If there’s a single, overriding narrative in the story of criminal justice reform as it’s told in the U.S., it’s that community activists support reforms while most criminal justice professionals oppose them — including by pushing back against progressive prosecutors elected through the efforts of those activists.
The truth is much more complicated, and more encouraging. In addition to nonprofits entirely of, by and for community activists pushing for reform, local and national groups exist in which law enforcement professionals themselves advocate for reforms or partner with community organizers to put them into practice. Such groups are plentiful enough, in fact, that all eight nonprofit grantees in the first cohort of The Just Trust’s new Safer Communities Accelerator involve some level of direct or indirect collaboration with law enforcement.
The Just Trust, a $350 million Chan Zuckerberg Initiative spinoff dedicated to funding criminal justice reform, launched the accelerator in December of last year. The effort, initially totaling $4 million, is focused on moving money to nonprofits “that are advancing innovative models for preventing crime, repairing harm, increasing accountability, and building stronger, safer communities,” according to the trust’s announcement. Happily, The Just Trust didn’t have a hard time finding partnerships between communities and the justice system to support.
“What’s beautiful about the cohort of accelerator grantees that we have is that it’s a combination of groups working within the system and outside of it to show that both are ways of making communities safer,” said Just Trust Chief Program Officer Jolene Forman.
Each of the initial cohort of Safer Communities grantees will receive $500,000 over two years. Six of the grantees have also been asked to replicate, or advise on replicating, their programs in other communities. The grantees’ efforts cover a spectrum of alternatives to incarceration focused on “front-end solutions that prevent people from entering the system in the first place, which has the greatest impact on how many people are in the justice system overall,” Forman said.
In Atlanta, for example, the Policing Alternatives & Diversion Initiative Division (PAD) prevents incarceration through pre-arrest diversion and the use of mobile response teams dispatched through a partnership with the city’s 311 line. Oregon’s CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets) partners with law enforcement in the cities of Eugene and Springfield to send mobile units out to intervene in precarious mental or emotional health crisis situations — either alone or in partnership with police.
The Law Enforcement Action Partnership (LEAP), on the other hand, is a national nonprofit composed of law enforcement professionals including police, sheriffs, prosecutors and judges “advocating for a new way of looking at the justice system and drug policy, employing innovative solutions and evidence-based best practices to prioritize community health and safety at the national, state and local level,” according to the trust’s press release announcing the first group of grantees.
These first grantees’ budgets are as varied as their scope, and range from $1 million to $10 million, according to the trust. In 2023, the trust plans to add additional grantees, prioritizing the seven states that are the focus of the funder’s State by State Campaign — designed, as the name implies, to support organizations advocating for state-level criminal justice reform. The two funding programs are like a one-two punch that, if successful, will allow advocacy organizations in states with Safer Communities grantees to point to the accomplishments of those nonprofits as they advocate for further reforms. The trust also hopes that these grants will “shine a light on these programs that are making communities safer,” Forman said.
At first glance, it may seem like The Just Trust is taking on quite a lot — both front-line solutions to incarceration as well as broader criminal justice reform advocacy. But according to Forman, the trust’s approach has been carefully considered. Before launching the Safer Communities Accelerator, The Just Trust did “a ton of research to figure out the solutions that are out there,” Forman said, keeping firmly in mind that, while the trust may initially have nine figures to spend, its budget is dwarfed by the $81 billion the U.S. spends every year on mass incarceration alone.
With those limitations in mind, Forman said, “we wanted to be really intentional about where we could both direct resources to support existing proven programs to help build up new programs, which will be the next phase of the accelerator, and most importantly, to draw attention to alternatives that work.”
The trust’s careful, incremental approach, and its overall strategy that now includes funding advocacy and direct service programs, is a welcome development on a criminal justice reform scene that has waded through a rocky couple of years and suffered no small amount of politically motivated backlash. Also welcome is the fact that so many criminal justice professionals, including police departments, are open to alternatives to arresting troubled individuals in the first place.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that while The Just Trust is now a distinct entity from CZI, it has its origins in Zuckerberg and Chan’s fortune and remains closely associated with CZI — Priscilla Chan is on its board, for instance, as well as CZI’s former policy and advocacy head, David Plouffe (of Barack Obama campaign fame). Also on the board are figures from right of center, like Brian Hooks, who leads Charles Koch’s philanthropic umbrella organization Stand Together. Given that, and the trust’s cautious, bridge-building approach to funding, it’s clear that Zuckerberg and Chan’s corner of the philanthrosphere still sees promise in pre-pandemic hopes for less confrontational, cross-ideological paths to justice reform.
What is also true, though, is that the world of U.S. criminal justice reform is a complicated, convoluted one, where few easy solutions exist for problems like police brutality, discriminatory cash bail systems, mistreatment of incarcerated people, a lack of services for formerly incarcerated individuals, and the ongoing battle over public sex offender registries. Efforts to solve many of these problems don’t enjoy anywhere near the same level of support from criminal justice professionals or the public as keeping individuals experiencing a mental health crisis out of jail.
Funders working on these related issues might do well to consider The Just Trust’s “one-two punch” approach of funding both advocacy and direct services. The success of direct service programs in cutting recidivism, decreasing embarrassing police brutality lawsuits and keeping families together can provide the data that advocates need to push reforms. At the same time, these kinds of programs are frequently in dire need of advocacy organizations to build the public support they need to continue their work.
As Forman told me, “This is a vision of safety that’s going to require all hands on deck.” She was speaking specifically of improving community safety through front-line alternatives to incarceration, but her argument definitely applies to the field as a whole.
