Promoting Smart Decarceration as a Grand Challenge

Abstract

America began the dramatic growth of its criminal justice system in the 1970s that led to the United States becoming the world’s largest jailer by the 21st century—a time period commonly referred to as mass incarceration. On any given day, approximately two million people are locked behind prisons and jail bars across the country, and over eleven million people cycle in and out of jails and prisons each year. As of the 2020s, there is widespread recognition that racial and social inequities fuel the constant churn of people in and out of the criminal justice and legal systems, leading to the burgeoning of advocacy groups and researchers calling to not only reform but transform the American way of conducting legal and correctional processing of crime. Promote Smart Decarceration was adopted by the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare (now powered by the Grand Challenges for Social Work) in 2015 as an organizing framework for data-driven and evaluative reforms. Smart decarceration is a framework with four guiding concepts: 1) Changing the narrative on incarceration and the incarcerated, 2) Generating criminal justice system-wide innovations, 3) implementing transdisciplinary policy and practice interventions, and 4) employing evidence-driven strategies. Smart decarceration adheres to the principle that in order for transformation to be achieved, both new evidence and existing evidence will guide decision-making and the diffusion of innovations. The achievement of smart decarceration will be evidenced when these three outcomes are simultaneously met: (1) the incarcerated population in US jails and prisons is substantially decreased, (2) racial and economic disparities in the criminal justice system are redressed, and (3) community safety and public well-being are maximized. Efforts to transform the criminal justice system are wide-ranging and include strategies such as legislative policy reform, prevention programming, public-messaging campaigns, empirical documentation of problems and solutions, employer hiring initiatives, diversion and deflection efforts, specialty courts, correctional programs, and behavioral interventions. The evidence base is growing for a reimagined criminal justice system, and the state of data-driven approaches to criminal behavior, legal processes, and punishment will likely look very different in 2030 than approaches do in the first two decades of the 2000s. This entry provides a state-of-the-evidence review of scholarship responsive to and informing the tenetsof smart decarceration.