In early
2018, the 8th District Court partnered with the City of Kalamazoo and the
County of Kalamazoo to submit an application to participate in the Intergovernmental
Policy Academy: Young Adults and the Justice System (“Academy”).
The
Academy is a collaborative effort of the National League of Cities,
the National Association of Counties, and the National Conference of State
Legislatures, underwritten by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
as part of its “Safety and Justice Challenge.” The Foundation’s challenge is a national
initiative to reduce over-incarceration by changing the way America thinks
about and uses jails. The purpose of the
Academy is to engage elected leaders (including judges, law enforcement
officials, and legislators) to develop and implement strategies to achieve
measurable reductions in the use of jails for young adults aged 18-24 years.
The process
of pulling together the information required for the application was an
eye-opening experience. Our local
criminal justice agencies discovered a lack of data sharing between agencies,
as well as issues with data accessibility. However, we also came to realize that there
was a broader breakdown in communication between the members of the agencies in
our community – the left hand did not know what the right hand was doing, as
the saying goes. The application process
made us aware of the opportunity for improvement in these areas, and all
parties expressed a desire to work together, whether or not we were selected to
be a part of the Academy.
Fortunately,
our team was selected to participate
in the Academy, along with four other teams from around the United States. Representatives from our city, county, and
court travelled to San Francisco in June 2018 to meet with the teams from
California, Indiana, Kansas, and New Mexico. We heard from experts and experienced criminal
justice professionals, and we participated in workshops and policy discussions,
all with the goal of creating a tangible plan to reduce the young adult jail
population collaboratively.
As our Kalamazoo
team met, we discovered that while multiple agencies in our community are taking
steps to reduce the young adult jail population, our efforts are not always coordinated.
For instance, our district court offers
a young adult diversion court for individuals 17-20 years of age on a diversion
or a delayed sentence. The diversion court
offers additional support for housing, education, employment, cognitive
behavioral therapy services, counseling services, etc., to move these young
people forward into adulthood while maintaining their diversions and/or delayed
sentences.
On the other
hand, our largest local law enforcement agency, the Kalamazoo Department of
Public Safety, oversees or participates in similar programs for individuals in
this age range. One such program, the Group
Violence Initiative, works with individuals 17 and older who have had multiple
interactions with law enforcement and seeks to change their behavior of by
engaging them in education, employment, and social services provided by community
partner organizations.
It is
wonderful that our court and police department are actively working to improve outcomes.
Through our participation in the Academy
project, we hope to achieve even better, more efficient outcomes as we work to
coordinate these efforts.
While
attending the meetings in San Francisco, our group also learned about criminal
justice coordinating councils (CJCCs) and the role these organizations can play
in improving communication, cooperation, and coordination between the various agencies
of a local criminal justice system. Such
councils are not new, but the idea was new to the members of our team. What better way for us to organize ourselves
to accomplish our goal of reducing the young adult jail population
collaboratively? As we started to plan
the creation of a CJCC here in our community, we were a little embarrassed to
learn that such a council already existed in our county, and some of us were
actually on it (in theory). I would say
that our CJCC existed on paper only, but no one has been able to find the
written bylaws, minutes, records, etc.
Unfortunately,
some years ago the loss of a grant-funded administrator, turnover in personnel,
and the lack of acute criminal justice issues requiring the members’ attention
led to the CJCC’s demise. Our team
agreed that it would be better to blow the dust off the cover of the previous CJCC’s
records than to reinvent the wheel. We
were able to resurrect enough of the council’s documents from archived internet
sources to breathe new life into our local CJCC.
Now that we
have an organized body to carry out our work, the next step is to gather the
data needed to identify and quantify the problems we seek to remedy. As noted above, a lack of accessible data has
been an issue from the beginning. Our
sheriff can readily tell us who is in jail and the age of the individual. With a little more effort, he can determine the
length of incarceration and why he or she is being held. What is not
readily accessible to the sheriff or the court is data concerning how many times an individual has been incarcerated
or failed to appear in court.
Compiling the
information needed for the application to take part in the Academy was a
laborious, time-consuming, mostly manual process, which involved looking up
individuals’ cases in two separate case management systems, and comparing said
information with that in the jail’s system. While such an analysis may be undertaken on
occasion, given the current state of data availability, it is impractical to do
so on a regular basis. Moreover, irregular
snapshots of the jail population are of limited value when trying to set a
baseline or measure progress towards a particular goal. As such, we have enlisted the aid of a local
nonprofit with expertise in statistics and data collection.
The five
Academy teams will be meeting again in January and June 2019 to review each
team’s progress. Our team has prioritized the data collection, and we
anticipate forming a CJCC workgroup in the near future.
A friend and
colleague has noted that when it comes to courts, change usually occurs in the
form of evolution, not revolution. Six
months after our gathering in California, I am proud of the progress that our
criminal justice agencies are making toward our goal of reducing the use of
jails for young adults. We have been
meeting regularly, engaging others in our effort, learning about our
capabilities and limitations, and strengthening our relationships. While our team will not solve all of our
community’s ills within the next six months, I am confident that we will be
able to report that we are proactively and collaboratively making progress, and
evolving.
