Key Initiatives

The CSG Justice Center Makes a Difference for the States

Improving Outcomes for Youth

Improving Outcomes for Youth (IOYouth) works with state and local jurisdictions to align their policies, practices and resource allocation with what research shows works to reduce recidivism and improve outcomes for youth while enhancing public safety. IOYouth’s data-driven technical assistance process takes a collaborative, jurisdiction-driven approach by convening leaders across all branches of government to identify challenges to improving youth outcomes in the juvenile justice system, determine administrative and policy priorities and enact system changes. The CSG Justice Center partners with jurisdictions over an 18-month period to establish a bipartisan, interbranch task force, conduct a data-driven assessment of the juvenile justice system from the point a youth is referred to the system through reentry into the community, provide recommendations for improvement and offer technical assistance.

By Katy Albis, Darby Baham and Leslie Griffin

The CSG Justice Center works with state and local leaders across the country, responding to their needs. What staff hear on the ground in states informs the development of initiatives that work to increase public safety and strengthen communities. Here are just a few of the initiatives the Justice Center is currently supporting or leading that help state and local policymakers address the needs of their constituents.

Expanding First Response and Crisis Response Options

Jurisdictions across the country are reimagining their approach to public safety by redefining who answers calls for service involving mental health or substance use crises, homelessness, “quality-oflife” issues or other social disturbances. CSG Justice Center staff have partnered with national experts such as the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs’ Bureau of Justice Assistance, the University of Cincinnati and Vital Strategies to develop resources that policymakers can use to learn more about these options and adequately support them. “Expanding First Response: A Toolkit for Community Responder Programs” serves as a central hub for local communities and states looking to establish or strengthen community responder programs, drawing on the experiences of emerging models across the country. The resource repository for the 2021 national Taking the Call conference also features information that policymakers can use to better understand how these crisis and community responder options, when implemented as part of a larger crisis system, can help jurisdictions improve health outcomes, strengthen connections to services and reduce unnecessary police involvement.

Lantern

Across the country, revocations from probation and parole account for a significant portion of admissions to state prisons. Unfortunately, supervision agencies often lack the tools or capacity to identify what behaviors or circumstances lead to revocations or what interventions effectively change behavior to prevent them. The Lantern initiative, a collaborative project between the CSG Justice Center and nonprofit technology partner Recidiviz, creates real-time data tools to help state policymakers better understand supervision trends. Automated tools calculate millions of metrics each week to track probation and parole revocations and identify solutions that can more effectively prevent unnecessary prison admissions. Lantern also produces custom analyses of trends in revocation decision-making and supervision violations and successes to help reduce recidivism.

Justice Reinvestment Initiative

State policymakers are grappling with a unique combination of public safety challenges, including upticks in violent crime, the opioid epidemic, the overrepresentation of people with mental illnesses in the justice system, high rates of recidivism and the high cost of corrections, all while trying to improve services for victims and increase opportunities for people returning to communities from jail and prison. To tackle these issues, more than 30 states have partnered with the Justice Center to use the Justice Reinvestment Initiative to identify and implement measures to improve public safety, reduce spending and reinvest savings in strategies that can decrease crime and recidivism. The initiative, which is funded by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs’ Bureau of Justice Assistance with support from The Pew Charitable Trusts, has led to billions of dollars in savings and meaningful decreases in prison admissions over the last decade.

Justice Counts

Policymakers are often forced to make critical decisions about the safety, liberties and tax dollars of their constituents using limited or stale criminal justice data. In the face of significant challenges and fiscal pressures, leaders need up-to-date information from across the justice system, presented in a way that is easy to understand and utilize. Justice Counts is an initiative led by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the CSG Justice Center and a first-of-itskind national coalition of 21 partners to develop and help implement consensus-driven metrics for criminal justice agencies to provide policymakers with more accurate, accessible and actionable data.

Reentry 2030

Reentry 2030 is a 50-state campaign intended to unite leaders around one goal: successful reintegration for every person with a criminal record. The campaign was launched in April 2022 with support from the Biden-Harris administration and will provide resources, tools and supports to help every state design and implement an ambitious plan to work toward a future of reentry that is human-centered, coordinated, transparent and equitable. Reentry 2030 builds on the success of Second Chance Act programs and aims to help every state: (1) scale up access to stable housing, education, employment skills training, behavioral health training, health care and other supports for people with criminal records; (2) clear away unnecessary barriers to opportunities and economic mobility; and (3) advance racial equity by using data to understand and address disparities in access to services, quality of services and outcomes.