In 2015, the MacArthur Foundation launched the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC), a 10-year investment initiative that created a network of local jurisdictions across the country committed to rethinking how they use local jails. As part of this effort, the MacArthur Foundation partnered with the Urban Institute to create the Innovation Fund to expand the SJC Network, providing 32 participating jurisdictions with the opportunity to test innovative ideas for safely reducing their jail populations while maintaining or enhancing public safety. In this report we present key lessons learned from the Innovation Fund and its contribution to the overall change legacy of the SJC.

Why This Matters

When the SJC was launched, the United States was facing a worsening crisis in its criminal legal system. The jail population had more than tripled from 158,394 in 1978 to 744,600 in 2014, and millions of people were cycling through local jails each year. During that period, the average length of stay in local jails more than doubled, from 9 to 23 days. There were also stark racial and ethnic disparities: Black people were incarcerated in jails at more than three and a half times the rate of white people, and Indigenous people at more than twice the rate of white people. Jails were driving a major but largely overlooked part of the mass-incarceration crisis. The SJC emerged to fill this gap by mobilizing local partners to confront this challenge directly.

Key Takeaways

The Innovation Fund demonstrated how even modest grant awards, paired with specialized technical assistance and access to a network of jurisdictions committed to jail reform, can drive meaningful change in local criminal legal systems.

The Innovation Fund advanced the change legacy of the SJC by

• designing and implementing new programs and interventions to address jail use,
• increasing stakeholder collaboration within and beyond the criminal legal system,
• enhancing data capacity,
• changing the culture around jail reform, and
• reducing jail populations.

Most Innovation Fund sites continued their projects several years after receiving the MacArthur Foundation’s initial grant and expanded their projects to address other aspects of local jail reform. In addition, many sites continued to actively participate in the SJC Network well beyond their initial grant period, underscoring the value of ongoing peer-learning opportunities and support.

Common implementation challenges sites experienced included

• cross-agency collaboration among local criminal legal system partners,
• securing buy-in from stakeholders and community members,
• staffing shortages and frequent turnover,
• disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and
• identifying and sustaining long-term funding for their Innovation Fund projects.

How We Did It

To inform this report, Urban researchers conducted semistructured interviews with 40 Innovation Fund stakeholders from 25 sites; reviewed relevant materials, such as SJC progress reports and publicly available documents; and analyzed jail population data from the Vera Institute of Justice’s Incarceration Trends dataset. We analyzed transcripts and notes from the interviews using NVivo qualitative analysis software, applying a codebook developed to identify themes related to sites’ implementation of Innovation Fund projects, their involvement in the SJC Network, and the broader local criminal legal reform landscape.