Communities bear the cost of a massive explosion in the jail population which has nearly doubled in less than two decades, according to JPI’s Jailing Communities: The Impact of Jail Expansion and Effective Public Safety Strategies. The research found that jails are now warehousing more people even though crime rates are at nearly the lowest levels in thirty years.

Jail population growth has serious consequences for communities that are paying tens of billions of dollars annually to sustain jails. Jails are filled with people with drug addictions, the homeless and people charged with immigration offenses. The report concludes that jails have become “new asylums,” with six out of 10 people in jail living with a mental illness.

New data revealed that Latinos are most likely to have to pay bail, have the highest bail amounts, are least likely to be able to pay and, by far, the least likely to be released prior to trial. African Americans are nearly five times as likely to be incarcerated in jails as whites and almost three times as likely as Latinos. Further exacerbating jail crowding problems is detainment for immigration violations—up 500 percent in the last decade.

In 2004, local governments spent a staggering $97 billion on criminal justice, including police, the courts and jails. Over $19 billion of county money went to financing jails alone. By way of comparison, during the same period, local governments spent $8.7 billion on libraries and $28 billion on higher education.

The report recommends improving release procedures for pretrial and sentenced populations; developing and implementing alternatives to incarceration; re-examining policies that lock up individuals for nonviolent crimes; diverting people with mental health and drug treatment needs to the public health system and community-based treatment; diverting spending on jail construction to agencies that work on community supervision and make community supervision effective; and providing more funding for education, employment, and housing.

The release of Jailing Communities sparked a nationwide discussion about the societal and financial costs jails place on communities.

Since the report’s April 1 release, over twenty articles, including two Associated Press stories, have focused on its findings and the realities of local jail incarceration rates. The coverage is spread across the nation and across different forms of media, from an article in the Washington Post to the Cape Cod Times to stories on several radio shows.

In many states, Jailing Communities brought the incarceration of the mentally ill into the debate. "I think we run the biggest mental institution in the state and that shouldn't be the case," said Maricopa County, AZ Sheriff Joe Arpaio. "[The Justice Policy Institute is] correct, [the mentally ill] should not be in our jails. There should be alternative ways to deal with mental illness” (Arizona Republic, April 2, 2008).

America’s juvenile justice systems are poised for a fundamental, urgently needed transformation—and not a moment too soon. Change in juvenile justice is vitally important for two reasons. First, chronic delinquents have some of the worst odds of maturing into successful adults. Compared to their peers, they will achieve less education, work fewer hours at lower pay, form lasting families less frequently, and spend time behind bars with alarming frequency.

Second, our failure to respond effectively to delinquency sustains unacceptable levels of crime, especially in our poorest neighborhoods, fraying the social fabric essential to thriving communities while costing huge amounts for police, prosecution and prisons.

This situation need not persist. Over the past 20 years, we have compiled powerful new evidence on what works in combating delinquency, devised and tested new intervention strategies, and begun putting this new knowledge into use. What have we learned?

First, we must reaffirm that youth are different from adults--still maturing, less culpable, more amenable to change—and, therefore, need and deserve a separate system of justice that reflects their developmental status. Recent research has deepened our understanding of the ways that kids are different and was a major reason why the U.S. Supreme Court banned the death penalty for juveniles several years ago. Still, we are prosecuting almost 200,000 kids in adult courts annually and incarcerating many—disproportionately African American youth—in adult jails and prisons. This is bad for kids and for public safety. The Centers for Disease Control, for example, recently reported that laws treating juveniles as adults actually increase recidivism.

Keeping kids in the juvenile justice system should not, however, be confused with putting them unnecessarily in juvenile institutions. Almost two-thirds of confined youth are nonviolent offenders, incarcerated often for want of better alternatives or because they have worn out system personnel’s patience. These are not adequate excuses for locking up kids, especially now that we have rigorously-tested, evidence-based programs that produce better results than incarceration. Expanding these community-based options should become a priority.

We also need to stop pulling youth into the juvenile justice system’s orbit unnecessarily. Over the past decade, because of “zero tolerance” policies in schools and limited public services, youth have been “dumped” into juvenile justice, presumably to get help, but typically only to languish in detention or end up with a delinquency record. Experience shows clearly that juvenile justice is not the place to seek services that should be provided by the education, mental health or child welfare systems.

