After a Request for Proposal was sent out by the San Diego County Board of Supervisors in search of “A Data Driven Approach to Protecting Public Safety, Improving and Expanding Rehabilitative Treatment Services, and Advancing Equity through Alternatives to Incarceration: Building on Lessons Learned during the COVID-19 Pandemic,” the Criminal Justice Research of the San Diego Association of Governments, signed a contract with the County to serve as the independent contractor.
SANDAG has been analyzing data through community input to identify the primary drivers of reduced incarceration rates during COVID-19, disaggregate the population affected, analyze outcomes associated with these short-term changes in incarceration policy, and recommend policy changes to reduce jail populations safely and permanently and better protect public safety with alternatives to incarceration.
In public meetings since May 2022, the data driven information gathered has found best practices, primary recommendations to date, and barriers that keep those who have been incarcerated returning to jail.
At the Jan. 25 community forum, Principal Criminal Justice Researcher Project Manager Dr. Octavio Rodriquez Ferreira said in an analysis of some of the best practices in ATI that they were able to document and analyze them.
“The ATI has very different portions of segments,” he said. “First of all, we analyzed jail population data. The second portion is understanding who had continued contact with the justice system, especially after the COVID -19 pandemic and all the policy changes that happened around that time. The third portion of the study is to document service’s needs, availability, the gaps and the barriers. Number four is identifying some programs or policies that have been successful or have proved to be promising or expanding in alternatives to incarceration,” adding the final phase is a cost analysis of a variety of services.
Ferreira said they have conducted surveys, and community forums to develop “more solid research” and will now wrap up the research and provide recommendations to the County of its research.
“One of the important things to remember is how jail bookings have decreased over the last couple of years,” he said. “Bookings decreased dramatically in 2020, and despite some peaks they have remained lower than in previous years. In this context it is important to ask this population that is not going to jail, what needs and services to they require, and alternatives they have opposed to going to jail.”
Ferreira said some of the best practices and examples found in data collection are: Community level crisis response and diversion, law enforcement-assisted crises response and diversion. Alternative treatment options for substance use offenses, behavioral interventions to reduce failure to appear, collaborative courts, pre-plea outreach and advocacy, correctional therapeutic communities, educational and vocational programs, comprehensive reentry service, and wraparound healthcare services.
Ferreira said preliminary takeaways and recommendations to date include focusing on prevention as much as reentry, meeting basic needs and earning a living wage is necessary to prevent incarceration, meet people where they are and consider individual needs as there is not a one size fits all approach, low-level offender have frequent contact so engaging them in services may not be easy, but it is essential to stop the revolving door of justice system contact, ensuring services are ease to get to, culturally competent, and use peer monitors, and that the County is in a unique position to facilitate collaboration and information/data sharing.
In community services, surveys indicate that housing, help paying for basic necessities, mental health services, employment assistance, transportation, and substance abuse treatment are the most important needs to reduce reentry into the criminal justice system.
Showing Up for Racial Justice North County San Diego’s Tom Packard said he had significant concerns about the data collected for the final report.
“Based on my review of your findings today I have not found nearly enough information regarding specific services needed in particular communities,” he said. “Your third interim report said you were waiting on Behavioral Health Services data from county funded programs. I think that data augmented with key informant interviews from service providers regarding service usage, waiting lists, and frustrations about no appropriate programs available for referrals to their clients will be needed to show service gaps. You will need this data to make specific recommendations to the Board.”
Darwin Fishman, part of SANDAG’s advisory group following this research process, said there are serious issues with the data provided by SANDAG and trying to connect it to policy recommendations.
“The good news is that for San Diego we do not have to reinvent the wheel,” he said. “There are not only other cities that have done ATIs, so one of the things we are using now is the ATI in Los Angeles and their report. They have over 100 recommendations. They are strong. They are clear recommendations. Hopefully at some point we will get on track with that. Hopefully we will be able to connect the usable data that makes sense for those areas where we can make a difference in ATIs to policy recommendations.”
Jerry Holt said the criminal justice system and the behavioral health system’s lack of data in this is frustrating.
“In January 2020, there was 6,559 people in our jails. Two years later there is 3,689, a 43% drop,” he said. “It blows my mind that we have a 43% drop and I do not see crime raging out in the streets. I do not see a lot of blowback from that. And, I am wondering why those 43% of people in jail were in jail in the first place. If we stop talking about all the data and all the programs, and we start talking about the customer, the person that is involved in the legal system, and we put them in the center, they are screaming for help. When the community is not cognizant of that we lose a lot of opportunities. One thing we could do is poll those people who were released in the past couple of years,” adding that the report that is being worked on now will not be seen until Feb. 28, and that it is frustrating that there is a draft out there that they could be giving feedback on before it gets released.
SANDAG Associate Research Analyst Sarah Egan said the recommendation presented were not specifically tied to best practices, but more generic.
“But the actual report and the best practices research that we are doing does look at specific things that are happening in other cities…We are focusing on programs that have been formally evaluated, but we are also looking at programs and practices that have been recommended or seen promising and not yet evaluated.”
For more information, or to make comments on this study, visit ati.sandag.org.
