photo by: Criminal Justice Coordinating Council screenshot

During a meeting Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2022, the Douglas County Criminal Justice Coordinating Council heard a presentation about the results of a Douglas County Jail population study.

A study of bookings into the Douglas County Jail over the past five years found that the majority were for minor, nonviolent charges, but there were also disparities in jail admissions that suggest law enforcement officers are more frequently arresting Black people relative to the general population.

The study was presented to the county’s Criminal Justice Coordinating Council last week. The data in the report covers people released from the Douglas County Jail during the five-year period between Jan. 1, 2017, and Dec. 31, 2021 — more than 10,000 individuals. The study was prepared by the Vera Institute of Justice, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit focused on criminal justice reform. Three of the senior research associates who worked on it — Bea Halbach-Singh, Sarah Minion and Jen Peirce — walked the CJCC through their findings Tuesday, which Minion called the culmination of a yearslong effort to analyze Douglas County’s jail population.

The study itself is a result of a push for a population study by faith-based advocacy group Justice Matters in 2020, during the same time the county was considering whether to expand the jail — a consideration that was ultimately dropped.

There are stark racial disparities in who was booked into the jail, Halbach-Singh told the CJCC. Police booked one out of 11 Douglas County residents who were 25 to 54 years old, excluding the college-age population, from 2017 to 2021, but almost one in three of those bookings were Black men and almost one in six were Hispanic men.

photo by: Criminal Justice Coordinating Council screenshot

Graphs in the jail population study show the disparity in the percentage of Black people booked into the Douglas County Jail during the past five years.

The study notes that white people made up the majority of jail admissions and “jail bed-days” — or each day that a person spends in jail — reflecting their demographic makeup as 79% of the county’s population, according to recent U.S. Census data. But that ratio doesn’t hold true for Black people. Though Black people represent just 6% of the county’s population age 15 or older, they account for 23% of jail bed-days and 18% of jail admissions.

“The fact that the disparities are even sharper for the proportion of bed-days than the proportion of admissions indicates that Black people are staying in jail longer than white people,” the study says.

Women, meanwhile, are increasingly facing incarceration in the community, a rate that tripled from 2000 to 2019. Halbach-Singh told the CJCC that women accounted for about 27% of jail admissions during the analysis period.

She added that this is a national trend, and in Douglas County, as is the case in many places, most women are admitted for low-level, nonviolent charges or administrative charges.

“Women who are incarcerated generally have very low incomes, which makes them less likely to be able to afford bail,” Halbach-Singh continued. “In addition, we also know that many women are primary caregivers to children, so the incarceration of women can contribute to the separation of families and therefore has broader impacts on the community.”

The study’s other key findings shed some light on the specific charges or reasons folks were ending up in jail. Failure to appear was the single most common charge overall. District Attorney Suzanne Valdez did clarify to the group, however, that though the report refers to this as a charge, a failure to appear is administrative in nature. That reason accounted for 21% of total admissions and 12% of bed-days.

Although probation is intended as an alternative to incarceration, the study found that probation violations are the second-highest contributor to the number of bed-days at the Douglas County Jail.

“Overall, the question that we have is whether probation as it’s being used is really serving as a viable alternative to incarceration as intended, and in some cases whether it may be exacerbating the criminalization of poverty to the extent that there’s sort of a relationship with the inability to pay supervision fees,” Halbach-Singh said.

Beyond failure-to-appear and probation violations, driving under the influence was the third most common charge driving pretrial jail admissions, the study found, and domestic violence charges made up the majority of overall admissions for violent charges at 62%. Both have mandatory arrest provisions in Kansas law, but Halbach-Singh said there are possibly some opportunities to address some of the underlying causes of those offenses as systemic issues in the community.

Peirce added that both DUIs and domestic violence can often result in serious — or even fatal — harm and deserve a serious response from law enforcement regardless of statutory arrest requirements.

photo by: Criminal Justice Coordinating Council screenshot

Another chart shows the 15 most common charge types driving pretrial admissions at the Douglas County Jail.

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Minion, the Vera Institute researcher, said the county has already taken some “critical” steps forward in the time since the Vera Institute began working on its study, like piloting a diversion program and investing in the Treatment and Recovery Center of Douglas County, although the latter resource has yet to open.

But she and the rest of her team briefed the CJCC on a number of other recommendations in their report. There aren’t many specific recommendations geared toward mitigating the racial disparities outlined earlier, but the report does suggest reducing pretrial lengths of stay by expanding the use of nonmonetary conditions for release as one option.

Another recommendation addresses the high volume of failure to appear instances: implementing a portable court rescheduling policy. That would allow officers to reschedule folks for an appearance they’ve missed on the spot, rather than booking them into jail. Yet another suggestion on this front is to expand on an existing weekly failure to appear docket that she said has already been successful in Lawrence Municipal Court and could be turned into a more frequent, daily docket or be expanded to other courts.

Continuances or notices to appear instead of warrants could also help move the needle on this issue, Minion said, as could eliminating court fines and fees.

For DUIs, there are strategies that would prevent incarceration from being the sole response, Peirce said. That could include establishing a sobering center, whether through the yet-to-open behavioral health crisis center or elsewhere, that could get first-time offenders off the roads.

Peirce said other strategies could include expanding public transit and offering safe driving training to address some of the underlying reasons that might be contributing to the prevalence of driving under the influence.

To that point, Douglas County’s director of behavioral health projects, Bob Tryanski, said DUIs are a symptom of a specific issue locally: binge drinking. That’s not just because Lawrence is a college town, Tryanski added.

“The age-adjusted binge drinking rate in Douglas County is higher than the rest of the state,” Tryanski said. “It’s something that we have identified as a public health issue through the community health plan, and from a prevention perspective, I think one of the questions we need to be asking ourselves is how serious can the community take that issue and figure out how we get upstream all the way from what we’re doing with our policies and procedures related to youth?”

Addressing the issue of domestic violence could be helped by installing crisis responders trained in domestic violence or a self-help or family resource center, Peirce said. Restorative justice diversion is another possible strategy on that front.

When it comes to implementing and monitoring any of the recommendations from the Vera Institute, the researchers said a strategy for doing so should include a number of minimum requirements, such as input from people with direct experience with Douglas County’s criminal legal system, clear goals and expectations for any policies that are implemented, a timeline for periodic progress assessment, and a process for making the results transparent to the public.