For a decade, the U.S. government took part in an unusual partnership with Pew Charitable Trusts aimed at cutting the nation’s prison population while spending the money saved by states on services that would help keep the crime rate down.
It was called the Justice Reinvestment Initiative (JRI), and Congress appropriated about $170 million for it.
The prison count dropped modestly and reported crime largely declined while the program was going strong, but how successful was it?
A review by William J. Sabol and Miranda L. Baumann of the Georgia State University criminology department concluded that “On the main issues on which it was sold—reducing prison populations and saving costs—the credible evidence of JRI’s impacts is weak to null.”
The authors said one reason for JRI’s limited impact was that its reforms dealt mainly with shorter prison terms for lesser offenders, and not with “violent offenders or those with long criminal histories”
“Achieving substantial reductions in the number of violent offenders in prison would have required JRI to address (reduce) the severity of sentencing and (increase) the use of alternatives to prison,” they added.
Sabol and Baumann wrote that “bipartisan compromise” would be difficult on those issues, so JRI “set a relatively low bar for reducing prison populations, oversold the potential cost savings, and ultimately did not deliver evidence that it was responsible for either.”
(A draft copy of the study for the Annual Review of Criminology is available for a fee at this site; it still could be revised before publication in January.)
The federal and state prisoner count in the U.S. fell from about 1,569,000 to 1,507,000 in the decade ending in 2016, when justice reinvestment was most active, says the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. Adding more than 600,000 in local jails, the U.S. remains the world leader in mass incarceration.
Sabol discussed his study Wednesday at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, being held this year in San Francisco.
He said it is correct that several dozen states changed their sentencing laws, many under the influence of the JRI program, but he noted that many states already had been modifying their laws before JRI became active.
Sources at Pew told The Crime Report that justice reinvestment states combined have reported more than $1 billion in “averted costs and savings” as a result of JRI.
This sum included canceled or postponed prison construction costs and averted operating costs, including food and medical care they would have been providing to inmates who were released or people who never were sent to prison in the first place.
Pew also says that between 2010 and 2017, 22 JRI states reported total investments of $557 million, which includes 19 states investing $193 million upfront and 18 states investing $364 million in subsequent years.
According to Pew, among the projects that money saved on housing prisoners have gone to are:
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- crisis stabilization units;
- community-based behavioral health treatment;
- law enforcement partnerships aimed at reducing violent crime;
- more community supervision of offenders;
- problem-solving courts;
- in-prison programming;
- pretrial reform; and,
- victims’ services.
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At Wednesday’s meeting, Adam Gelb, who ran Pew’s justice reinvestment program for 12 years, characterized some of the JRI shortcomings cited by Sabol as “reform meeting reality.”
(Gelb now heads a separate justice reform effort called the Council on Criminal Justice.)
Gelb explained that in many states, when money is not spent on a capital project such a prison, it can’t be re-directed to social programs, but may be reserved for other kinds of construction.
Money saved by closing or not building prisons may be used for major items like raising the salaries of remaining corrections officers, which happened in Michigan, he said.
The long JRI effort helped produce a “large cadre of people who are changing the culture of policy making” in criminal justice, Gelb said.
The final story on JRI is yet to be told, with research still underway.
Maryland passed its own justice reinvestment law in 2017, and an evaluation is being led by criminologist James Lynch of the University of Maryland, who like Sabol is a former director of the U.S. Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Lynch described the ongoing study at the criminology meeting, saying that the results so far show that the state’s reforms have not led to any increase in serious crimes.
In their paper, Sabol and Baumann of Georgia State conceded that identifying JRI’s effects on public safety presents challenges.” They noted that states implemented many different kinds of reforms in different ways.
Maryland’s effort is relatively new, but several states had JRI programs well under way as early as 2010, the paper says, which “provides a sufficient length of time to conduct at least some preliminary analysis of JRI’s impacts on public safety.”
So far, however, “the absence of evidence about JRI’s impacts on public safety are disappointing gaps in knowledge about what JRI may have accomplished and whether the federal investment paid off,” Sabol and Baumann said.
The Trump administration has not supported JRI’s main aim of reducing prison population, as The Crime Report has described. Congress has continued to fund it, but the administration has changed the focus of the program to better gathering of data to fight violent crime.
Ted Gest is president of Criminal Justice Journalists and Washington bureau chief of The Crime Report.