NEW YORK, NY – Today, the Vera Institute of Justice announced its inaugural round of In Our Backyards Community Grants, which will support organizing, research, and public education around reducing mass incarceration. Vera’s grants will fund a total of 11 projects undertaken by 16 organizations in 7 states.

These Community Grants represent the latest facet of Vera’s In Our Backyards initiative, which focuses on the high and rising use of incarceration in small cities and rural American communities. While major cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago have begun to reduce their use of prison and jail, small cities and rural counties across the country are deepening their reliance on mass incarceration.

In Our Backyards Campaign Director Jasmine Heiss said, “In the wake of the 2016 election, small cities and rural American counties are often painted with a broad brush—characterized as racially and ethnically homogenous, tough on crime, or politically disengaged. This cohort of grantees embodies the diversity, resilience and tenacity of small cities, suburbs, and rural communities. And their work paints a vivid picture of the issues and challenges confronting communities across our country, where a lack of economic opportunity, meagre community-based support for mental illness and substance use, and political interests have collided to deepen a reliance on jails and prisons and sustain deep racial disparities in incarceration. With In Our Backyards Community Grants, Vera is investing in community organizations who can help shift narratives and drive change outside of our nation’s biggest cities.”

This changing geography means that while campaigns like “Close the Jail ATL” in Atlanta and “Close the Creek” in Philadelphia have secured powerful commitments from elected leaders to close jails, hundreds of smaller communities are grappling with a quiet jail boom. The In Our Backyards Community Grants are meant to sustain and scale vital work already underway outside of major cities to end mass incarceration where it begins—at the local level.

The proposals were scored by both Vera staff and two expert reviewers: Judah Schept, Associate Professor in the School of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University and author of Progressive Punishment: Job Loss, Jail Growth, and the Neoliberal Politics of Carceral Expansion, and Tiheba Bain, Director of Coalitions for The National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls.

Underscoring the urgency of the grants, Judah Schept said: “The carceral state is tenacious, and in many places around the United States, sentencing reform hasn’t led to meaningful decarceration, but simply shifted people from prisons to jails. The proposals for the Vera Institute’s In Our Backyards Community Grants reveal that the persistence of mass incarceration is being met with trenchant and inspiring challenges at local levels, and a commitment to bringing people home, fighting jail expansion and construction, and developing and investing in alternatives that shrink reliance on various forms of imprisonment and supervision while meeting people’s needs. Organizations and coalitions in rural communities are working hard both to change the material conditions on the ground and disrupt the status quo of incarceration.”

Vera has been at the forefront of research and analysis around rising incarceration in small cities and rural communities since the launch of the innovative data tool Incarceration Trends Project, which provides the most comprehensive review of county-by-county incarceration rates to date. The In Our Backyards initiative has also produced substantial on-the-ground state and county research, meant to catalyze meaningful policy and practice change that promotes decarceration, prevents the building of bigger jails, and supports diversion and community support. The In Our Backyards initiative’s commitment to end mass incarceration in small and rural America is generously supported by Google.org funding and Google.org Fellows. The In Our Backyards Community Grants are a means to further scale this work by building state and local momentum, led by organizations that understand their communities best, with the support of Vera’s research and tools. In total, Vera is investing $160,000 in the 16 grantees.

Tiheba Bain added: “The vision and ambition shared in all of the proposals we received made the final selection process extremely difficult. In this era of mass incarceration, it is vital to support the full breadth of grassroots work that is underway across the country. And these grants are one more step toward building even more powerful momentum around ending mass incarceration and investing in communities.”

This year’s In Our Backyards Community Grants are supporting organizations tackling a range of local challenges, including highlighting racial disparities and educating voters on the role prosecutors play in the justice system, challenging jail expansion, advocating for bail reform, and urging communities to stop relying on jails and prisons for economic survival. For a full list of grantees, see below.

