| Notes | Through the Safety and Justice Challenge, we are engaging in a long-term strategy of investment in local reform, research, experimentation, and communications intended to create national demand for local justice reform as a means of reducing over-incarceration in America. The Challenge supports jurisdictions across the country working to safely reduce over-reliance on jails, with a particular focus on addressing disproportionate impact on low-income individuals and communities of color. Central to the initiative is a competition through which we are funding a set of jurisdictions to design and implement plans for creating fairer, more effective local justice systems using innovative, collaborative, and evidence-based solutions and another group of jurisdictions to support a single innovative justice reform program or project. The work of these sites will raise the profile of the problem of overuse and misuse of jails and demonstrate alternatives to incarceration as usual. Their efforts will reveal new and better ways of targeting resources, more effective means of managing and mitigating risk without resorting to incarceration, and better public safety returns and social outcomes. To advance our knowledge and understanding about the use of jail in America and to document the experience of local jurisdictions that succeed in building more effective and just criminal justice systems, the we are complementing our grants to local jurisdictions with investments in research and data analytics. We are also investing in a robust communications strategy aimed at elevating jail overuse and misuse into an urgent national issue, spreading effective approaches and practices in justice reform, and generating national demand for a more balanced set of approaches to crime and disorder that use incarceration only where necessary and as part of a flexible range of effective alternatives. The Challenge engages a diverse range of organizations and individuals—law enforcement, judges, prosecutors, defenders, policymakers, academia, advocates, and funders—to lend their insights and participation to this effort. Many of the nation's leading criminal justice organizations provide technical assistance, data analysis, and other support to Safety and Justice Challenge jurisdictions, including the Center for Court Innovation, the Institute for State and Local Governance at the City University of New York, the Justice Management Institute, Justice System Partners, the Pretrial Justice Institute, the Vera Institute of Justice, Policy Research, Inc., and the W. Haywood Burns Institute. |