The majority of people in jail are presumed innocent. Most are there for nonviolent offenses. Many are simply too poor to post bail. Our overuse of jails carries significant costs—to individuals, families, communities, and society at large. We need solutions to start where incarceration starts: in our nation’s jails.
The primary purpose of jails is to detain those awaiting trial who are a danger to public safety or a flight risk. But they now hold many who are neither, at exorbitant fiscal and social costs.
A total of 191 applications were submitted to the Challenge from jurisdictions spanning 45 states. Meet the 40 that were selected to participate in the Challenge Network.
“Most of these tragedies result from officers’ lack of training on how to deal with people with serious mental illnesses. Standard police training—to issue commands, and when they are not followed, to push harder and more aggressively—may work in other
“In the 24 years former inmate Shaurn Thomas spent trying to convince others of his innocence, he maintained that “the justice system was going to prevail sooner or later, and that somebody would hear my cries.” Letters he’d written claiming he
Closing Rikers Island, and re-envisioning jail in New York City: https://t.co/whA4TnEKfe #rethinkjails @macarthur https://t.co/jRmDICuOYL
"Our police dept. understands and believes that treatment over arrest... provides better, long-lasting results."… https://t.co/xJCJEBjkYS
As Albert Einstein said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” It’s hard to imagine a better example of the need for new ways of thinking than in the difficult
