Making Justice Local
The Criminal Justice Reform Initiative maps progressive policies block by block.
Give NowArrests and incarceration are a blanket response to the challenges of racial segregation, social isolation, and economic divestment. Across every US jurisdiction, a minority of neighborhoods and communities disproportionately implement this response to criminal justice, and it is disproportionately concentrated in a minority of neighborhoods and communities in every jurisdiction in the country. Those neighborhoods are the same ones where there’s high unemployment, frightening numbers of traumatized children, and emergency rooms that are overused for primary care. Without justice reform and targeted reinvestment, these neighborhoods are unlikely to extract themselves from the perpetual administration of costly, crippling government.
With only 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States holds over 20 percent of all the world’s prisoners: there is no doubt that the country has a justice problem. But many jurisdictions have substantially lowered their use of jail and prison—through intentional policies at the local level.
Unfortunately, such jurisdictions are the exception rather than the rule. Even the best data-driven criminal justice reform efforts often fail to incorporate empirical accounts of community experiences, interests, and priorities regarding safety and justice or the perspectives of justice system practitioners and those who have been involved in the justice system. The omission is especially problematic considering the well-documented concentrations of incarceration in low-income neighborhoods and neighborhoods of color, which already suffer multiple layers of inequality.
To address this need, the Criminal Justice Reform Initiative is working with a cadre of national technical-assistance partners to launch a five-year national Justice and Governance Partnership in mid-size cities and rural jurisdictions across the country. Working with local justice intermediaries, the technical-assistance partners will develop and launch the Justice Mapping Center’s Justice Audit, which will produce maps—along with other data reflecting the justice ecosystem—that visually depict spatial concentrations of high rates of incarceration and overlapping inequities in CJRI partner communities. Ultimately, these visualizations and data will be a critical part of Justice Reinvestment Plans, which will inform criminal justice and governance reform policies in CJRI partner jurisdictions.
