Q&A: Franklin County, Ohio, Tackles Racial Disparities in the Justice System with Data and Community Engagement

Ruchelle Pride

As a Stepping Up Innovator county and a MacArthur Foundation Safety and Justice Challenge site, Franklin County, Ohio, has been at the forefront of efforts to advance equity in its justice and behavioral health systems. Franklin County facilitates many justice-related initiatives, including one that leverages data to improve decision-making and outcomes and another that engages people with lived experience in justice system planning and implementation efforts. To learn more about these efforts, The Council of State Governments (CSG) Justice Center talked with Ruchelle Pride, Franklin County’s interim director of economic development and planning and director of the Office of Justice Policy and Programs (OJPP), about these different but interconnected approaches to achieve equitable outcomes. 

Editor’s note: Answers have been edited for length and clarity.   

Stepping Towards Justice

Franklin County’s Stepping Towards Justice initiative applies the four key measures of Stepping Up to analyze and promote racial equity in justice system outcomes. 

How was the Stepping Towards Justice initiative formed? 

The OJPP launched the Stepping Towards Justice framework in 2020, which acknowledges that racism is a root cause of poverty, bad health, broken families, and damaged communities and causes people to be overincarcerated and underserved. We began by collecting and analyzing criminal justice system data, including data on arrests, arraignments, bookings, lengths of stay at the jail, and probation revocations. We initially started off as a select committee springboarded from the Criminal Justice Planning Board. The committee reported on these metrics to the full Criminal Justice Planning Board through quarterly meetings. We wanted to commit to reducing racial disparities and inequities across the justice system at the time of arrest, arraignment, sentencing, and during community supervision by 50 percent by 2025. We have kept this initiative within the Criminal Justice Planning Board, meaning that we’re the owner of these data across the intercept points and can share it to improve decision-making.  

What does the data collection and analysis process look like in Stepping Towards Justice at a high level? 

One of our functions as the OJPP is systemwide data gathering and sharing. We have a data analyst on staff as well as several grant managers and other program managers who ensure there is a quarterly compilation of these data points across the Sequential Intercept Model. They submit requests to our courts and law enforcement to share data they collect outside of what is already made public. It’s constant data mining.  

How have you leveraged data for decision-making across different intercept points to address racial disparities? 

Data has helped us determine what initiatives and what trajectory we should be on as an agency and as a stakeholder with our other key partners. For example, the data showed us the importance of bringing back our jail population review committee. We saw people who were cycling 10–15 times out of our jails. We knew that our jails were becoming the de facto mental health facilities, and they are not designed or equipped to be, nor should they be. When we can use the data to see who’s coming in and out of our jails, we can create solutions to help them avoid coming back to jail altogether.  

What are your future goals for this initiative? 

My goal is for this to become standard practice instead of an initiative. My goal is to eradicate the places where we have such stark disparities and inequities to the point where we have to create an entire focus group around how to dismantle, disrupt, and stop what is hurting people. The goal is that this doesn’t have to be an initiative because we are over that 50 percent reduction in disparities and we’ve reached a place where you rarely see these types of inequities. There’s no perfect human. There’s no perfect judge. There’s no perfect court process or system. There are going to be things that happen that shouldn’t happen, but our goal is to make inequities virtually minimal and to mitigate them at any point we can. I also want to ensure that we are infusing some of this data mapping and data mining around inequities in affordable housing, economic mobility, and economic development to strengthen these efforts.   

Reentry Advisory Board 

Franklin County’s Reentry Advisory Board includes 20 community stakeholders appointed by the Board of Commissioners and ad hoc workgroup members who are selected by the OJPP to support the board in planning and implementing set goals and objectives. Members provide reentry guidance to facilitate the transition from incarceration to the community and ultimately reduce recidivism in the county. (Photo courtesy of the Reentry Advisory Board)

Can you tell us a little about the Reentry Advisory Board? 

We completed a study back in 2009 that came to inform the work of the Stepping Towards Justice coalition because we found a lot of blaring data that helped us decide that we needed to focus on our reentry population. For example, there was a three-year recidivism rate of nearly 40 percent for individuals leaving state facilities and returning to Franklin County. Currently, our county jail recidivism rate is approximately 62 percent. The number-one recommendation to address these outcomes was to establish a community-wide reentry task force. This later morphed into the Reentry Advisory Board and was elevated to our commissioners and appointed as an official board in 2019. 

How are community members appointed to the Reentry Advisory Board?   

We look for the individuals in our ecosystem who are really making an impact. Our selection process is very inclusive because we ask people with lived experience, as well as our partners (such as service providers and other community-based organizations), to recommend individuals they feel should be part of the Reentry Advisory Board. We are consistently engaging our residents because of the work we do and because we operate high-fidelity, high-touch programs. This gives us the opportunity to engage people who have lived experience as the real subject matter experts. We encounter individuals from all walks of life at the OJPP Main Office, Rapid Resource Centers, SAFER Station Drop-In Center, and community events where we provide peer support and reentry navigation. Additionally, we facilitate evidence-based programming inside our county jail, where we interface with residents on their journey to recovery and improved well-being. Final board appointments rest with our Board of Commissioners, but they have consistently trusted us and who we put forward as potential members of the Reentry Advisory Board, given our expertise and relationships across the ecosystem.  

Can you discuss how community members are engaged in the board? Are they people who have been involved in the justice system?   

The Reentry Advisory Board has a work group full of community members, some with lived experience in the justice system who now run their own reentry programs and services. We have a robust listserv of individuals, including some who are not seated as actual members. However, the OJPP has extended an opportunity to them to participate as ad hoc work group members, which allows them to receive the same information, including meeting agendas and meeting invitations. We include them no differently than the other members. There are 20 official members listed, but there are established work groups that have increased membership to 40+ individuals coming together quarterly to meet and do the work. 

How do you plan to sustain the Reentry Advisory Board?   

We just hired a new reentry services coordinator who is going to keep the board moving, coordinated, focused, and in alignment from a sustainability perspective. This is the person who will keep the Executive Board committee of the Reentry Advisory Board updated on bylaws, practices, and policies. We also sustain this work by keeping the board informed and maintaining consistent communication with them when promoting and coordinating events. We also bring in outside subject matter experts to invigorate us with the work we are charged to do. We have adopted a strategy of persistence, which keeps people feeling involved. When they hear things are moving and know things are happening, they are more likely to stay engaged because they do not want to miss out!  

Photo credit: Jordan Griffith via Unsplash