The White House launched a new criminal justice reform this week aimed at studying the prison population and determining which people should be moved from prison cells into treatment centers.
The Data-Driven Justice Initiative will seek to identify at-risk individuals — those suffering from mental illnesses, substance abuse disorders and chronic health problems — and relocate them into treatment facilities. It also aims to keep people from being incarcerated simply because they are awaiting trial for a low-level offense but cannot afford to post bail.
Sixty-seven state and local governments are part of the initiative, which also includes private-sector and philanthropic organizations like Amazon Web Services and MasterCard. By studying data and connecting those at-risk people with health and criminal justice departments, the coalition hopes to cut down the population of people in jail.
The initiative will also try to identify at-risk individuals in jail and find ways to release them safely back into society, by trying to replicate examples where this has worked.
According to the White House, more than 11 million Americans move through 3,100 local jails nationwide at a cost of $22 billion annually. Of those people, 64 percent suffer from mental illness, 68 percent have a substance abuse disorder and 44 percent suffer from chronic health problems.
The new initiative looks to break this cycle.
Here’s how Miami did it:
Miami-Dade, Florida, found that 97 people with serious mental illness accounted for $13.7 million in services over four years, spending more than 39,000 days in either jail, emergency rooms, state hospitals or psychiatric facilities in their county. In response, the county provided key mental health de-escalation training to their police officers and 911 dispatchers.
Over the past five years, Miami-Dade police have responded to nearly 50,000 calls for service for people in mental-health crises, but have made only 109 arrests, diverting more than 10,000 people to services or safely stabilizing situations without arrest.The jail population fell from over 7,000 to just over 4,700, and the county was able to close an entire jail facility, saving nearly $12 million a year.
“I can tell you that there’s almost nothing more frustrating to a police officer than seeing someone who clearly needs help, and having the only options available, as were mentioned, is jail and hospital emergency rooms,” Knoxville Police Chief David Rausch said Thursday.
According to Rausch, a new approach by the Knoxville Police Department — teaming up with local organizations to help people with mental and substance abuse problems — “has made our community safer, and it has improved the well-being of a part of our population that was being incarcerated because we didn’t recognize their behavior as symptoms of mental illness.”
The White House hopes that 100 state and local governments will be part of the coalition by the end of this year.