Grantees

Illinois

• Workers Center for Racial Justice (WCRJ): WCRJ is expanding their work into St. Clair County, IL, home to the second-largest Black population in the state. Their efforts will be focused primarily in East St. Louis, a small post-industrial city whose residents have been harmed by racial violence, followed by white flight, disinvestment, and concentrated poverty. Of approximately 30,000 citizens, over 97 percent are Black. As the county prepares for a critical State's Attorney race in 2020, WCRJ will build a strong base of grassroots leaders who understand the role that prosecutors play in the justice system. They will also advocate for decarceration and re-investment in marginalized communities, and a bail policy that mandates consideration of each defendant's economic circumstances.

Kansas

• Justice Matters: In an ongoing effort to advance decarceration, Justice Matters is undertaking local community organizing focused on stopping a proposed jail expansion and embracing local system reforms and the broader use of safe, effective alternatives to incarceration. Their work will uplift practices proven to safely lower jail populations and improve public safety, including supportive pre-trial release, case processing improvements, alternative responses to technical violations of supervision, and the implementation of local, restorative justice systems.

Kentucky

• Kentucky Center for Economic Policy: The Kentucky Center for Economic Policy (KCEP) will support research, communications and advocacy to address the incentives and drivers behind rising jail incarceration in rural Kentucky. Their work will make information available about the policy drivers and economic conditions causing growth in the local jail population and build momentum for criminal justice reforms and better local government alternatives. KCEP will analyze data on county jail populations and pretrial release practices in order to understand trends across the state, focusing on very different counties facing jail overcrowding.

North Carolina

• We Are Down Home North Carolina: We Are Down Home is advancing a new effort associated with their Alamance County chapter’s” Stop Criminalizing the Poor” working group. This member-led working group is in the process of launching North Carolina’s first rural community bail fund, which they intend to serve as an anchor for community organizing and campaigning. We Are Down Home also views these Alamance-specific efforts as a pilot and entry-point for their broader statewide network into campaigning to end mass incarceration and win meaningful criminal justice reforms. Their goal is to develop replicable models, materials, and language that will enable statewide and aligned efforts anchored in our other county-based chapters. This work is rooted in the understanding that rural communities are increasingly sites of jail construction and expansion. Alamance County, specifically, has been approached by ICE; the Alamance jail is set to become perhaps the largest ICE detention facility in North Carolina.
• Carolina Justice Policy Center (CJPC), NAACP of Wilson County, and Community Alliance for Public Education (CAPE): Wilson County, NC incarcerates too many Black, Latino, and poor residents simply because they cannot afford to post bail. This impacts the community as a whole, particularly children of jailed parents who suffer family separation, housing displacement, mental health challenges, stigma, and shame. Together, the Carolina Justice Policy Center (CJPC), the NAACP of Wilson County, and the Community Alliance for Public Education (CAPE) will mobilize community groups, social services organizations, educators, parents, and others to advance bail reform and the use of "cite and release". They will share data and research in community meetings, round-table events with law enforcement leaders and civil servants, and in a large forum.

