Project

Public Safety Performance Project

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Public Safety Performance Project

Crime and correctional control—any court-ordered supervision of an individual, whether in the community, as with probation or parole, or in a facility, such as a jail or prison—create substantial burdens for governments and taxpayers, as well as for people in confinement or under supervision and their families. But decades of research have revealed a range of strategies that are more effective for achieving public safety.

Since 2005, The Pew Charitable Trusts and its partners have conducted research, provided technical assistance and legislative support to governments, and made strategic grants to advance fiscally sound, data-driven criminal and juvenile justice policies and practices that protect public safety and reduce correctional populations and costs.

Building on this record, Pew is working with state and local officials and community stakeholders around the country to reform jail, community supervision, and juvenile legal systems by:

  • Safely reducing admissions to and the length of time people spend in jail, expanding strategies to ensure that people accused of crimes appear in court, reducing the likelihood of re-arrest while awaiting trial, supporting crime victims, and better aligning public safety practices and investments with research and constitutional principles.
  • Decreasing the size of probation and parole populations so that community supervision agencies can focus their limited resources on the individuals with the greatest needs, implement best practices to increase successful outcomes, and reduce returns to jail and prison for new offenses and technical violations (i.e., noncompliance with one or more supervision rules).
  • Reducing the number of young people who enter the juvenile court system and are subjected to its orders and sent away from their families to residential facilities.
  • Aligning the amount of time young people stay in residential facilities with research on effective practices, and improving the quality of supervision, services, and supports available in their home communities.
  • Identifying and reforming policies and practices that contribute to disparities based on genderrace, class, ability, and ethnicity in people’s experiences and outcomes within the criminal and juvenile legal system, and that limit opportunities for people of color and disabled people to avoid becoming embroiled in the criminal and juvenile legal systems or to exit those systems.

Through these strategies, Pew aims to help policymakers enact data-driven reforms that deliver lasting results.

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Report

Policy Reforms Can Strengthen Community Supervision

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Report

Since 1980, the nation’s community supervision population has ballooned by almost 240 percent. As of 2016, 1 in 55 U.S. adults (nearly 4.5 million people) are on probation or parole, more than twice the number incarcerated in state and federal prisons and local jails.

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Article

Why Hasn’t the Number of People in U.S. Jails Dropped?

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Article

Federal statistics show that from 2010 to 2017, crimes, arrests, and resulting jail admissions fell by 14, 20, and 18 percent, respectively. In fact, there were 2 million fewer admissions to jails nationwide in 2017 than seven years earlier. Still, despite these positive trends, the total number of people in county and municipal jails remained virtually unchanged.

Small but Growing Group Incarcerated For a Month or More Has Kept Jail Populations High
Article

Small but Growing Group Has Kept Jail Populations High

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Article

The COVID-19 pandemic has focused attention on the more than 700,000 people in jails across the United States because of the potential for spread of the virus to those working and confined there.

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The Public Supports Alternatives to Incarceration

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Voters’ top priority is keeping communities safe, but large majorities also believe that the nation imprisons too many people for too long.  A body of national- and state-level public opinion research dating to 2010 has found overwhelming support across political parties, regions, ages, genders, and racial/ethnic groups for policy changes that shift nonviolent offenders from prison to more effective, less expensive alternatives.

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Podcast

Reform in the Most Incarcerated State

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Podcast

Louisiana has the highest imprisonment rate in the U.S., but that may change as a result of comprehensive criminal justice reform passed this summer. Through a tremendous bipartisan effort, state leaders passed a package of bills that aims to reduce crime and incarceration through innovative, evidence-based means. That includes steering less serious offenders away from prison, strengthening alternatives to incarceration, and removing barriers to success during re-entry to society. Terry Schuster of Pew's public safety performance project speaks with host Dan LeDuc about why this change was important and what its impact could be. For more information on public safety, listen to the episode “Less Incarceration, Less Crime” to find out what two leaders in South Carolina did to slow prison growth and make communities safer.