St. Louis County jail inmate population drops by 22 percent

Several years ago, officials in the largest and busiest judicial circuit in Missouri set a goal: to shrink St. Louis County‘s jail population by 15 to 19 percent.

After a period of trial and error, they’ve met that target — and exceeded it.

According to county data, the jail population has dropped by 22.3 percent from the over-capacity crowd of 1,242 inmates in July 2018 to 965 inmates in May 2019.

County officials said they achieved this result by first gathering data and then trying several remedies.

One remedy involved fast-tracking the cases of probation violators. The average stay of those inmates had been 99 days in 2015; now it’s only 13 days. The county also expanded pretrial release and is matching up defendants with treatment and education programs.

Most recently, the county set up a “Population Review Team” to pore over the case files of inmates accused of nonviolent (C, D and E) felonies and consider alternatives to incarceration. Those inmates used to constitute 35.3 percent of the jail population; now they’re only 15.3 percent of it.

This jail-reduction effort certainly received a boost in 2016 and 2018 from two separate grants of $2.25 million from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, said Beth Huebner, a professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who has both participated in and observed the process.

But the more crucial factor, Huebner said, was the sustained commitment from all facets of the county’s criminal justice system — from the prosecutors, public defenders and judges to police, jail staff, administrative staff and treatment providers.

“People have come together,” said Huebner. “It’s not been just one reform. It’s been a system reform. And I can’t tell you how rare this is.”

She said the cost savings to date have not been calculated, but so far the thinning of the jail population has reduced the facility’s overtime costs and even sparked a hope that certain “pods” (or housing units) could be shuttered in the long-term.

District Defender Stephen Reynolds said that independent of the MacArthur grants, “there are a lot of things converging” to contribute to the shrinkage: Local efforts by the Bail Project, a national nonprofit organization; a new approach to pretrial release by Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell that is trickling down to the rank-and-file prosecutors; and a “cultural shift” on the bench wherein judges feel more willing to release defendants pretrial.

“I don’t think we’ll be able to pinpoint it to one thing,” Reynolds said. “But I think that since last summer, St. Louis County has been moving in the right direction.”

Multi-year project

The county’s effort began after Darren Wilson, a white police officer in Ferguson, fatally shot black teenager Michael Brown in August 2014, igniting months of protest and raising questions about criminal justice practices in St. Louis County.

The following year, with the jail at or near its full capacity of 1,232 individuals, St. Louis County and UMSL received a planning grant of $150,000 from MacArthur to gather data and come up with a way to ease the pressure on the facility.

Until that time, Huebner said, “the county hadn’t had the time or resources to do a deep dive into the issue.”

They discovered that a major population driver was slow adjudication of probation violators, caused in large part by a lack of coordination between the probation department and the jail. That process has improved, Huebner said. At the same time, the circuit judges who must decide whether to return the inmates to the community or to revoke their probation and remand them to state custody are now receiving “nudge” emails, reminding them to carve out time for these cases in their dockets.

Another major population driver, the county learned, was that many inmates were awaiting trial and couldn’t afford to post bond — a situation born of poverty, unemployment, homelessness and substance use in many instances. So the county has expanded its pretrial release program by coordinating with social-service providers to ensure that those released obtain mental health and substance-use treatment, as well as education and other services.

Another option available to inmates is participation in one of the county’s treatment courts, which now include mental health, veterans, drug and DWI courts. In certain cases, these programs entail regular check-ins, group or individual therapy, or community service work.

After an initial focus on probation violators and the provision of social services, Huebner said, “We didn’t see the decline in total jail population we wanted. We knew we needed to make another change.”

So in August 2018, the court set up its Population Review Team. The group consists of approximately 15-20 people, including St. Louis County Circuit Court Presiding Judge Gloria Clark Reno and other circuit judges, jail employees (including the staff psychologist), law enforcement officers, public defenders, prosecutors, a member of the criminal-defense bar, a mental health court representative, community service providers, community advocates, Huebner and others.

The team meets roughly once a week on the third floor of the Buzz Westfall Justice Center in Clayton to discuss smoothing out friction points in court processes. They also look at the case files of inmates accused of nonviolent felonies and consider alternatives to keeping those inmates locked up. As of late March, the team had reviewed the files of 187 such inmates. Ultimately, 154 of them were released.

Overall, the number of inmates at the jail accused of nonviolent felonies has fallen from 378 in July 2018 to 143 in May, according Andria Nelson, a data analyst in the county executive’s office. She credits that reduction to the team’s decisions but also to changes in bond and warrant practices and the prosecuting attorney’s new policies.

Huebner said that the key to making all of these advances at the jail was a focus on hard numbers and a willingness to chip away at the problem piece by piece.

“I think if you’re at a smaller jail in Missouri, you can start this process with an Excel spreadsheet,” Huebner said. “It doesn’t require a sophisticated data processor. It’s getting the data and figuring out who’s in the jail and why, then bringing people to the table.”

Reynolds said it’s an open question whether the county’s jail population will stay down. Part of it depends on whether the cultural shift in the judiciary endures.

Another factor is technical: Later this year, the judges will begin using a risk-assessment tool created by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. Drawing on data from 750,000 cases in nearly 300 jurisdictions, that tool isolates for judges nine factors that best predict a defendant’s pretrial risk of failure to appear, new criminal activity and new violent criminal activity.

“It’s an open question whether this trend continues,” Reynolds said. “I don’t think we’ll know until a year from now. But I’m hopeful that it continues because I believe it’s the right direction.”