Solutions to mass incarceration -- roundup from 2022

Throughout the year in my posts, I’ve noted many articles about solutions being tried around the country to reduce the present and historical harms of the criminal legal system, and build safety without prisons. I’ve compiled them here for easy reference. This is not a comprehensive list of solutions, but a roundup of articles that came out this year. The language in each point is taken from the time when I first recorded it, so there may be fresher updates that aren’t accounted for here. I welcome your feedback! 

• Safer Cities relaunched its weekly newsletter, which will focus on highlighting solutions being implemented in communities around the country, such as civilian traffic enforcement and mental health workers responding to mental health crises. Sign up here for regular updates on things that work, and see previous updates here. 

• Give people money

  • Researcher by Eugenia South from the Urban Health Lab and her co-authors found that providing cash for housing repairs was associated with a 21% decrease in crime, and nearly 7% drop in shootings.

  • California’s legislature passed a bill to increase the amount of “gate money” given to people upon release from prison from $200 to $1500; unfortunately the Governor did not sign it. The first few days out of prison are the most dicey, and if people have enough money to buy some clothes, food, and a place to stay for long enough till they get a job, they can succeed. Without that, failure is all but guaranteed.  

  • New research shows that keeping young people on welfare past their 18th birthday, rather than forcing them to re enroll as adults under stricter criteria, leads to substantially fewer criminal legal interactions for those young people. 

• Center healing and restoration, not punishment and suffering

  • The Des Moines school system has removed police from their schools and implemented a restorative practices program to address conflicts and harms at school. The students report much higher feelings of safety and relationships with peers than before the pandemic. 

  • MILPA, a collective led by formerly incarcerated people dedicated to healing work, issued a report on work they did on Rikers Island, which included circles and sweat lodges for processing trauma with incarcerated youth. My contact inside Rikers told me at the time that violence immediately decreased and the guards loved the program. I’m really interested to learn more about this group. 

  • Trained in principles of nonviolence, a group of teenagers in Chicago, called Peace Warriors, are showing up in school to prevent fights, break them up and to run peace circles. School leaders say it’s working. 

  • For the first time, there are no girls incarcerated in the state of Hawaii, after system leaders replaced punitive models with trauma-informed ones. 

  • If you have been looking for a concise introduction to restorative justice, listen to Ezra Klein’s interview with the wonderful sujatha baliga, a national expert on restorative justice and longtime practitioner. sujatha has been at the forefront of work to center the real needs of crime survivors, from innovating trauma recovery centers to advocating against punitive laws that do not actually help survivors. sujatha is a 2019 MacArthur genius award winner and has a forthcoming book centering forgiveness. 

  • Professor Ruha Benjamin wrote for Time magazine on a concept of “viral justice,” (the title of her new book), where infectious acts of local transformative justice bridge together to transform the culture at large. After writing of her brother’s struggles with mental illness that landed him in an incredibly traumatizing jail in Los Angeles, she discussed her experience at the Free Her national conference in Detroit, where the National Council convened many hundreds of leaders to talk about ending incarceration for women and girls. 

  • A randomized control trial of 2,500 men in Chicago found major reductions in gun violence (79% fewer arrests and 47% fewer victimizations for shootings and homicides) for people referred by community groups to a violence interruption program.  The program costs a tiny fraction of what the city spends on policing.

• Do healthcare not handcuffs

  • Since June 2020, Denver’s Support Team Assisted Response (STAR) sent medical and behavioral health clinicians (instead of police) to over 2,200 low-risk calls reporting trespassing, intoxication, or mental health crises involving poverty, homelessness or addiction. They have never called for police back-up due to a safety issue. The city is expanding the program. An evaluation of the STAR program in Denver, which assigns mental health responders to an array of cases rather than sending police, reduced reports of less serious crimes by 34% and did not increase major crimes. 

  • Mother Jones did a lengthy profile about a community-based hotline in Oakland called Mental Health First, which provides assistance in acute mental health crisis situations.

  • The Oregon Health Authority recently announced that it has finished awarding the first two years of funding to nonprofits under Measure 110, the 2020 ballot measure that decriminalized possession of all drugs in Oregon, which also directed cannabis tax dollars to pay into a grant program for substance abuse treatment and services. 

  • Overdose deaths in the U.S. are trending sharply upward, and sending people to jail and prison for drug use and distribution is not working to stop it. Bolts magazine has an in-depth piece on safe-consumption sites in the Netherlands, which offer a safe environment to use drugs while also connecting people to services and ensuring that people are not passing disease through dirty needles. Some dismiss this approach as ‘permissive.’ The thing is, it works. 

