Cohort 2024
Detroit Justice Center
Analyzing Data to Support Community Reinvestment in Mental Health and Harm Reduction
Detroit, MI
Detroit currently spends $545 per resident on incarceration and only $68 per resident on health. This has disproportionately impacted Detroit’s Black community. In Wayne County (home of Detroit), 73.9 percent of the jail population is Black, a share nearly double that of the county’s Black population (38.3 percent). Spending on incarceration has not led to true community safety; rather, it has filled jails with Black and low-income Detroiters who are there because of underlying problems around poverty, mental health, and the criminalization of substance use—factors that only worsen with incarceration. The Detroit Justice Center is a nonprofit law firm founded to end mass incarceration and remedy its impacts. At the core of the center’s work is the framework of divest/invest, which involves diverting funds from incarceration and reinvesting in resources that will provide genuine community safety.
With Catalyst Grant funding, the Detroit Justice Center will expand its landscape analysis of local ecosystems of care, and of the gaps and system breakdowns that often perpetuate the cycle of arrest and incarceration for people experiencing mental health crises and substance use. Through research and collaboration with five community and grassroots partners, the landscape analysis will culminate in a convening of mental health, substance use, and harm reduction service providers, and community-based coalition partners. To this end, the center will partner with a research and data consultant to increase its data-collection efforts, with particular emphasis on building capacity to access public criminal legal system data, which will be a featured part of the convening—a space to share findings and emerging strategies, engage in thought partnership and collective visioning, and begin exploring recommendations for mental health reinvestment in Detroit. This project will enable the Detroit Justice Center to assess and visualize racial disparities in Detroit’s criminal legal system and mental health and harm reduction landscape and create data-driven public awareness in the campaign for community reinvestment.
