Transcriber: Sara Pasini Reviewer: Keira White
It was a sunny day, the school bus pulled up to the curb.
I was a little girl excited to see her mom.
I got off the bus and I realized something was wrong.
My mom had been crying. I kept asking: “Mom, what’s the matter?”
She just kept saying: “We have to go”.
That day, my dad had made a bad decision, he got involved in a drug deal.
He was arrested.
My mom was crying because she was terrified
our family was about to get ripped apart.
As a little girl, I remember the morning he went to court
and holding him so tightly
because I didn’t know if he was going to come home.
We were so lucky, my dad came home,
he was there for me, he was there for my family.
He became a Hall of Fame volunteer in my community.
I was lucky.
Unlike millions of others, I got to keep my dad.
It was before the war on drugs reached its peak.
It was before the rise in mandatory minimum sentencing
that sent so many people away from their families.
It has driven this calling to help keep more families and communities intact.
I’ve been on a journey to try to help our criminal justice system
do more good than harm.
My first job out of college was in probation and parole,
I supervised women like Joyce,
a single mom of teenage boys who had never been in trouble before.
Or guys like John,
who had a terrible temper and got in trouble and fights often.
And my responsibility,
what I was supposed to be doing, was to supervise them both
and have them, once a month, find a way to come report to me,
so they can show me their pay-stubs
to prove that they were gainfully employed.
I struggled with that.
How was that helping Joyce be there for her kids
and get on her feet financially?
How was it helping John to better regulate his emotions
and keep from getting into fights and be able to hold down a job?
At the time there was this growing body of research that said what works,
and just supervising conditions really wasn’t all that effective.
There were things we could do
that could lower reoffending, that could better do more good than harm.
I went on to work in a state agency hundreds of miles away
that was trying to bring that research into practice.
I got to see first-hand inside the walls of one agency
how we can bring that research to practice day in and day out.
An organization that was transforming, from counting how many things got done
to what was the impact of those things,
and I thought, we can go beyond this, this is just one agency,
and the criminal justice system is made up of numerous agencies that stretch
across branches of government.
I went to work for an institute traveling the country,
looking into how we could use data to bring about systemic reform,
how we could pull these big policy levers
and impact change on the ground across our communities,
whether it was a statehouse in Kentucky or even right here in South Carolina
or an inter-agency partnership from California to Virginia.
I saw how data could ground the debate.
I saw how transformative leaders could bring diverse perspectives together
to help come to consensus on matters
of safety and justice and resource allocation.
I also saw how hard it is to turn an entrenched culture around.
Imagine thinking you’ve got the right idea and you’ve got everybody you know,
and you go and you see this barge, and you’re going to turn this barge around
so you push it as hard as you can,
and you’re in two inches of water,
and every time you think you make a move, something else happens.
In the criminal justice system, inevitably something else always pops up,
and what I came to learn
is the criminal justice system has entirely too much in common
with the arcade game Whack A Mole.
A headline pops up, we whack it, another headline pops up,
we whack it and we just keep going into this perpetual,
disorienting cycle of Whack A Mole, and I ask you for what?
Is that making our community any more safe?
Is it making our system any more just or fair?
So I became convinced, there’s a disconnect
in what we think we’re going to do at a state level
with what happens every day on the ground with people like Joyce and John.
If we really want to make criminal justice reform happen in an effective way,
we had to go local, into a single community,
and look at the whole system, beyond the walls of any one agency,
and that’s what we’ve been doing here in Charleston since 2015.
We formed what’s known as a Criminal Justice Coordinating Council:
a CJCC.
It’s a collaborative body that focuses on the system
and strives to help do more good than harm.
It started small and it’s gotten bigger over the years,
when leaders came together and more opened their doors and their data
and more members of our community got engaged.
It includes leadership from our top law enforcement agencies,
our prosecution, defense, the judiciary, probation, parole,
behavioral health providers,
and diverse representatives from all across the community,
formerly incarcerated, survivors of crime, the business community,
civil rights community, all coming together under a common goal,
trying to do more good than harm.
The first thing we did was something that had never been done before.
We brought together data from all across the system,
and we put a giant mirror in front of all of us and asked:
“How was our system serving all of us?”
and the data grounded the conversation because what we saw,
was an overuse of jail, over 24,000 admissions into our jail.
The majority of the charges headed to municipal and magistrate court,
candidly things many of us may even do in our own backyard,
like sip from an open container of beer, take a nap on a bench.
Within that, we also saw missed opportunities,
the deeper we dove into the data.
We saw individuals that were coming into contact with law enforcement
due to untreated factors that were bringing them out,
whether it was homelessness or mental illness.
Opportunities to do more good than harm.
We looked even closer at the data,
and we looked at a single charge of simple possession of marijuana.
For every one white individual that was coming into our jail,
we were bringing eight black individuals.
A civil rights leader slammed her hand on the table
and she said: “I knew it, I knew it!”
but she didn’t just know it, everybody knew it and it wasn’t right.
This body of leaders working locally can make change happen, and they did.
They transformed decisions to use jail
or use supportive services to help people in need.
We looked even deeper into what happened when somebody did come to jail,
and we saw immense pre-trial challenges, and made changes to make sure
that the judges could have more information,
and we can more precisely pinpoint
the threats to safety or justice in our community.
By the end of 2021, the progress has continued and multiplied.
Our jail population is 40% smaller.
(Applause)
Municipal and magistrate charges are no longer the top reasons for jail use,
those are down by 80%.
The people that were cycling through perpetually on low level charges,
they’re down 60%,
and our judges have information to help them every day,
and we have data to help us keep learning and keep growing together.
And what I’m here to ask all of you,
is to recognize that Charleston is just one county.
There are roughly 3000 around this country,
and not near enough have this kind of capacity.
So I ask you to reject Whack A Mole,
demand accountability for the entire local criminal justice system.
As a taxpayer, as somebody who lives in the community,
as somebody who may have been impacted by crime, we can do more good than harm.
People like you can engage in improving our system.
We can demand focus on the entire system, and demand that it be accountable.
We can ask key questions, and together
we can all do more good than harm.
(Applause)