Cohort 2025
Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice
Promoting Diversion through a Community Justice Portal
Kern County, CA
Kern County, California, has the third-highest rate of families living below the poverty level in the state. Financial hardship is exacerbated for families when law enforcement officers arrest people and fines are issued that families cannot afford. Kern County also has one of the highest misdemeanor arrest rates in the state and Black and Latinx people are disproportionately arrested, despite a plethora of evidence that people of color do not offend at higher rates than white people. These disparities in arrests result in disparities in incarceration: Black people make up 20 percent of people incarcerated in Kern County, despite representing only around 5 percent of the county population.
With Catalyst grant funding, the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice (CJCJ), an organization that works to reduce society’s reliance on incarceration as a solution to social problems, will partner with Community Interventions and RomoGIS to make arrests in Kern County more transparent and highlight alternatives to arrest and incarceration through a community justice portal. The portal will include a user-friendly, interactive dashboard illustrating front-end racial disparities in the Kern County criminal legal system using data from the police departments in Kern County; the Kern County Sheriff’s Office, District Attorney’s Office, and Probation Department; and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. It will complement these data with qualitative data collected from county residents directly affected by policing disparities and limited diversion programming. The dashboard will visualize and map trends and disparities in arrests and diversion programming. The dashboard will also include data on available community resources that could be leveraged to strengthen community-based diversion alternatives. The portal will make data more accessible, helping community members, policymakers, media, and law enforcement identify impacts and disparities in current criminal legal system practices and develop and implement programs, such as diversion, that allow people to access appropriate rehabilitation options and services while maintaining community ties and without compounding difficult financial circumstances.
