MILWAUKEE EVIDENCE BASED CRIMINAL JUSTICE DECISIONS

Judge Jeffrey Kremers, Chief Judge for Milwaukee County, discussed how 7 years ago Milwaukee County was faced with a law suit involving conditions of the jail. In addition to fixing the conditions, they were asked to reconstitute its Community Justice Council. About 3 years ago, there was an opportunity to apply for a National Institute of Corrections grant dealing with evidence based decision making in the criminal justice system. Seven cities were selected as winners of this competition and Milwaukee was one of the seven. They spent a year with technical assistance including mapping their criminal justice system with the goal to be one of the finalists to get the enhanced technical assistance. Milwaukee County was selected as one of the final three. As part of process, a map was developed to look at where all the decision points where in the criminal justice system. One of the factors they looked at was setting bail. Bail was based on the DA’s experience, the going rate in a community and what a person can pay. The purpose of bail is to ensure that the person comes back to court while the case is pending and that they don’t commit a new offense while the case is pending. The amount is only designed to ensure that they come back to court and the conditions such as GPS are to ensure that a new offense is not committed. In 2009, a one day snap shot study was conducted in the Milwaukee County jail. The average daily population was 3,200 and 23% of inmates paid less than $500 bail. If that number was reduced 10% there would be a 103,870 reduction in jail bed days and a cost savings of $6 million. There are about 5,134 arrests per month, 3,439 bookings, the average length of stay pre-trial is 8.1 days, total length of stay is 21 days, 38% had previous booking and 1% of jail inmates have been booked 7 or more times a year which mostly represents the mentally ill. Evidence based decision making is driven by research defined best practices, sustainable and can be measured, justified and replicated. The goal is to maintain public safety, foster collaboration among agencies, create efficiencies in the use of limited resources and implement sustainable evidence based practices. Everyday risks are taken in setting bail. Monetary bail does not improve court appearance rates for low risk defenders and does not improve community safety. After doing some research, it was determined that there were six factors that will determine if a person is likely to come back to court and commit a new offense: how many cases were filed against them, have they ever failed to appear in court, were they arrested on this case while out on bail on another case, are they employed/primary caregiver, do they have a stable residence and their UNCOPE score. These factors are given points and 7 grids were developed to determine levels of bail and supervision. This program started in January 17, 2012 and 19,000 people were screened and the compliance rate was 86%. The data will be unraveled on May 10th. The failure to appear and committed offenses rate decreased by more than 10% since this program started.