 21% of people in jail across the country. In contrast to national trends, jail populations in rural counties increased by 27% from 2013 to 2019, reaching per capita incarceration rates at nearly double those in urban areas. Quietly, between 1970 and 2013, rates of pretrial detention in these rural areas grew by 436%. Measured in rates per 100,000 residents, the incarceration rate in rural counties was 398, 2.4 times higher than the incarceration rate of 165 in urban counties. Despite playing an increasingly prominent role in national trends, rural places have been less prominent in the national criminal justice reform narrative. Rather, there are several common assumptions that circulate as to why people go to jail in rural areas: that the opioid crisis hit rural communities hardest and this inevitably led to more arrests and jail time, that rural areas do not have the resources to offer robust diversion programs or treatment services, and that rural law enforcement and political leaders are ideologically committed to tougher “law and order” tactics. While these narratives contain significant elements of truth for many rural counties and do play a role in shaping crime and justice dynamics more broadly, they do not explain the enormous scale of rural jail growth specifically. This article argues that, instead, the principal drivers of rural jail incarceration are policy choices and discretionary practices that are largely within the purview of local and state justice system leaders. Data on jail population trends are now comprehensive and detailed enough to illustrate some diverging trends between rural counties and smaller cities versus major metropolitan areas. Research has started to identify some of the principal drivers of rural jail populations, such as pretrial detention and economic incentives for holding people in jail. But a principal insight from existing research in rural systems is that any analysis of the formal mechanisms of the justice system must be embedded in the local context. Individual criminal justice actors in rural areas have even more influence on reforms than they typically do in larger systems. Local views and attitudes about the causes of crime and the merits of potential reforms can vary greatly even among rural communities in a given region. The rural versus urban divide is not just “tough on crime” versus treatment and prevention. Community advocacy and pressure on jails in rural communities is often driven by organizations whose focus is not usually criminal justice (such as churches or civic organizations); their strategies and messages thus require more contextualization. As demographics and immigration patterns shift, new coalitions are also emerging that may be involved in debates about how counties use detention centers. Further, in places with less data management capacity, understanding the process for generating administrative data is more important. In other words, the common analysis methods for unpacking jail trends in big cities miss meaningful parts of the picture in rural areas. This article sets out to frame the state of knowledge on drivers of rural jail incarceration and identifies where more research is needed to build pathways toward reversing rural jail growth trends. The goal is not to illustrate or test any given explanation empirically. Rather, this article draws on national data and examples from specific rural areas16 to consider several contributing factors to rural jail growth: money bail and pretrial detention, financial incentives to holding people in jail, probation enforcement, and unintended consequences of state-level reforms. It will then discuss how common issues facing many rural places, such as scarcity of social service organizations and challenges in accessing lawyers and resources in the criminal legal system affect rural jail population reduction efforts. Finally, it will point to opportunities for policy and practice change that are tailored to rural places. This is a call for further research and policy development on reducing local jail incarceration in rural areas, in ways that are attuned to the variation and complexities of rural communities.

Idaho Law Review Volume 57 Number 3 Article 5 November 2022

By Evelyn F. McCoy, Paige Thompson, Travis Reginal, and Natalie Lima

Jail incarceration continues to be a main driver of the mass incarceration crisis in the United States and to negatively affect individuals, families, and communities. Racial disparities in local jail populations are significant, particularly to the detriment of Black communities. Involvement in the criminal legal system, even when brief, can have severe consequences, including barriers to sustaining employment and securing stable housing, poor physical and mental health stemming from chronic stress and limited access to adequate health care, and disruptions to family relationships and social support networks.

To address these issues, Philadelphia implemented a multipronged reform plan supported by the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) to reduce its jail population and associated racial and ethnic disparities. Since 2015, Philadelphia has significantly reduced its jail population through these SJC efforts, which included closing a jail facility, launching a strategy across decision points in the criminal legal system, strengthening collaboration and cross-agency partnerships, launching a formal committee to represent community members’ perspectives, and analyzing data to identify racial and ethnic disparities across decision points. This report describes Philadelphia’s major SJC strategies, documents how it navigated challenges and advanced tangible reform efforts, and explores the perceived impacts of these strategies on its efforts to engage community members, reduce local jail use, and implement system reforms that advance equity. Lessons learned include that it is possible to significantly reduce jail populations in large cities with comprehensive, cross-agency collaboration; that such jail population reductions do not necessarily mean racial and ethnic disparities will also decrease; that reform fatigue is a reality for long-term initiatives like the SJC and can make it difficult for stakeholders to sustain efforts; and that meaningful community engagement is challenging and requires educating stakeholders and community members.

Urban Institute. 2023. 36p.

