Charleston County

Charleston County is a member of the first cohort of jurisdictions to participate in the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) Network, the centerpiece of the Foundation’s strategy to address overincarceration by reducing jail misuse and overuse and racial and ethnic disparities in jail usage. This capstone award enables Charleston County to continue its participation in the SJC Network and maintain progress achieved during previous rounds of funding, both in reducing jail populations and increasing fairness, while sustaining momentum for local system reform.

Charleston County (Charleston) is a member of the first cohort of jurisdictions to participate in the Safety and Justice Challenge Network, the centerpiece of the Foundation’s strategy to address overincarceration by reducing jail misuse and overuse and racial disparities in jail usage. This award enables Charleston to build on and secure progress achieved during previous rounds of implementation funding in reducing jail populations, increasing fairness, and advancing racial equity while sustaining local system reform momentum.

Charleston County is an original member of the Safety and Justice Challenge Network, the centerpiece of the Foundation’s strategy to address over-incarceration by reducing jail misuse and overuse and disparities in jail usage. Under previous awards, Charleston County engaged in a structured, collaborative process to identify local drivers of unnecessary jail incarceration, generated an ambitious plan to address them, and implemented the plan over a two-year period with technical assistance and guidance from a consortium of national experts. This award enables Charleston County to sustain and expand its reform work, implementing changes across an array of criminal justice processing and decision points with the goal of achieving further reductions in local incarceration, accelerating the pace of systems reform, and addressing racial and ethnic disparities.

Following a national competition in 2015, Charleston County was among 20 jurisdictions selected for inclusion in the Safety and Justice Challenge Network, the centerpiece of the Foundation’s strategy to address overincarceration by reducing jail misuse and overuse. A previous award supported Charleston County’s participation in a structured data analysis and planning process, assessing local drivers of jail incarceration, setting reduction targets, and developing a plan to achieve them. Resulting plans were scored by an expert panel on the basis of ambition, comprehensiveness, and achievability, and 11, including Charleston County’s, were selected for implementation funding on the basis of this review. This two-year award enables Charleston County to institute changes aimed at reducing local incarceration and disparities in jail usage in accordance with its implementation plan.

Twenty jurisdictions have been selected, following a nationwide competition, to participate in the Safety and Justice Challenge Network of sites committed to finding ways to safely and sustainably reduce unnecessary jail incarceration. The Safety and Justice Challenge Network is at the core of the Foundation’s initiative to reduce over-incarceration by changing the way America thinks about and uses jails. Awards to these jurisdictions support their participation in a structured data analysis and planning process aimed at assessing drivers of local incarceration and developing multi-stakeholder action plans to address them.