Multnomah County has been awarded a $2 million grant as part of an effort to reduce local jail populations by improving what officials say is an outdated pretrial justice system.
The grant is from the MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge, a $217 million national initiative to reduce over-incarceration and address racial and ethnic disparities by changing the way Americans think about jail.
Abbey Stamp, the executive director of Multnomah County’s Local Public Safety Coordinating Council, said the grant will help tackle inefficiencies and implement better policies on how people are processed through the local criminal justice system.
“This grant is going to give us, as a system, the real opportunity to think long and hard and evaluate what’s the safest system we can implement,” Stamp said.
According to a statement from the county, many defendants cycle through the pretrial system periodically, compounding costly and time-consuming court appearances. Defendants awaiting trial who aren’t a flight risk or a danger to public safety end up being held by the pretrial system due to antiquated policies.
Stamp said these low-level repeat offenses are usually from people who are experiencing severe challenges with housing, mental health and addiction recovery. After being booked and released from jail, people end up missing their court summons and get arrested again. Low-level crimes usually consist of misdemeanors, theft and other instances with no victim or property damage.
“What we find is that the folks who commit those low level crimes are the ones that come back again and come back again. Those are the folks who are having housing crises, behavioral health challenges — from my perspective, these are folks who shouldn’t be in the justice system,” Stamp said.
“Clearly, it’s not the right fit in terms of how to get help. It’s not a simple task to come back to court in 30 days — it’s a population we need to understand a whole lot more about.”
To address the issues, the grant money will go toward hiring temporary staff to implement recommendations based on a comprehensive assessment of the pretrial system to “align with national best practices in pretrial justice.”
“Our goal is to make our system more risk-based, which is founded and developed through using social science and data to make better decisions about who should stay in jail, and who can safely be released from jail, either with supervision or without,” Stamp said.
“We want to increase our use of risk-based decision making, and decrease our use of charge-based decision making.”
The grant will also go toward addressing how incarceration impacts people of color.
According to a 2019 report by the W. Haywood Burns Institute, racial and ethnic disparities impact communities of color “at every decision point in Multnomah County’s public safety system.” Guided by the report, the county will relaunch a Racial and Ethnic Disparities sub-committee to address the issue.
This is the fourth grant the county has received from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. According to the Safety and Justice Challenge, Multnomah County has reduced the local jail population by over 10% since partnering with the foundation in 2015. The county aims to reach an overall reduction goal of 14.4% within the next two years.
In 2019, a Multnomah County Corrections Grand Jury released a report that found jails and detention centers weren’t appropriate locations for most people being held there. The report argues that most adults in custody should instead be in a clinical setting where they can receive specialized treatment, as most people in custody experience increasingly severe challenges with mental health, housing and substance abuse.
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