MacArthur Foundation awards Multnomah County grant to create fairer jail system | OregonLive.com MacArthur Foundation to create a fairer jail system.
“We’re working hard to find alternative solutions for people facing mental health issues who land in our jails,” said County Chairwoman Deborah Kafoury. This grant will help us get there.”
People suffering mental health problems make up about 40 percent of Multnomah County’s jail bookings, and they usually are behind bars longer than other detainees, according to county figures. Numbers from October show those detained in jail who suffer from mental illness spent an average of 18 days behind bars, compared with an average length of stay of 13.5 days for all jail detainees, according to the county.
African American detainees with mental illness were booked into jail at twice the rate of other African American inmates, according to the county’s grant application.
The county wants to provide community options for inmates with mental health needs, decrease the disproportionate incarceration of people of color, and decrease the number of low-risk inmates sitting in jail.
The county, for example, found that people convicted of driving under the influence of intoxicants who violated their probation conditions and had their probation revoked “contributed substantially to jail bed use,” the application said.
The county is looking for ways to reduce the number of people taking up its more than 1,300 jail beds by finding alternative sanctions for misdemeanor offenders who have violated probation and by increasing supervised release options for those awaiting trial on certain felony charges.
Multnomah County is one of 20 jurisdictions that were selected for the grant from nearly 200 municipalities from 45 states. That second round will offer grants of between $500,000 and $2 million annually, depending on the size of the jurisdiction.
The 20 locations selected include large cities such as New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Houston to smaller localities like Mesa County, CO, and Pennington County, SD, as well as the state of Connecticut. “We hope their local efforts will model effective and safe alternatives to the incarceration status quo for the rest of the country.”
Nearly 12 million people annually pass through the more than 3,000 county lockups and city jails across the country, with close to 731,000 people locked up on any given day, according to a February report on jails by the nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice.
