Nancy La Vigne, director of UI’s Justice Policy Center, answers five questions about justice reinvestment—a data-driven approach to criminal justice policies. This strategy could help cash-strapped states and counties cut spending on corrections, improve public safety, and reduce the number of people behind bars.
April 21, 2011
1. What is justice reinvestment?
Justice reinvestment is a process designed to help states and localities make better decisions about how they use their scarce criminal justice resources. Sound decisions rest on data collection and analysis of what drives criminal justice costs—who’s in prison, how long do they stay there, when do they get out, who ends up returning, and who costs the system the most money. We can identify who poses the greatest threat to public safety and make sure there is space for them in prison or jail.
These drivers vary widely by jurisdiction, reflecting each state’s sentencing policies and the local population’s characteristics. Good information allows us to prioritize jail and prison space and cut costs by diverting those who aren’t a real threat—say, by moving people arrested for public intoxication to a treatment center instead of holding them in jail. Incarceration is very costly, so almost any alternative is going to be cheaper. The challenge, of course, is saving money while ensuring that public safety goals are maintained.
The original concept behind justice reinvestment was to take the money saved from making more cost-beneficial criminal justice policy decisions and reinvest it in the communities hardest hit by the cycle of incarceration and release. But that was before the recession. What we’re seeing now is a little more like justice reallocation—saving money on incarceration may keep a reentry program from being scrapped due to budget cuts, for example.
2. Why is justice reinvestment necessary?
As a country, we’ve been incarcerating more and more people in state prisons and county jails over the past several decades. In the past, a lot of sentencing and correctional policies were based on politics, anger, fear. Now, the recession and government budget crises are forcing public officials to question whether incarceration is the best use of resources. That’s not to suggest that certain people shouldn’t be behind bars, but that lots of the policies that put them there were made without careful analysis of what works best for which people and which policies are the most cost beneficial and will yield the best public safety payoffs.
Last year, some states saw the first meaningful drop in prison populations in decades. In some cases, the decline was driven by a justice reinvestment initiative. In others, it was driven by a desperate attempt to save money or deal with overcrowding, but without any strategic analysis.
On the local level, the jail population has continued to grow. City and county governments have seen a 30 percent rise in the jail population accompanied by an 80 percent spike in county correctional costs in the past decade. With jails, ballooning costs reflect the considerable number of people awaiting trial, sentencing, or transfer. Only about 40 percent of county inmates nationwide are sentenced to jail stays, while the rest are there temporarily. Jail often ends up being the easiest place to put people who are chronically homeless and mentally ill or repeatedly arrested for nuisance crimes—in other words, people who could be better and more cheaply served in the community. Doing that, though, requires coordination and community resources, which local justice reinvestments sites are aiming to organize.
"GOOD INFORMATION ALLOWS US TO PRIORITIZE JAIL AND PRISON SPACE AND CUT COSTS BY DIVERTING THOSE WHO AREN’T A REAL THREAT."
3. Besides money, what are the biggest obstacles to local justice reinvestment?
For states, the biggest obstacle to justice reinvestment is getting bipartisan legislative support to change sentencing policies and other laws. At the local level, you’re not working with a legislative body, so the hardest part is generating support among all the players in the criminal justice system. Someone who can make budgetary decisions—the city or county administrator—needs to take the reins, but you also need the sheriff and the warden and the district attorney and the public defenders and the mayor on board, all working toward the same goal.
Counties have tried before to reduce their jail populations. Some have succeeded, but none of the efforts have stuck because they’ve failed to get everyone in the system on board. Let’s say you work with the courts to speed up case processing so people aren’t languishing behind bars awaiting trail and crowding up the jail. That’s great, but if you haven’t coordinated with the police, they may launch a new policy of doing sweeps in high-crime neighborhoods to arrest people in open-air drug markets, refilling the jail yet again.
4. How is the Urban Institute contributing to justice reinvestment?
Our researchers are working with three counties—Alachua County, Florida; Allegheny County, Pennsylvania; and Travis County, Texas—to test the justice reinvestment approach at the local level. All three have analyzed their data, identified the drivers of their criminal justice costs, and developed what they think will be better, more cost-effective ways to do business.
Also, in October 2010, we were selected to coordinate, oversee, and assess the National Justice Reinvestment Initiative, which is run by the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA). We’ll be evaluating the initiative and figuring out whether the justice reinvestment sites are collecting the right data; using those data well to guide their decisions; and successfully diverting people from prison, saving money, and improving public safety.
5. You’ve testified before Congress about the Justice Reinvestment Act. How will it help states and localities with justice reinvestment?
The Justice Reinvestment Act is the bigger version of what we’re working on with the Bureau of Justice Assistance. If the BJA sites demonstrate that the analysis and decisionmaking process of justice reinvestment delivers results, and if they can attract bipartisan and cross-agency support, the Act would provide seed money to help the site make changes. If, for example, a county finds that chronic drunkenness is behind its high jail costs, it could use seed money to build a sobriety center in the community that would, in the long-run, save money on jail costs.
Latest Research