The system’s persistent and perplexing failure to engage families, to strengthen and empower them to play their roles as primary influences on their children, must be remedied. Models are now available, for example, that involve parents in planning their children’s court dispositions. Not surprisingly, when families are involved, youth do better.

All of the things wrong with juvenile justice have disproportionate impacts on youth of color. Indeed, these shortcomings have made juvenile justice the system where our poorest, most disadvantaged youth end up. The system’s very credibility is undermined by this disproportionate representation of youth of color and many observers wonder whether the system’s problems aren’t a manifestation of official indifference to the populations served. Can we really continue to tolerate a justice system for our most unfortunate and troubled youth that is not worthy of the name?

As a society, we can not continue to proclaim our country the leader in issues related to justice and equality while operating a system that routinely fails to recognize that children are different from adults, that places kids in dangerous and ineffective institutions, that “dumps” youth with significant needs into juvenile court, and that treats youth of color more harshly than their white counterparts. We simply can not, nor must we continue to endure the rotten outcomes—ridiculous recidivism rates, enormous costs, shameful racial disparities—that are the result of current misguided policies and practices. A road map for reform now exists. Can we find the determination and leadership to follow it?

To read the 2008 Kids Count Essay—A Road Map for Juvenile Justice Reform, please visit www.aecf.org/kidscount

Bart Lubow is the Director of Programs for High Risk Youth at the Annie E. Casey Foundation. This piece was published in The Tennessean on June 17, 2008.

Baltimore judges say limited treatment resources drive unnecessary incarceration and negative outcomes for people with addictions who end up in the criminal justice system, according JPI’s Judging Maryland: Baltimore Judges on Effective Solutions to Working with Substance Abusers in the Criminal Justice System. The report explored Baltimore’s continued reliance on incarceration despite significant state, local, and private investments in a treatment system that is considered a national model. The report’s findings were based on two focus group interviews with judges who sit on Baltimore’s Circuit and District Courts.

According to report findings, inadequate supervision and a shortage of slots in appropriate treatment programs were two of the leading concerns voiced by the judges. Judges also felt that the lack of timely, objective information about the individual’s needs, availability of treatment slots, and outcomes at the individual and program level prevent them from identifying appropriate alternatives to incarceration and the proper level of supervision.

JPI recommended various policy reforms including increasing the capacity of Baltimore courts to assess defendants’ drug treatment needs; improving information-sharing systems among assessors, treatment providers, and the criminal justice system; enhanced training on substance abuse and Baltimore’s treatment system for interested judges; expanding the use of methadone maintenance to jail detainees and people on methadone treatment waitlists; improving supervision of participants in court-ordered treatment by fully implementing Proactive Community Supervision in Baltimore; expanding Baltimore’s Drug Treatment Court Programs and the Felony Diversion Initiative; studying the population of “frequent users”; expanding supportive housing and residential treatment capacity in the City; and improving representation of substance-addicted defendants by hiring more Office of the Public Defender (OPD) attorneys and staff to increase the number of defendants served by OPD’s Division of Client Services.

As part of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Models for Change initiative, the Juvenile Justice Initiative of Illinois released a report demonstrating that the 2005 repeal of a state law that once forced children accused of drug offenses into adult criminal courts has not compromised public safety. Instead, hundreds of Illinois youth have received a greater opportunity to turn their lives around.

Following the repeal of the automatic drug transfer law, the number of youth automatically sent to adult courts was lowered by two-thirds, with no detrimental impact on public safety. There was also no increase in juvenile court caseloads or waivers to adult courtrooms, according to Changing Course: A Review of the First Two Years of Drug Transfer Reform in Illinois.
The repeal of the automatic drug transfer law put Illinois back in the national spotlight for reform of juvenile justice policy based on data, evidence-based practices and fairness.

“In the two years since the automatic transfer laws were repealed, children have been returned to the jurisdiction of the juvenile court where they belong,” said Diane Geraghty, director of the Loyola Civitas ChildLaw Center, lead entity for the Models for Change initiative in Illinois. “This legislation returns Illinois to its original role as a leader in rehabilitating youth and protecting communities.”

Based on the success of the repeal, the report recommends additional reforms, including enhanced rehabilitative programs for youth, differences in sentencing for youth and adults, and the delegation of authority to juvenile court judges to determine which juvenile cases should be transferred to adult courts.

