Jail administrators and local public safety leaders require tools to accurately forecast their local jail populations in order to assist with long and short-term planning.
However, creating reliable and accurate jail population projections is challenging for a variety of reasons including short lengths of stays, mixed sentenced and detained populations, greater discretion regarding release, and short time horizons for the impact of policy changes.
This new publication describes some of the challenges and how they are addressed by the Jail Population and Policy Impact Tool©, developed by CJI and economist Michael Wilson for the Justice Reinvestment Initiative (JRI), funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA). The Tool utilizes a jurisdiction’s own data to develop projections of various policy scenarios. This publication describes the basic principles of the tool and the data required to use it. Use of the tool is free, please contact jppit@crj.org if your organization is interested.
Click here to read the report.