New York and California are home to America’s largest cities and two of its most robust economies. Together, they’re home to 18% of the national population and they hold a combined 11% of the country’s incarcerated population. They are also home to organizations awarded a full 50% of geographically designated criminal justice commitments from philanthropy, according to Candid’s numbers on the geographic distribution of criminal justice grantmaking.
According to an analysis provided to IP by researchers at The Bridgespan Group, New York accounted for 33% of funding commitments from 2018 to 2022, while California received 17%. Incarceration isn’t the only measurement for determining how many people in a given state are being impacted by its carceral system; however, the disparity between the percentage of incarcerated people in these two states and the much larger percentage of money spent there raises natural questions about just what is happening and why.
This geographic disparity in criminal justice funding is a real issue for nonprofits working in states that have worse levels of mass incarceration and fewer or less prominent organizations working to reform the system. Note that the incarceration rates per 100,000 residents in New York and California are nowhere near those of the three states with the worst rates: Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas. According to Candid’s data, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas all received zero percent of the commitments targeted to specific areas; basically, the commitments they received weren’t high enough to rate. Funders’ oversight in this respect may be costing them opportunities to make a bigger difference nationwide.
To be sure, the picture is complicated by the fact that Candid tracks the geographic location of grant recipients, but not where those recipients spend money. Nor does Candid differentiate between local nonprofits and organizations with a national scope. To give just two examples, grants made to the Vera Institute of Justice were tagged as going to New York (where Vera is headquartered), while money moved to Impact Justice was tagged as designated for California. Both nonprofits have programs in multiple states, making it impossible to know those grants’ final destinations.
But even allowing for potential inaccuracies in the data due to the influence of national actors in the sector, a Bridgespan analyst and other experts agreed that the geographic disparity is real. “It’s likely that many organizations spend at least a chunk of funding in their ‘home base’ state, even if they are national,” said Bridgespan partner Marina Fisher, citing Vera’s Greater Justice NY program as an example. “Second, the fact remains that relatively few organizations based in the Midwest and Southeast are getting criminal justice reform funding. This means that a disproportionately small amount of dollars is flowing to organizations that are proximate to challenges in those states due to a local home base.”
The Candid analysis provided to IP by Bridgespan certainly backs up that assertion: The state which received the third-highest fraction of funding for 2018–2022, Illinois, accounted for just 9% of commitments. The next state on the list is North Carolina, with just 6%, and the numbers only go down from there.
This trend is also not a new development. In 2022, IP published a guest article by Bridgespan Group partner Allana Jackson and Bridgespan Manager Alexandra Williams using 2019 data to outline the vast disparities in criminal justice funding for the South and Midwest. The numbers for the years since then prove that 2019 wasn’t an outlier, but rather business as usual.
Possible causes and lost opportunities
Part of this may stem from the geographic location of the funders themselves. “From our participation in the Criminal Justice Funders Forum and other criminal justice funder forums at the state and national level, we have seen that most of the criminal justice funders are based in California and New York,” said Angie Junck, Human Rights program director for the Heising-Simons Foundation.
My own quick survey of Candid data seems to confirm that. Using search parameters for grants made from 2020–2024 to determine the location of probable criminal justice funders, more than 20% of the 1,068 funders tagged by Candid, or 224, were located in either California or New York. Likewise, nearly 22% criminal justice grantees for those years, or a total of 82 nonprofits combined, were in the same two states.
“My sense is people fund locally; a lot of people fund those things they can touch and feel,” said Impact Justice founder and President Alex Busansky. “If you talk to a funder in New York City about what’s going on at Rikers, it has a saliency that it doesn’t if I say, ‘Let’s talk about the Chester facility in Connecticut.'”
There’s also the fact that state governments of California and New York are more progressive than many of their southern or Midwestern counterparts, and known for their criminal justice reform wins, from decreasing mass incarceration to electing progressive prosecutors. It’s hard to pinpoint definitively which came first, but it’s definitely the case that success and funding share a powerful mutual attraction.
It could also be argued that, just as with many other issues, funders are prioritizing nonprofits with a national reach over those working locally. Everyone who cares about abortion rights knows about Planned Parenthood, while far fewer may know the name of abortion funds in their own state. To the extent that criminal justice nonprofits with a national reach are located in New York and California, at least some of the disparity may simply be yet another case of funders picking the easiest, best-known option.
Finally, criminal justice reform is hardly the only issue that suffers from geographic disparities in funding. “Our field alone is not the only field that tends to under-invest in the places where the problems are often most difficult,” said Vera Institute President and Director Nick Turner.
Of course, there are criminal justice funders that are looking far beyond their own backyards. The Just Trust, for example, moved roughly 30% of its 2022—2023 funding to Alabama, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma and West Virginia, said founder and CEO Ana Zamora.
“When we started The Just Trust, we intentionally focused on historically underfunded regions like the Deep South and Appalachia,” Zamora said. “Places that are at the epicenter of our over-incarceration and public safety crisis in this country, and that also have incredible groups and leaders who have been doing the work on shoestring budgets for years.”
Funders that continue to focus on seemingly sure-bet areas like California and New York aren’t just making it harder to bring the benefits of criminal justice reform to areas like the South and Midwest. They may also be missing the chance to score comparatively easy wins.
Impact Justice’s Busansky said he has seen a big difference in terms of how much harder it can be to implement programs in even the most progressive states. Using the nonprofit’s Growing Justice program as an example, Busansky said that, after three years of attempting to implement a program to install a shipping container vertical farm in a women’s prison in California, “I don’t have that much hair, so I don’t want to pull it out. But if I did, I’d pull it all out.” By comparison, launching the same program in South Carolina has been “like a walk in the park compared to what we have to go through in California, and it’s nonsensical half the time. I’m just trying to put a shipping container in a prison to grow lettuce.”
Whether the issue is advocating for local criminal reforms or creating programs to help incarcerated people learn skills they can take into the world after reentry, criminal justice funders looking for wins may want to consider the possibility that they may have more impact — and for less money — by looking beyond the usual suspects for their grantmaking.
In addition to criminal justice reform funding, Dawn Wolfe covers issues including LGBTQ philanthropy, funding for women’s/abortion rights, and efforts to reform the philanthropic sector including addressing the nonprofit burnout crisis. This article is part of an informal series on the dropoff in criminal justice reform funding. Contact Dawn at: dawnw@insidephilanthropy.com
