As the extensive impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic became clear, many municipalities—including those participating in the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) — implemented emergency measures to reduce their jail populations. This brief describes how those measures influenced jail populations in SJC sites between February and October 2020—and how jail populations and racial and ethnic disparities changed during the pandemic’s early months.

Building on significant momentum for evidence-based reforms to local justice systems, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation provided $18 million in grants as part of its Safety and Justice Challenge, a national initiative to reduce over-incarceration by changing the way America thinks about and uses jails. In this report, we measure and describe the effectiveness of strategies to reduce jail populations over the first three years of the initiative.