PCIC has partnered with Lone Star Justice Alliance (LSJA), a nonprofit legal organization whose mission is to improve the lives of emerging adults (18-24 years old) in the justice system through utilization of developmentally appropriate responses to behavior, treating emerging adults with equity and dignity to promote resilience, conserve costs, and increase public safety. PCIC will provide a platform to support their “Transformative Justice” and “End Juvenile Life Sentences” programs, which implement innovative strategies for maximizing the supports and services needed to keep emerging adults in the community where their needs are better met at a lower cost to the state. Through targeted outreach, public awareness campaigns, and other organizing activities, LSJA’s community programs engage emerging adults and their families to promote the development of positive outcomes among Texas emerging adults.
Each year, Texas spends more than $5 billion to incarcerate nearly 150,000 people in our state prisons, three-fourths of which are people of color, yet 75% of young adults who enter the system reoffend within three years.
While there is currently much discussion around mass incarceration, practices in Texas still adhere to a system that fundamentally believes that incarceration is the primary answer to crime. Research, however, has shown that not only does incarceration largely fail to rehabilitate in the ways suggested, but it also perpetuates of cycles of violence, and in many ways increases harm, particularly among youths.
In fact, crime victims agree: 52% of crime victims report that prison makes people worse and them less safe. This could explain why in the richest nation in the world with arguably the largest, most expensive criminal justice system in human history, the majority of victims never report these crimes. They prefer nothing to everything we have to offer.
Overhauling the practices of the criminal justice system is not a matter of simply preventing future criminal activity—it requires uprooting the foundation of the system to identify why individuals commit crimes and providing them with the tools to achieve autonomy in a responsible manner. This primarily works by stabilizing their social determinants of health (SDoH)-- social factors that heavily influence health outcomes. It has been shown that 80% of an individual’s health is determined by social, environmental and behavioral factors, while only 20% is determined by clinical factors, such as hospital or clinic visits.
Establishing a secure environment and a path to success at this critical age, where young adults are still developing mentally and emotionally, can determine the trajectory for the rest of their life. By aligning resources to improve their physical environment, social and economic circumstance and learned health behaviors, this troubled emerging adult population will be in a position to succeed rather than succumbing to the inevitable cycle of living on the fringes of society with periods of intermittent jail time.
In order to overcome deep-rooted racism and disproportionate incarceration rates for at-risk emerging adult populations in the current criminal justice system, care providers across the healthcare, government and criminal justice sectors must collaborate to construct an alternative model that integrates reformative practices from all domains rather than maintaining a siloed approach. Accomplishing this requires constructing a care plan based on data-driven analytics, transparency across all participating agencies, in terms of sharing accumulated data and patient information, and a platform that is capable of tracking individuals’ progress through the intervention process. This is all in an effort to stabilize the social and medical factors that afflict these young adults on a community-wide scale. By customizing PCIC’s Unified Care Continuum Platform (UCCP) to accommodate the needs of LSJA’s care provision model, care coordinators can determine resource availability, make referrals, track outcomes and analyze data in one consolidated platform.
The data collected within this platform will then inform LSJA’s partnership with researchers at the University of Texas Health School of Public Health, Texas A&M Public Policy Research Institute, and Harvard Law School’s Access to Justice Lab, who will conduct a randomized control trial (RCT) to track participants’ health and criminal justice outcomes, perform cost-benefit-analysis, and process evaluations in the Transformative Justice Program. Results from the RCT will be disseminated to stakeholders in these counties and to researchers and experts at local, state, and national conferences in order to inform changes in policy that could reduce the state’s incarceration rate, while promoting public safety and the effective use of the state’s limited resources. This is the first study of its kind in the United States since the mid-1960’s, and it has the potential to provide the most comprehensive evidence in favor of treatment over incarceration.
Based on current estimates, the cost-savings of the Transformative Justice model could be significant. For the first 100 people in the program, making the conservative assumption that our program will drop recidivism from 75 to 40%, experts predict we could save as much as $4.7 million within three years on the cost of incarceration alone. These savings could be reinvested in scaling this model, but also in schools, health care, housing, or other public goods which, in their present state, contribute to the incidence of justice system involvement for many emerging adults. We are excited to see how scaling this care coordination and transformative justice model impacts the way reformative practices are conducted and tracked, particularly for youth populations across the nation.
To learn more about LSJA and their work, click here.
