Major Criminal Justice Overhaul Proposed By DC Task Force

WASHINGTON, DC — A Washington, D.C., task force released a plan Thursday to serve as a guide for city leaders to lower incarceration rates by half and overhaul how the city polices its citizens.

The report, "Jails & Justice: Our Transformation Starts Today," provides a detailed plan with steps for District of Columbia leaders to transform the city's justice system over the next 10 years, with specific changes that could be made immediately.

The District Task Force on Jails & Justice report also includes plans to create a new non-traditional facility that would house all people detained prior to going to trial or who have received sentences that allow them to stay in D.C.

“We can all now more clearly envision a future with drastically fewer incarcerated people," Professor Shelley Broderick, chair of the District Task Force on Jails & Justice and the former dean of the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law, said Thursday in a statement. "The time for real change is here and the need is urgent.”

After holding town halls and conducting surveys over the past two years, the task force came up with an 80-point plan for D.C. officials to use in addressing top criminal justice issues, from COVID-19 to racial justice to incarceration practices.

The new report is a sequel to the report "Jails & Justice: A Framework for Change." For the two reports, researchers engaged 2,500 D.C. residents, including people who are currently incarcerated in federal Bureau of Prisons facilities.

At a virtual news conference Thursday about the report, Jonathan Smith, executive director of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs and a member of the task force, said the evidence shows that D.C.'s incarceration rate does little to keep communities safe.

One of the themes of the report is working to "shrink the footprint of our criminal justice system," Smith noted.

While the task force’s work will affect all of D.C., Black residents are overrepresented at each stage of the city's criminal justice system, according to the report. Black people make up 47 percent of D.C.’s population but 86 percent of the people who are arrested, 92 percent of the people jailed and 95 percent of the people in prison serving sentences.

The task force said it explicitly targeted its recommendations to help end the over-criminalization of Black people in the District.

Smith said at the news conference that COVID-19 has brought on changes to the criminal justice system that reform advocates had proposed years before the pandemic. The District has seen a reduction in the number of people taken into custody during the pandemic, along with an increased use of compassionate release from incarceration.

The pandemic has forced the District and other jurisdictions across the nation to conduct an experiment with many of the proposals sought by prison reform advocates over the past decade, Smith said.

As proposed, the new non-traditional jail would hold all people who the District decides must be detained pre-trial for community safety and all people who are sentenced to incarceration, including those sentenced for felony convictions who are currently held in federal Bureau of Prisons facilities.

The facility, which would have up to 3,800 beds, would be built in two parts: the New Facility - Annex, a smaller section built first, and opening while the existing Central Treatment Facility still operates, and New Facility - Main, the larger section, built second, which will open as CTF is closed.

The timing of the construction of a new facility would depend on the District's finances as it eventually seeks to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, said D.C. Council Member Charles Allen, a member of the task force and chair of city council's Committee on the Judiciary & Public Safety and Co-Chair, Committee on Facilities and Services.

The District Task Force on Jails & Justice is an independent advisory body founded in 2019. The report was produced by the Council for Court Excellence under a grant from the District of Columbia.