It has been two eventful years since the launch of the Safety and Justice Challenge, MacArthur's ambitious effort to stimulate reform of local criminal justice systems, reduce racial and ethnic disparities, and change the way the nation thinks about and uses jails. The Challenge targets America's excessive reliance on jail incarceration, a key component and driver of mass incarceration, by supporting a diverse network of communities seeking better, fairer, and more balanced approaches to crime.

Our work began in 2015 with the selection of 20 jurisdictions from across the country to participate in a learning and leadership community called "the Safety and Justice Challenge Network," whose members were publicly committed to reducing their jail usage dramatically and making their local criminal justice systems fairer and more effective in the process. Teams from each of these jurisdictions were initially supported through a data analysis and system mapping process designed to identify local sources of unnecessary jail incarceration and racial and ethnic disparities in jail usage, and to enable collaborative leadership teams to generate comprehensive reform plans in response.

A first round of implementation funding was awarded to a group of these sites in 2016, with the rest receiving smaller grants to support continued progress and planning. We recently announced a second round of deep implementation grants. Now a total of 20 Challenge Network implementation sites are working with a national consortium of expert consultants to make broad changes in their local systems—deflecting or diverting low-level offenders, piloting or expanding programs that connect people with sources of treatment and help instead of jail, eliminating inefficiencies and cutting processing times to shorten jail stays, and otherwise rethinking and redesigning their systems from the ground up.

[For more on this story by Laurie R. Garduque, go to https://www.macfound.org/press...ce-reform-long-haul/]