Pennsylvania

• Healing Communities: Healing Communities USA is a national faith-based reentry network that trains communities of faith in reentry support for returning citizens and their families, restorative justice models, capacity building, faith-based cognitive behavioral therapy and advocacy. They will collaborate with their Philadelphia Chapter, JustLeadership USA and several other organizations to replicate a Philadelphia strategy in other counties and advance statewide reforms to cash bail, ban the box, solitary confinement, ending racial disparities, probation and parole reform, and reinvestment in directly impacted communities. They plan to expand efforts into Lancaster City and Allentown and support community organizing, legislative reform, social media, and campaign building and education.
• Pennsylvania Prison Society & Urban Rural Action: Pennsylvania Prison Society and Urban Rural Action are implementing the “Consensus-Building for Incarceration Reform” (CBIR) program in Adams County and Philadelphia. This innovative eight-month project will advance collaborative urban/rural efforts among criminal justice reform advocates, community leaders, and county jail officials to reduce incarceration rates and improve jail conditions in Adams County and Philadelphia. They will strengthen this network’s influence, advocacy, and consensus-building capacity, increase both communities' familiarity with data on existing incarceration rates and jail conditions, develop and implement influence and advocacy strategies to reduce incarceration and improve jail conditions, and build relationships across the urban/rural divide through communal meals, homestays, and collaboration. Their approach leverages a statewide network of Prison Society volunteers who have been working for more humane prison conditions for 232 years, proven UR Action approaches for joint problem-solving and consensus-building, and deep local relationships in Adams County and Philadelphia. They will measure the impact of urban/rural collaboration to advance incarceration reform, creating a promising model that can be replicated in other geographies.
• University of Scranton: The University of Scranton Center for the Analysis and Prevention of Crime (CAPoC) will use the granted funds to start a long term data-sharing and data-reporting relationship with the Lackawanna County prison (LCP) and the community. The 8-month project would include the set-up and initial analysis of prison data to better understand LCP's daily and admission populations. CAPoC's goal is to institutionalize data analysis and evidence-based practice in the region, as part of their portfolio of projects. They also plan to draw attention to the issues of carceral justice via a public information strategy aimed at the surrounding community.

Tennessee

• ACLU of Tennessee: The money bail system is a leading cause of mass incarceration in Tennessee. Indeed, half of the almost 30,000 individuals in county jails in the state are pre-trial detainees — most are eligible for bail but cannot pay the required amount. The ACLU of Tennessee will build on ongoing work on money bail reform by a) conducting qualitative research on the human toll of current pretrial practices in three rural Tennessee counties, b) illuminating their findings and distributing them to key community stakeholders, legislators, the media and the public, and c) building relationships with stakeholders in rural communities for ongoing work on this issue beyond the grant.
• No Exceptions Prison Collective, Free Hearts and Mercy Junction Justice and Peace Center: The “In Defense of our Families” project will counter the narrative that jails and prisons are beneficial to rural communities by focusing on the true costs of jails and prisons – the human cost. This work undertaken by No Exceptions, Free Hearts and Mercy Junction Justice and Peace Center will be narrative-driven, and will focus on one county in each of Tennessee’s three regions. In each county, they will interview loved ones of incarcerated people, formerly incarcerated individuals, jail and prison staff, and local elected officials. They will incorporate data regarding rates of incarceration in these areas, lengths of sentences, and an economic analysis of costs versus gains from a fiscal perspective. Their primary focus and purpose is to build a broader base and amplify the voices of those directly impacted to the ends of showing that any purported economic benefit to the county is outweighed by the destruction of both family and community stability. Moreover, they will show the disparate impact on communities of color and the poor. These interviews will be edited into social media content and a video presentation that will accompany a panel discussion in each of the three regions, with the purpose of educating both the public and elected officials.

Texas

• Mano Amiga SM: In 2016, the U.S. Census Bureau named Hays County, TX – situated between Austin and San Antonio – the fastest growing county in the nation. While their county population has risen 16 percent in the past 4 years, the incarceration rate has soared a shocking 82 percent. This dangerous jail population increase results in part from policing and prosecution policies, including arrest for low-level offenses. Possession of less than two ounces of marijuana was the top arresting charge in Hays County from 2013 to 2017, and accounted for 20 percent of all misdemeanor cases going through the county courts in 2018. To decarcerate Hays County, Mano Amiga will launch a public campaign to educate the city council of San Marcos – the largest city in Hays County – on how to best decriminalize and reduce the prosecution of low-level offenses by passing resolutions that direct Police Chief Chase Stapp and his police department to limit discretion regarding these needless arrests. While their plan focuses on municipal reforms in San Marcos, their high-profile efforts will run parallel to broader efforts by Mano Amiga and their partners to usher in similar and more far-reaching policies on the county level, as well, with success in San Marcos modelling potential county policy.