Extending Reimagine Adult Justice: What’s next for Wendy Ware’s work?
- ICJJ
- 7 days ago
- 5 min read
Last November, Wendy Ware, a national expert in corrections data analysis, authored “Alameda County Jail Analysis & Population Projections”. The report details current trends in crime, arrests, jail population, and recidivism.
She submitted her report and presented a summary, “County Jail Population Analysis,” to the Board of Supervisors Public Protection Committee as she ended her one-year consulting contract with the County. (Click titles for links to the full reports.)
The information in these reports is of central importance not only for adjustments of practice and policy among criminal justice agencies, but for other County agencies with responsibilities for health, behavioral health, and housing.
What’s Needed: Rigorous research such as this is central to sustaining improvements in jail conditions and driving policy-relevant criminal justice decisions. ICJJ wants to see Wendy Ware’s jail reports continued and expanded to incorporate behavioral health data and Care First, Jails Last metrics.
Continued – and fuller – benefit from the work of Ms. Ware requires both multi-year trend analyses and expansion of her mandate to include study of the populations at the jail who experience significant mental illness and substance use disorders.
(See below, “Findings: Why This Work Matters.”)
With fuller access to existing data, Ms. Ware or her successor would be able to assess treatment needs and treatment utilization, and identify obstacles to diverting more defendants into appropriate treatment in a non-jail setting.
Strong analyses will permit smarter allocation of funding, staff, and programs. In turn, this will reduce the speed of the revolving door of jail entry and reduce the number of our community members held in the jail population.
The analysis of these important data is necessary to indicate where services are needed to both reimagine and implement adult justice.
But three crucial steps must be taken:
As of our publication date, to our knowledge, no contract has been awarded for Ms. Ware (or anyone) to continue this important work of data analysis and interpretation. The Board must do so.
Access to behavioral health data is needed for a comprehensive project extension. The Board of Supervisors must stipulate that the County’s Behavioral Health Department cooperates with this project.
New roles are needed if the Care First, Jails Last initiative is to survive into the future and promote system improvement, and if Wendy Ware or her successor is to secure cooperation from Health, Housing, Alameda County Sheriff’s Office, and other agencies. The work will need an independent “czar” and a high-level collaborative body outside and above the Sheriff’s Office (similar to the group that Wendy Still originally formed; see Recent History section for more information). Overseeing this effort should be part of the responsibility of a future Director for CFJL Policy, appointed by and reporting to the Board of Supervisors.
What You Can Do:
Contact members of the Board of Supervisors to insist that the Reimagine Adult Justice work move forward. — Encourage Board members to submit a priority “budget letter” to the County Administrator’s Office, requesting a new contract to continue Ms. Ware’s work.— Board members should assert it is County policy that relevant behavioral health and other data be released to researchers.— Demand that supervision of this contract be outside and above the Sheriff’s Office.
We need a Public Dashboard! Call for the Sheriff’s Office and other County entities to report real-time jail data, plus data on current jail operations and residents, and pre-release and re-entry planning.
Watch for the next Care First, Jails Last presentation to the Board’s Public Protection Committee, expected this month.
REIMAGINE ADULT JUSTICE: RECENT HISTORY
In 2023 and 2024, several important reports were released under the leadership of Wendy Still, the former Chief Probation Officer turned Project Manager for Alameda County’s “Reimagine Adult Justice” (RAJ) effort.
Following Ms. Still’s retirement, her colleague Wendy Ware continued a portion of their work under contract from the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office. That contract expired last November.
The RAJ Initiative and Ms. Ware’s contract work were developed following advocates’ demands that the County minimize reliance on jail detention for “social problems”. This effort coalesced into work by the Care First Community Coalition, other advocates, and, subsequently, the “Care First Jails Last (CFJL) Initiative” now pursued by the renamed Behavioral Health Advisory Board’s Care First ad hoc committee.
(For additional background, see ICJJ newsletter Issues #9, 10, 11, 14, 15, and 16.)
FINDINGS: WHY THIS WORK MATTERS
Rigorous research like that performed by Wendy Ware is central to sustaining improvement in jail conditions and to driving policy-relevant criminal justice decisions.
For example, this table with data excerpted from one of Ms. Ware’s reports reveals that there may be distinct populations held at the jail based on individuals’ length of stay.
Almost two out of five people released from the jail in 2024 were released within 24 hours, and about three out of five were released within 72 hours. These individuals likely differ in many ways from the 11 percent who were released after 30 days or longer.
Other charts in Ms. Ware’s reports indicate that she has the data to distinguish the shorter-term detainees from the longer-term detainees for a variety of characteristics, including: charge (new arrest, warrant, violation of community supervision, or other); demographic indicators (gender, race, and age); arresting agency; bond amount; and release reason.
Although we know from ACSO reports that 25 percent of detainees are assessed as having moderate to severe functional mental health impairment “in a correctional setting,” and we know that others are diagnosed with substance use disorder and/or report being homeless at the time of arrest, Ms. Ware’s work to date does not examine the relationship among these behavioral health and housing problems and jail admission or release.
We also have no information on the role that other health problems may play. Surely policies to implement – and programs to support – successful re-entry must be aligned with different individuals’ needs. To understand this fully, Ms. Ware’s important work must be continued and expanded.
Hiding Behind HIPAA?
The confidentiality regulations known as HIPAA are designed to protect people’s privacy by limiting how some patient information can be shared and utilized. Unfortunately, this positive tool is often used by agencies as an excuse not to share information, even when it can be safely shared for research purposes. Across the country, confidentiality agreements with researchers routinely and successfully protect individual privacy while supporting data analysis for policy research purposes.