For more information on the Models for Change initiative, visit www.modelsforchange.net.

For more information on Changing Course, go to www.jjustice.org.

In partnership with Justice Maryland and the Drug Policy Alliance, JPI has launched a community-based project that will document the devastating affect of over-incarceration and the drug war on communities, families and civic institutions in Baltimore City. This project will provide individuals affected by Maryland’s criminal justice system with a platform to tell their stories and engage with policy makers. This project is supported by the Open Society Institute-Baltimore and is part of JPI’s multi-year effort to reform criminal justice policy in Maryland.

JPI’s previous research and publications reveal the need for a documentation project focused on Baltimore City, where an astonishing 54 percent of all African American men ages 20-30 are either in prison or jail or on probation or parole. African Americans represent only 28 percent of the general population in Maryland, but comprise 90 percent of all those imprisoned for drug offenses. This is despite public health research that shows whites and African Americans use drugs at similar rates. Data like this underscores the need for sentencing reform. But data can’t tell the human toll of these policies or explain how an over-reliance on incarceration has affected civic institutions in this city.

“We believe that by giving people affected by Maryland’s criminal justice system a platform to tell their stories, we will give policy makers an insider’s look at what the real consequences of uninformed and shortsighted policies are,” says project coordinator Shakti Belway. “Together we can tell the untold story of Maryland’s punitive, ineffective criminal justice policies—and reveal the impact on our communities.”

For more information or to participate in this documentation project or if you need more information, contact Shakti Belway at Shakti.Belway@gmail.com (415-516-4211) or Kim Haven at Kimberly@justicemaryland.org (443-759-4152).

The Justice Policy Institute joined forces with the NAACP to produce a report on the state of juvenile justice in seven southern states. The report, Juvenile Justice Reform: Unlocking the Future of Our Communities, was published as a chapter in the NAACP report One Voice, One Vote, and summarized the issues facing youth in Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee.

The report found that thousands of youth of color growing up in the Southern U.S. are funneled into the juvenile justice system because of racially disparate school discipline policies and a lack of community-based alternatives. Seventeen percent of the youth in the U.S. who are either detained or committed to a juvenile facility live in the seven states covered in the report, and African American youth in the South are disproportionately detained for drug offenses, even though their use patterns are similar to those of whites. Additionally, the report found that the majority of youth arrested in the United States have been arrested for nonviolent offenses, and do not pose a serious threat to public safety.

“Students should not be deprived of an education and a future by being derailed into the juvenile justice system for minor acts,” said Adora Nweze, state president of the Florida State Conference NAACP, in the chapter’s introduction. “The criminalization of our children must be stopped.”

The report recommends the re-authorization of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA), which would prohibit the incarceration of children for non-criminal offenses, reduce racial disparities in the justice system, and ensure that children are never imprisoned with adults. It also calls for legislators to pass the Youth PROMISE Act, which focuses innovative crime-fighting resources in communities that need them most and mandates that states use evidence-based programs to meet the needs of youth and find alternatives to incarceration.

“The Justice Policy Institute’s emphasis on solutions proven successful at reducing incarceration and on building better futures for our children across the country highlight the kind of changes that we hope to see adopted by our lawmakers,” said Derrick Johnson, national NAACP Board member.

The NAACP report was prepared for the annual Civil Rights Advocacy Training Institute, which was attended by over 300 members of the Southeast Region of the NAACP. The Institute trains NAACP members to advocate for policy reforms that would greatly improve the state of African American communities in the South. 

One of the reasons John McCain says he is touring Colombia and Mexico this week is to underscore the importance of the "War on Drugs." Just as McCain wants to continue Bush's failed policies in the "War on Terror," he wants to continue Bush's failed policies in the "War on Drugs" as well.

Though the failures of the "War on Drugs" are more silent and insidious than his dramatic failures in the Middle East, the two have much in common. Both have involved an over-reliance on, and often reckless use of, military force to solve problems for which military power is not appropriate. And both result in massive diversions of attention and energy from the real source of a problem into "crusades" that actually made matters worse.

