How did this county come to release a man like this so easily?
Part of the answer is a decade of deliberate policy. Some of it was paid for by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation when it awarded Allegheny County a Safety and Justice Challenge grant. The initiative describes its mission as fighting “the misuse and overuse of jails.” The county’s own first-year report is blunt about what the money was for: “to reduce the population of the Allegheny County Jail by 20%.”
The county beat that goal. It reported a 36% reduction in its jail population during that first two-year grant, a stretch that included the COVID-19 shutdowns, when jails nationwide emptied out.
The MacArthur Foundation then renewed: $2 million in 2020, $1.17 million in 2022 over four years, and $334,000 in 2024. In all, $5.5 million since 2018. The county has said it was chosen for the 2021 renewal “based on the promise and progress of work to date.”
In other words, results got rewarded.
What did the money buy? The county’s reports list public defenders at overnight arraignments, hiring staff so every district judge could get a pretrial risk assessment, and faster court processing. The results were measurable. At the overnight arraignments where public defenders began appearing, district judges set money bonds 39% less often than in the same period of 2018. And the county’s pretrial office, in its own words, “never recommends money bail, which is ineffective and unfair to people who are poor.”
That recommendation creates a system built to say yes to release, one that measures success by how many beds sit empty. Keeping a man in jail requires somebody — a judge, a prosecutor, a victim — to push against that current.
Part of the answer is a decade of deliberate policy. Some of it was paid for by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation when it awarded Allegheny County a Safety and Justice Challenge grant. The initiative describes its mission as fighting “the misuse and overuse of jails.” The county’s own first-year report is blunt about what the money was for: “to reduce the population of the Allegheny County Jail by 20%.”
The county beat that goal. It reported a 36% reduction in its jail population during that first two-year grant, a stretch that included the COVID-19 shutdowns, when jails nationwide emptied out.
The MacArthur Foundation then renewed: $2 million in 2020, $1.17 million in 2022 over four years, and $334,000 in 2024. In all, $5.5 million since 2018. The county has said it was chosen for the 2021 renewal “based on the promise and progress of work to date.”
In other words, results got rewarded.
What did the money buy? The county’s reports list public defenders at overnight arraignments, hiring staff so every district judge could get a pretrial risk assessment, and faster court processing. The results were measurable. At the overnight arraignments where public defenders began appearing, district judges set money bonds 39% less often than in the same period of 2018. And the county’s pretrial office, in its own words, “never recommends money bail, which is ineffective and unfair to people who are poor.”
That recommendation creates a system built to say yes to release, one that measures success by how many beds sit empty. Keeping a man in jail requires somebody — a judge, a prosecutor, a victim — to push against that current.
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