Less crime, fewer victims through Justice Reinvestment Initiatives

This week communities across America will join together to commemorate National Crime Victims’ Rights Week, an annual event initiated in 1981 by President Ronald Reagan. For 2015, the focus is on “engaging communities and empowering victims.” 

With six decades of combined experience in the criminal justice and victim assistance fields, we support strategies that are smart on crime, reduce recidivism, and increase services for crime victims and survivors. And although our political perspectives differ, we share a common, overriding goal – less crime and fewer victims. 

{mosads}We believe a promising path toward that goal is the Justice Reinvestment Initiative (JRI), a data-driven approach to hold offenders accountable, control taxpayer costs and keep communities safe. In recent years, a growing number of red and blue states from North Carolina to Mississippi and Oregon have embraced justice reinvestment, and victims and their advocates have been enthusiastically involved in the efforts every step of the way. 

JRI begins with the gathering and analysis of data to identify shortcomings in the criminal justice system, and then engages all branches of government and outside stakeholders to develop evidence-based policies that address those problems and reduce taxpayer costs. Savings produced by reforms are “reinvested” into programs proven to improve public safety.  

Crime victims benefit from JRI in multiple ways.  

In many states, savings from reforms have been used to fund Statewide Automated Victim Information and Notification (SAVIN) systems; state crime victim compensation programs; victim restitution management systems that help victims cope with financial losses resulting from crime; and direct services and support for victims, including those in rural, remote and tribal jurisdictions. 

This investment has been critical, especially in the wake of budget cuts that devastated many government and community victim support programs, and it’s long overdue. 

Consider the findings of a 2011 Special Report by the U.S. Department of Justice, which found that only about nine percent of serious violent crime victims received direct victim assistance from a victim service agency from 1993 to 2009. Similarly, the first ever study of California crime victims conducted in 2012 by Californians for Safety and Justice found that four of the five victim services mentioned in the survey were unknown to the majority of victims.   

JRI also aids victims in less obvious but equally important ways, by reducing recidivism. 

A common feature of JRI reforms is to expand the use of validated risk assessment instruments to evaluate offenders and provide critical information about what treatment and supervision strategies will work best for each offender’s particular circumstances.

That helps reduce crime and keep victims safe.

On the front end, justice reinvestment initiatives actively engage crime victims as key players in the development of policy reforms. This is a major change from the past, when crime victims often had little say in major changes to the criminal justice system. Including their perspective helps ensure reforms are victim-sensitive and also validates their experience and contributions. 

Why have crime victims and survivors been enlisted as contributing architects of reform efforts such as JRI?   

Consider for a moment how poorly the justice system would function without victims willing to report crimes, serve as witnesses, and help us understand the often-devastating impact that crime has on individuals, their families and their communities.  Crime victims and survivors offer us a highly personal lens that reveals their most significant needs, provides critical guidance to improve victim services and support, and contributes insights to the development of effective crime-reduction strategies. 

Once treated as an afterthought, victims are now valued as integral partners in our work.   

And like other Americans, victims increasingly are calling for smart reforms that focus less on lengthy prison sentences for all and more on targeted, evidence-based crime responses that are proven to reduce recidivism. In numerous opinion surveys, for example, more than 80 percent of respondents from households in which someone has been a victim of a violent or nonviolent crime agree with the following statement:  

It does not matter whether a nonviolent offender is in prison for 18 or 24 or 30 months.  What really matters is that the system does a better job of making sure that when an offender does get out, he is less likely to commit another violent crime. 

Justice reinvestment is about less crime and fewer victims.  That, in the end, is what we all want. 

Jenkins is the chief probation officer of San Diego County, California and has been a community corrections leader for 37 years.  He is the vice president of the American Probation and Parole Association. Seymour is a Washington, DC-based national crime victim advocate who has worked in her field for over 30 years.