On a recent afternoon at the city hall in Toledo, Ohio, Holly Matthews is teaching her colleagues some slang. “I forgot to tell everyone my new word of the day,” she says. “It’s ‘pookie.’” A pookie, Matthews explains, is another word for a crack pipe. “I checked with Urban Dictionary,” she says, chuckling.
Matthews is executive director of the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, an agency that provides criminal justice information services to residents of Lucas County in Northwest Ohio. She is also one of a dozen members of the county’s Population Review Team, an interagency group that seeks ways of reducing or eliminating jail time for new or low-level offenders, with the goal of reducing incarceration rates in Lucas County’s overburdened jails. (Matthews’ “pookie” was in a case file she was reviewing, found by police in the pocket of a man who was arrested after a domestic dispute.)
The atmosphere in the room can be lighthearted, but the Population Review Team’s work is serious business — especially in Toledo, Lucas’ county seat, where reducing incarceration rates is sorely needed. The county’s jail is designed to hold only pretrial inmates, but it is being overburdened by too many people waiting to see a judge. In 2014, a U.S. Federal judge ordered the county to cap its jail population, which had a capacity of 346 beds. Two years after the cap was set, the jail’s population has been reduced to 667 people — down from 845 in 2016 — for the first quarter this year, according to Matthews.
To try and address these issues of overcrowding, the Population Review Team meets once a week to review the county’s jail cases to find ways to reduce bail, alter criminal offenses and, in some cases, eliminate or reduce jail time completely.
Toledo isn’t alone in dealing with overcrowded jails.
Nationally, jail populations have been steadily rising, contributing to high incarceration rates throughout the country. Daily local jail populations swelled from 157,000 in 1970 to over 700,000 people in 2015. Annually, there are close to 11 million admissions into jails, according to data collected by the Vera Institute of Justice.
“It’s become a crisis because as we’ve added laws that impose mandatory sentencing,” says Gene A. Zmuda, a common pleas court judge for Lucas County. “We are incarcerating more and more of our population.”
For those on the Population Review Team — along with Matthews, the group includes local correction officers and defense attorneys — this means reviewing rap sheets to determine if there are ways to release inmates without putting the public at risk, such as increased usage of electronic monitoring.
In other cases, plea deals are brokered, according to Sean McNulty, chief public defender for the Toledo Legal Aid Society and an original member of the review team. Candidates who are deemed “good” — those with misdemeanor charges or nonviolent crimes — can have their bail modified or their case expedited or, in some cases, they are simply set free.
Zmuda invokes an example of a first-time drug user. “Maybe jail isn’t the right place for that person,” he says. “Send them to rehabilitation and break the cycle of addiction.”
The program started in 2016, after the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation awarded the county a $2 million grant directing local mental-health organizations to partner with law enforcement officials, with the intent to “institute changes aimed at reducing local incarceration and disparities in jail usage in accordance with its implementation plan.”
Over the course of an afternoon, the team isolates about a dozen defendants in custody whose charges will be reviewed. During a recent meeting, McNulty and John Madigan, the city’s prosecutor, were able to agree to several resolutions for a handful of people who were sitting in the county’s jail. The negotiations included a reduced charge, credit for time served and a probation term.
According to Matthews, this comprehensive collaboration and review reduced 1,800 jail days in total for 2017. And while the jail’s population isn’t as low as officials want it to be, they point to the reductions they’ve made in the past two years, by almost two hundred inmates in total.
“Jail buildup happened over 40 years and it won’t be solved in just a year or two,” says Patrick Griffin, the senior program officer for the MacArthur Foundation.
Along with the review board meetings, Lucas County officials have implemented four other strategies — such as training cops to identify alternatives to arrests or keeping people with mental health issues out of jail — to help in reducing the county’s jail population.
And as the initiative continues, Griffin hopes that solutions like the ones being implemented in Lucas County will spread to other parts of the state, and beyond.
“It will take success and then practitioners will take notice,” he says. “We have to increase demand among citizens for jail reform.”
Zmuda, McNulty and others believe that the next important step will be addressing the overrepresentation of minors in the system, along with keeping substance abusers from getting swept into the jail.
“We’re holding fewer — and holding the right — people,” says Zmuda. “We have right-sized our jail.”
Tag: jail
This Former Inmate Fights for Others’ Freedom from Life Sentences
Jason Hernandez never thought he would see the outside world again.
Since 1998, he had been serving a life sentence in federal prison for selling crack cocaine in his native McKinney, Texas. It was his first criminal offense, but due to the Drug Act of 1986 and the mandatory minimum sentences it required, Hernandez found himself locked up at the age of 21. Then, in 2013, his prayers and petitions were answered: He was granted clemency by President Obama.
Watch the video above and see how Hernandez uses Crack Open the Door, his sentencing advocacy nonprofit, to spotlight and fight for the release of other first-time nonviolent drug offenders serving life without parole.
MORE: Criminal Justice Reform Is Imminent. Here’s Why
How Tablets Are Helping San Francisco Inmates Get Back on Track
It’s no secret that education programs in prison may help reduce recidivism and better transition inmates back into society, which is why California is launching a pilot program to supply tablets to prisoners.
The two year, $275,000 pilot program is directed toward helping inmates tap into the technology that’s now available in most elementary schools. The state is distributing 125 tablets, enabling access to only four websites but allowing prisoners to read books, do homework or prepare for their criminal cases through the use of a law library, MSNBC reports.
