Three Safety and Justice Challenge sites—Lucas County, Ohio; Pima County, Arizona; and St. Louis County, Missouri—have used jail population review teams (PRT) to help find opportunities to safely address the overuse of jails. A new study on PRTs looks at their impact on jails and how they address racial disparities. It asks how PRTs are used, if it reduced jail incarceration, and whether it reduced the racial and ethnic disparities.
The study found that PRTs reduced the overall number of people in jails, by a small percentage, thanks to individual reviews, but PRTs were unlikely to reduce racial disparities without other interventions. A PRT model can encourage collaboration to drive more policy change and add to other strategies that address local jail overuse.
