Last week, new data was released showing that reductions in arrests and jail populations does not lead to an increase in crime or adversely impact community safety, as reported by Essence based off of studies produced from the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC).
Sponsored by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, “[t]he
Safety and Justice Challenge is providing support to local leaders from
across the country who are determined to tackle one of the greatest drivers of
over-incarceration in America—the misuse and overuse of jails.” Challenge
participants are tasked with “develop[ing] and model[ing] effective ways to
keep people out of jail who don’t belong there, more
effectively reintegrate[ing] those who must be confined into the
community upon release, and help[ing] them stay out of jail thereafter. In
doing so, they will demonstrate alternatives to incarceration as usual,
creating models for reducing unnecessary jail use to make communities
healthier, fairer, and safer.”
SJC collaborated with data experts from City University of
New York’s Institute for State and Local Governance (CUNY ISLG) and the JFA
Institute (JFA) to assess the public safety impacts of criminal justice reform
strategies pre- and post-pandemic and released two reports last week with
their findings: The Impact of COVID-19 on Crime, Arrests and Jail Populations and Jail Decarceration and Public Safety: Preliminary
Findings from the Safety and Justice Challenge. These two studies focused
on participating cities and counties and examined the public safety effects
between 2015 and 2019 after the enactment of jail population reduction and the
impact of COVID-19 on the criminal justice system, including crimes, arrests,
and jail populaces, respectively.
Findings showed that “reducing over-incarceration in
jails keeps us safe. Narratives connecting these reforms to rising crime rates
are misleading and damaging.”
The studies’ analysis serves to provide evidence in direct
opposition to those who tend to blame criminal justice reform for being the
root cause of a rise in violent crime. For instance, jail population
for one study participant, Lake
County, IL, decreased by 27% during the pandemic due to
the implementation of public health efforts, while both nonviolent
and violent crimes declined by 11% between 2016 and 2019. This data
further emphasizes that this country needs to rethink the conventional and
established delineations of the meaning of public safety because
this only acts as a detriment to communities, particularly BIPOC (black,
indigenous, and other people of color) ones who are often oppressed
by an unjust system, if true transformation in the form of fairness and equity
is to be achieved.
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