By Jennifer Peirce, Madeline Bailey, and Shahd Elbushra

These two research briefs summarize analysis of county jail bookings in seven rural Georgia counties (2019–2020) and five rural Washington counties (2015–2021). In both Georgia and Washington, jail incarceration rates are higher in rural counties than in urban and suburban counties. The briefs, created in partnership with the University of Georgia and Washington State University, demonstrate that jails in these rural counties are primarily holding people for minor charges. Vera calls on local actors to use citation in lieu of arrest and automatic pretrial release policies, as well as to strengthen pretrial services and avoid using jail as a penalty for failing to appear in court or for technical probation violations. The majority of jail admissions in rural counties in both Georgia and Washington were for nonviolent charges, including driving with a suspended license, penalties related to navigating criminal legal system rules (like failure to appear in court), and probation violations.

DOWNLOAD: Punitive policies are driving jail incarceration in rural Georgia

Punitive policies are driving jail incarceration in rural Georgia

DOWNLOAD: Rural Washington State Needs Criminal Legal System Reform

By Brady P. Horn,  Aakrit Joshi and Paul Guerin

  Substance use disorders (SUD) are very prevalent and costly in the United States and New Mexico. Over 20 million individuals in the US meet diagnostic criteria for SUD and over 65 thousand US residents died from drug opioid overdose in 2020. It is well known that there is a strong correlation between SUD and incarceration. National studies have found that on average two thirds of prisoners have SUD and approximately 30% of inmates report having an opioid use disorder (OUD). There is growing momentum nationally to incorporate SUD, particularly OUD treatment, into incarceration systems and numerous studies have found that providing medication for opioids use disorder (MOUD) in incarceration systems is clinically effective. Since 2005, there has been a Methadone Maintenance Treatment (MMT) continuation program within the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) where individuals who were already receiving community-based treatment could continue their treatment within the jail. Prior work has found that this program was associated with reduced crime. In 2017 this program was expanded and started providing treatment to individuals who had not been receiving methadone in the community prior to incarceration. In this study we evaluate the impact of this treatment program. Data was collected from numerous different sources, linked, thoroughly cleaned, and a difference-in-difference empirical strategy is used. Robust evidence is found that MMT initiation reduced reincarceration. Our main results find that MMT initiation is associated with a perperson reduction in 19 incarceration days in the one-year period after jail-based MMT was received. We also find evidence confirming prior studies that found MMT continuation reduces recidivism. We find that jail-based MMT continuation is associated with a per-person reduction in 31 incarceration days in the one-year period post release. Also, a heterogenous Surve treatment effect is found where individuals that received jail-based MMT for longer periods of time had larger reductions in reincarceration. Individuals who received MMT initiation for 70 days or more were associated with 22 fewer reincarceration days and individuals that received MMT continuation were associated with 60 fewer reincarceration days.   

Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico, Center for Applied Research Analysis, 2022. 43p.

By Joanna Weill, Amanda Cissner, and Sruthi Naraharisetti

The United States incarcerates more people than any other country in the world, with a rate of 537 of every 100,000 U.S. residents behind bars by the beginning of 2021.  Nearly one-third of those incarcerated are held in local jails, most during the pretrial period, before they have been convicted of any crime. In 2019, local jails across the U.S. held an average of 734,500 individuals each day.  The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 intensified calls to reduce jail populations, since the frequent turnover and commonly cramped communal living conditions proved ideal for spreading the virus. Accordingly, the spring of 2020 saw a dramatically declining jail population for the first time in a decade—the result of both fewer new admissions and expedited release for those already detained.  Still, more than half a million individuals were held in local jails by mid-2020,  and evidence suggests that the early COVID-generated reductions have not been sustained. By the latter half of 2020, jail populations had crept back up, nearing pre-pandemic levels.  Racial and ethnic disparities in jail populations are well-established. While Black individuals comprised 13% of the total U.S. population in 2019, they accounted for a third of those in jail (34%). Racial disparities permeate every step of the criminal justice process: Black individuals are more likely than White individuals to be arrested and detained awaiting trial;  those who are held pretrial are then more likely to be convicted.  Once convicted, Black individuals receive longer jail and prison sentences than White individuals. Declining jail incarceration…..

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  early into the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated existing racial disparities; incarceration rates among Black individuals declined 22% from 2019 through mid-2020, while those for Whites declined 28%; rates for Latinx and Asian individuals decreased 23% and 21% respectively.  This trend underlines the reality that without strategies deliberately tailored to address racial disparities, general efforts to reduce jail populations will not necessarily lead to greater racial and ethnic equity.  

New York: Center for Court Innovation, 2022. 34p.