County of Los Angeles

Los Angeles County (Los Angeles) is a member of the first cohort of jurisdictions to participate in the Safety and Justice Challenge Network, the centerpiece of the Foundation’s strategy to address overincarceration by reducing jail misuse and overuse and racial disparities in jail usage. This award enables Los Angeles to build on and secure progress achieved during previous rounds of implementation funding in reducing jail populations, increasing fairness, and advancing racial equity while sustaining local system reform momentum.

Los Angeles County (Los Angeles) is an original member of the Safety and Justice Challenge Network, the centerpiece of the Foundation’s strategy to address over-incarceration by reducing jail misuse and overuse and disparities in jail usage. Under previous awards, Los Angeles engaged in a structured, collaborative process to identify local drivers of unnecessary jail incarceration, generated an ambitious plan to address them, and implemented the plan with technical assistance and guidance from a consortium of national experts. This award enables Los Angeles to sustain and expand its reform work, implementing changes across an array of criminal justice processing and decision points with the goal of safely achieving reductions in local incarceration and reducing racial and ethnic disparities.

Los Angeles County (Los Angeles) is one of twenty jurisdictions originally selected to participate in the Safety and Justice Challenge Network, the centerpiece of the Foundation’s strategy to address over-incarceration by reducing jail misuse and overuse. A previous award to Los Angeles County supported efforts to refine its reform strategies and further develop its implementation plan. This one-year award enables Los Angeles to continue to participate in the Network, build a full system reform strategy, and to make targeted changes aimed at reducing local incarceration and disparities in jail usage. The aim is to demonstrate more effective, fairer, and equitable responses to crime and social, creating momentum toward local systems reform nationally.

Following a national competition in 2015, twenty jurisdictions were selected for inclusion in the Safety and Justice Challenge Network, the centerpiece of the Foundation’s strategy to address over-incarceration by reducing jail misuse and overuse. A previous award enabled these sites to assess local drivers of jail incarceration and develop plans to address them. Resulting plans were reviewed with the help of an expert panel, and eleven Core Sites were selected for implementation funding, with the remaining nine partner site jurisdictions to receive smaller awards enabling them to continue to participate in the Challenge Network. Partner sites will use their awards to refine and strengthen their plans for targeting drivers of local incarceration, begin implementation where possible, and continue to share what they learn with other Network sites.

Twenty jurisdictions have been selected, following a nationwide competition, to participate in the Safety and Justice Challenge Network of sites committed to finding ways to safely and sustainably reduce unnecessary jail incarceration. The Safety and Justice Challenge Network is at the core of the Foundation’s initiative to reduce over-incarceration by changing the way America thinks about and uses jails. Awards to these jurisdictions support their participation in a structured data analysis and planning process aimed at assessing drivers of local incarceration and developing multi-stakeholder action plans to address them.