  • In Minnesota, veterans with certain forms of trauma can divert from prison into a treatment program and avoid a criminal record. This is a positive development, though unfortunately the language around it reinforces the validity of the punishment framework – the article uses terms like leniency and compassion – rather than acknowledging that punishment isn’t working well across the board, especially for the huge number of people suffering from trauma.   

  • Years ago, I co-authored a research paper called Healthcare not Handcuffs, identifying the major justice implications of the expansion of medicaid under the ACA. Now there is research documenting the very positive results of that expansion. Turns out we were right! Bottom line: more healthcare means more safety, less jailing, and less suffering. 

    • “Medicaid expansion produced a 20–32% negative difference in overall arrests rates in the first three years. We observe the largest negative differences for drug arrests: we find a 25–41% negative difference in drug arrests in the three years following Medicaid expansion, compared to non-expansion counties. We observe a 19–29% negative difference in arrests for violence in the three years after Medicaid expansion, and a decrease in low-level arrests between 24–28% in expansion counties compared to non-expansion counties.” 

    • For more research showing that investments in health are some of the best safety investments we can do, see this recent article in Time. 

• Do housing

  • In Finland, the “housing first” approach to homelessness has been very successful.  

  • Houston has successfully implemented a housing first model that has reduced homelessness by over 60% over the past 10 years.

  • In Seattle, a homelessness initiative called JustCare has successfully moved people off the street into housing, without violent police crackdowns. As reported in the NYTimes: “The work begins with no-strings offerings of items like food, water and clean needles. These regular visits help‌‌ demonstrate trustworthiness and defuse fear about coercion. Workers neutralize tense situations with humor and compassion and by recognizing that often bizarre behavior is driven by fundamental needs like hunger, thirst and exhaustion.” After building trust with ‌‌local homeless people, the workers move them into housing without strict abstinence requirements and then help clean up the site. The police are contacted only as a last resort. ‌

• Curb police violence and reduce armed police 

  • Whereas local governments have had a hard time reigning in reckless and deadly police departments or forcing needed policy changes, insurance companies are now stepping up to demand that departments update their practices or lose coverage. It appears to be working. See also my old favorite, Blood Money, on the woes of small cities breaking under bond debt from police misconduct settlements. 

  • The City of West Hollywood voted to reduce the number of sheriff’s officers they’re contracting from the county by 5 (saving $2million), and spend that money to hire 30 “block by block” ambassadors, who wear a uniform and stand at a cardboard podium and offer help to anyone who needs it. That could be walking you to your door at night, giving directions, or connecting people to services. See here for more information, including a discussion of the ‘sentinel effect’, where more eyes on the street improved public safety. 30 ambassadors are better than 5 armed officers for the same price.  

• Just release people 

  • The Washington Post reported on the staggering success, and I don’t use those words lightly, of the federal program to release people from prison to home supervision in order to lower the risk of COVID deaths in prison. Of the 11,000 people released to their families, 10,983 of them committed zero new offenses and did great. They are home with their families and living their lives. This begs the question: how many thousands more people are sitting in prison right now who really don’t need to be there? 

  • A large research study has found that bail reform in Houston resulted in a 13% increase in people released within the first 24 hours of a misdemeanor arrest and a 6% decrease in new prosecutions over the three years following arrest, and was a huge money saver for the county. The study also found a 15% reduction in guilty pleas, suggesting that many innocent people had been pleading guilty before to get out of jail and go home to their families. 

• Do implementation

  • The St-Louis Dispatch reported that the city jail population has fallen by half in the past 3 years, thanks to a number of policy changes and the combined efforts of the Mayor, DA and others who are on the side of reform, and to Action St. Louis for outstanding organizing and work to implement a reform policy agenda. 

  • In a major victory for Los Angeles organizers working to institutionalize and build on their wins, the L.A. County Board approved a motion to create the Justice, Care and Opportunities Department, which will become a centralized home for various programs created in the last few years in support of the county’s Care First, Jails Last initiative. Read the press release from Justice LA, the powerhouse team behind the passage of this motion. 

• Treat defendants and people in prison as human beings

  • The Complete Picture Project makes films about defendants to show judges at sentencing, to show the fullness of their lives and connections to family and community. These films have reportedly led to defendants receiving dramatically reduced sentences. See The Laura Flanders Show’s coverage. 

  • Bianca Tylek, ED of the fabulous Worth Rises, reported that: “Call time is up an amazing 120% since Connecticut, which had the highest prison call rates in the nation (up to $0.32 per min), made calls free in July thanks to legislation we passed in 2021. Incarcerated people are now spending 42 mins each day talking to loved ones.”