Of course the central fallacy of the "War on Drugs" is that drug addiction is not essentially a military or law enforcement problem. It is a medical problem. Today America spends billions of dollars on enforcement, interdiction, eradication and the incarceration of those who sell and use drugs. Yet at the same time there are long waiting lists to get into serious drug rehab programs.

We've known for years that by far the most cost effective way of cutting drug use is through treatment and education. A recent study by the Justice Policy Institute found that investments in drug treatment and education are 10 to 15 times more effective at cutting drug use than the same amount spent on law enforcement aimed at drugs...

Of course the Bush-McCain strategy in the "War on Drugs" has many other victims. Quite apart from the millions of Americans who go without treatment, there are hundreds of thousands more who are locked up for their drug use. An example: fifty-two percent of those incarcerated in Illinois prisons for drug offenses are there for "possession." That's kind of like the Medieval practice of burning people at the stake because they were mentally ill and possessed by "demons".

The massive mandatory minimum drug penalties of the "War on Drugs" don't simply send people to jail for a few months - but for huge chunks of their lives...

The price of these policies to our broader society has been breathtaking. The entire correctional system had about 550,000 inmates in 1985. Today, it has 2.6 million--mostly because of mandatory minimums and major limitations on the use of parole at both the state and federal level.

The cost of the system has gone from $9 billion a year in 1985 to $60 billion a year today.

The prison system doesn't focus on rehabilitation or education, either. It basically warehouses inmates and in many cases makes them more inclined to commit real crimes. Today the recidivism rate is 67 percent. Two-thirds of inmates will return to prison after being released.

As a result of these policies, one in three black men can expect to serve time in jail or prison at some point in his life, and at any given time one in nine African American men between 18 and 29 years of age is behind bars.

Our "War on Drugs" is one of the main reasons why America puts a higher percentage of its population behind bars than any other society on earth. A shocking twenty-five percent of prisoners in the World are in the US, even though we have only 5% of the world's population. That is shameful for the land of the free.

The bottom line is simple. America simply can't afford to allow McCain to continue Bush's "War on Drugs" for four more years.

Robert Creamer is a long-time political organizer and strategist and author of the recent book "Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win", available on Amazon.com

Excerpted from the Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-creamer, July 2, 2008

JPI is collaborating with the Coalition for Juvenile Justice (CJJ) to document states’ compliance with the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA). The JJDPA is a comprehensive federal law that prohibits states from incarcerating children for non-criminal behavior, restricts when and how states can incarcerate children in adult facilities and mandates that states address disproportionate minority confinement. In order to help CJJ assess JJDPA-related best practices at the state and federal level, JPI is in the process of administering a comprehensive survey to State Advisory Groups in all 56 states and territories.

Relying on JPI’s research, CJJ develop practice brief that will evaluate the effectiveness of current compliance practices, requirements and guidelines, and make recommendations for improvements. The practice brief will be a valuable resource for state level compliance efforts. CJJ further plans to use the brief to help inform policy and practice in the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP).

The Justice Policy Institute worked with the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana and Color of Change to help inform the public about latest Jena 6 legal proceedings. Last year, Jena became synonymous with injustice after more than 20,000 people marched to protest the treatment of the six black students known as the "Jena 6." After African American high school students integrated an area of the schoolyard under a large shade-tree, white students hung nooses from the tree's branches. Months of racial tension culminated in a schoolyard fight that prompted local law enforcement to charge six African American students with attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder. No white students were charge with any crime. One of the Jena 6 was tried as an adult and convicted by an all-white jury. The Appeals Court later overturned this conviction and sent his case to juvenile court. The remaining five students still face multi-year prison sentences.

In an attempt to ensure a fair trial, attorneys for the five remaining students filed recusal motions that requested the appointment of a new judge. These motions argued that the presiding judge has personal and professional bias against the Jena 6 and is therefore unable to provide a fair trial.

While the media reported widely on Jena’s failed justice system, the motions requesting a new judge were the first legal documents that truly described the biased justice system in Jena. In short, these motions put the Jena justice system on trial. In the words of J.B. Beard, brother of Jesse Ray, the youngest member of the Jena 6, “A judge who has an axe to grind against my brother and his friends has the power to destroy their lives and make the world think the worst about our town. But a fair trial for the Jena 6 will prove to them and to the nation that justice in Jena is possible.”

The Jena 6 team is currently awaiting the court’s decision on the recusal motions.