The tablets also feature an education application and curriculum developed by Five Keys Charter School, which donated $125,000 to the initiative. The California Wellness Foundation has also bestowed a $75,000 grant for the project, while San Francisco’s Adult Probation Department gave $75,000, according to Steve Good, the executive director for the Five Keys Charter School.
“We hope this will help bridge the digital divide and provide inmates access to technology that every elementary, middle and high school student already has, but has been out of reach for those forgotten by society,” Good says.
The majority of the 125 tablets will be given to men and women who are already part of the Five Keys programs. The tablets, developed by New York-based American Prison Data Systems, can be remotely monitored or disabled and will be available to prisoners most hours of the day. American Prison Data Systems also provides similar devices to juvenile jails in Indiana, Kansas and an adult prison system in Maryland.
“This is really cutting edge,” says San Francisco Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi. “Historically, there’s been resistance, if not prohibitions, on allowing technology into the living quarters of inmates.”
Inmate and former army veteran Dennis Jones hope the use of a tablet will help him earn a high school diploma and keep him off the streets the next time he’s released.
“I’m five credits shy of getting my diploma,” Jones says. “I’m willing to work toward that goal — and hopefully this will help me.”
A New Fleet of Food Trucks Offers a Better Path for Formerly Jailed Kids
Snow Day is the first in a potential fleet of food trucks by the New York City-based nonprofit Drive Change. On its menu: locally-sourced, maple syrup-inspired food that is prepared, cooked and served by formerly incarcerated youth.
Jordyn Lexton founded the organization in 2013 with the goal of reducing the number of young people that return to jail after being released with a criminal record. She employs them at $11 and hour and provides what she hopes will be a launchpad into the food industry or other employment opportunities.
How A New York Program is Reframing Prison Education
About two hours miles north of Manhattan, a group of young men meet weekly to debate philosophy and discuss composition. The curriculum is like any other liberal arts course, but the classroom is quite different from what most people experience.
These classes take place behind the confines of the Otisville Correctional Facility, a medium security prison in New York where many of its inmates are serving life sentences.
Otisville was the first to implement the Prison to College Pipeline (P2CP), a partnership between the City University of New York (CUNY) and the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS). Led by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Hostos Community College, the initiative selects inmates who have high school diplomas or GEDs and are eligible for release within five years to enroll as students through a process that includes assessment tests, submitting essays, and sitting down for an interview — much like the traditional college application process.
Founded in 2011, P2CP has successfully served 26 students incarcerated at Otisville and 30 students from John Jay College who sat in on monthly seminars with the Otisville students. The program boasts 12 students that have been released back into society, plus four that are enrolled at CUNY institutions (two at John Jay, one at Hostos and another at Bronx Community College) while two others have started the enrollment process. All of the men are employed and enrolled in a training program or an internship.
It’s no secret that prison education programs have been successful in crime prevention, but since the government passed a bill halting the federal financing of Pell grants to prisoners in 1994, support has been limited.
In fact, earlier this year New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo introduced a proposal in his budget to finance prison education but lawmakers opposed the plan. Since then, the governor dropped it. He need not look farther than his neighboring state of New Jersey, however, where Governor Chris Christie recently expanded the privately funded program the New Jersey Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prisons program (NJ-STEP). The initiative includes eight higher education institutions across the state offering courses to almost 500 inmates at six correctional facilities, NJ.com reports.
MORE: Cooking Up Change at an Illinois Prison
Elsewhere in New York, programs such as the Bard Prison Initiative — a partnership with Bard College that began in 1999 — has reported that two-thirds of the program’s alumni are employed, finishing college degrees, or enrolled in graduate schools including New York University, Columbia and Yale. The College and Community Fellowship in New York focuses on helping female inmates leaving prison finish college.
As the New York Times points out, prison education programs can go beyond preventing prison recidivism and crime prevention. A program to engage young inmates could serve as a model to educate wayward youth in troubled communities — preventing entry into the correctional system altogether.
In the meantime, P2CP continues to break barriers between the life an inmate expects and one that they can actually accomplish. The program is recruiting for Fall 2014 semester at Otisville, plus Greene and Wallkill, two other correctional facilities that will serve as potential breeding grounds for more untapped, bright minds.
Does Reducing Jail Sentences Take a Bite Out of Crime?
“We cannot prosecute our way to becoming a safer nation.”
That’s the guiding principle behind Attorney General Eric Holder’s “Smart on Crime” initiative, which he launched last spring. This week, he made impressive strides toward making good on that statement, as well as the plan’s promise to enforce fair punishments as well as ensuring safety.
Meet the Venture Capitalist Who’s Investing in Redemption
Christopher Redlitz spends his life turning other people’s dreams into realities. Now Redlitz, a venture capitalist and cofounder of Transmedia Capital in San Francisco, is focusing his skills on helping a group that rarely gets a second chance: prison inmates. Through his nonprofit, The Last Mile, Redlitz and his partners select groups of qualified men and provide them with training in technology and entrepreneurship. Through six months of classes, participants learn everything from how to use social media to forming businesses and more, leading up to their very own Demo Day, where they present their business ideas to a select audience. The hope is that, upon their release, the men will have the confidence and skills to work in a paid internship program within the Silicon Valley technology sector, where they can gain real-life experience to aid in the transition from inmate to citizen. The program is already a success at San Quentin State Prison, and now it’s being implemented in an L.A. county jail, with others soon to follow.
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