We have issued a series of reports on North Carolina state and county-level jail occupancy rates, including one in October 2020 focusing on changes in total county and statewide jail occupants during the COVID-19 pandemic (our earlier reports are here, here and here). This report provides updated jail population numbers through November 2020. Please refer to our prior reports for information on data sources and calculations.
Criminal Justice Innovation Lab
Promising Results in Two New Bail Reform Evaluation Reports
On January 2020, North Carolina’s Judicial Districts 21 (Forsyth County) and 2 (Washington, Beaufort, Martin, Tyrrell, and Hyde counties) implemented bail reform. In both jurisdictions, reforms were implemented after a collaborative, consensus process. Participants included judges, prosecutors, defenders, magistrates, clerks, law enforcement leaders and others. Judicial District 21 adopted a new decision-making tool to be … Read more
Pilot Sites Chosen for North Carolina’s Citation Project
Back in July I wrote a post (here) inviting North Carolina police departments to apply to participate as pilot sites for The Citation Project. Executed by the UNC School of Government’s Criminal Justice Innovation Lab and the North Carolina Association of Chiefs of Police, The Citation Project seeks to improve policing practices through implementation and rigorous evaluation of a model citation in lieu of arrest policy. Four pilots sites have been selected. They include: Winston-Salem, Wilmington, Apex and Elizabeth City.
Changes in North Carolina Jail Populations During COVID-19
We have issued a series of reports on North Carolina state and county-level jail occupancy rates, including one in July 2020 focusing on changes in jail occupancy rates during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic (here, here and here). In this report, we switch our reporting metric and focus on changes in occupants as opposed to occupancy rates. We also provide a new tool for stakeholders to examine changes in county jail populations during the COVID-19 period.
Lessons from the Alamance County Bail Litigation
A federal court Consent Order has been entered in the Alamance County bail litigation. The relief granted in that order and the county’s new local bail and first appearance policies hold important lessons for other North Carolina jurisdictions about the constitutional requirements for local bail systems. Put another way, because the agreed-upon relief and procedures in the Alamance case were deemed sufficient to address the constitutional violations alleged, they offer a model for other local bail systems. In this post, I discuss the key changes to the Alamance system.
How Long Does it Take to Process a Criminal Case in North Carolina?
The Criminal Justice Innovation Lab recently released a report analyzing disposition and pending case times for North Carolina criminal cases. The full report is here. In this blog post, I discuss our findings regarding statewide disposition times as compared to Benchmarks developed by the National Center for State Courts (NCSC). As we explain in the report, the North Carolina Commission on the Administration of Law & Justice recommended that North Carolina examine its current case processing time guidelines using the NCSC Benchmarks as a guide. We thus compared North Carolina disposition times against those metrics. As discussed below, statewide median disposition times in district and superior court, for all case types, fell short of the NCSC Benchmarks.
Changes in North Carolina Jail Populations During the COVID-19 Pandemic
We previously shared data on jail occupancy in North Carolina for 2018 (here) and 2019 (here). Responding to requests for information regarding changes in jail populations during the COVID-19 pandemic, with this report we offer information about 2020 jail populations. For an explanation regarding our data source and explanatory notes, please see our prior reports. Before we get to the numbers, we make two important points. First, beginning on April 6, 2020, a moratorium was placed on most inmate transfers from county jails to the state prison system.[1] As our colleague Jamie Markham explained, state officials imposed that moratorium to help manage the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, inmates ordered to serve active time were—unless sentenced to time served, released on appeal bond, or otherwise permitted to delay the start of their sentence—rolled into a “jail backlog.”[2] By the end of May 2020, there were over 1600 backlog inmates in county jails.[3] To the extent efforts were made to reduce populations in county jails, the moratorium would have impacted those initiatives. Second, the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a suspension of jury trials. Charging new offenses, however, has continued. Thus, jails may be experiencing a backlog of defendants detained pretrial.
Invitation to NC Police Departments: Apply Now for The Citation Project
On July 15th, the North Carolina Association of Chiefs of Police (NCACP) invited its members to apply to serve as pilot sites for a new project supporting evidence-based policing practices. Executed by the UNC School of Government’s Criminal Justice Innovation Lab (CJIL) and the NCACP, The Citation Project seeks to improve policing practices through implementation and rigorous evaluation of a model citation in lieu of arrest policy. The project has three components: (1) developing a model citation in lieu of arrest policy; (2) selecting North Carolina police departments to serve as pilot sites and supporting their implementation of the model policy; and (3) conducting an empirical evaluation to assess impact on core criminal justice metrics.
Detailed North Carolina Statewide & County-Level Criminal Charging Data
We previously reported on North Carolina state and county-level criminal charging data. In our earlier report (here) we provided data on charges, charged defendants and charged cases for felonies and misdemeanors, and broke misdemeanors down into non-traffic and traffic offenses. In this report, we present more detailed information about the nature of the felony and misdemeanor charges brought in North Carolina in 2019. For felony offenses, we provide data at the state and county level on, among other things, the number of non-violent and violent felony charges, and separate out drug charges. At the misdemeanor level, we parse the data into still more categories, including breakdowns for, among other things, DWI and related charges, non-DWI traffic charges, ordinance violations, and non-violent and violent misdemeanor charges. There is a lot to unpack in our new spreadsheet. In this report, we present some of the top line results. A spreadsheet with the data is available here.
2019 North Carolina Jail Occupancy Rates
Local jails are an important part of the state’s criminal justice system. Jails house, among others, individuals held pretrial, serving sentences, and held for federal and other authorities. In this report and in the accompanying spreadsheet (here), we provide information about North Carolina jail occupancy rates. Among other things, we find that:
- 40.6% of counties[1] exceeded in-county jail capacity for at least one month in 2019; and
- 56.3% of counties exceeded 90% of in-county jail capacity for at least one month in 2019.
Our report relies on information reported to state authorities. Specifically, the North Carolina Administrative Code requires the sheriff or the administrator of a regional jail to submit a monthly report to the Jail and Detention Section of DHHS’ Division of Health Service Regulation.[2] Police chiefs likewise are required to report monthly on the occupancy of municipal lockups.[3] According to DHHS, those required to report do not include a count of inmates housed in other counties; rather they count only individuals physically present in the facility.[4] A jail that is housing individuals for another county would include those persons in its count.[5] We obtained a compilation of reported data from DHSS and it serves as the basis for this report.