Reimagining Criminal Justice: Leveraging Federal Grants to Foster Community-Based Criminal Justice Programs

Discussions about Vice President Kamala’ Harris’ record as a progressive prosecutor have offered an opportunity to consider what the next president could do to help spur equitable criminal justice reform. While recognizing that policing is largely a local endeavor, it is important to identify how the next president can leverage existing federal programs to contribute to larger criminal justice reform and equity efforts. In this paper we propose that the next administration restructure the Justice Assistance Grants (JAG) and Community-Oriented Policing Services (COPS) grants in order to support community-based criminal justice programs (CCJP) to achieve equitable criminal justice reform. These programs, which emphasize partnerships between law enforcement, prosecutors, and non-law enforcement organizations, aim to reduce crime and recidivism through rehabilitation, mental health services, and social support. The proposal we offer draws inspiration from Vice President Kamala Harris’s "Back on Track" program, which successfully helped first-time nonviolent offenders avoid incarceration through alternative sentencing that focuses on rehabilitation. The paper argues that similar programs, if federally supported, could help contribute to equitable criminal justice reform by fostering trust between law enforcement and communities, reducing police brutality while also preventing crime and recidivism.

Publication, ReportRutgers CLiMEOctober 22, 2024Inequality, Race

Empowering Public Property: Simulating New Housing, Economic Development and Greenspace Policy with Newark’s City-Owned Property Inventory

This is a report about how cities can better organize and manage their data about the property they own in order to promote transparency and advance critical policymaking. Newark, like many legacy cities, owns hundreds of parcels through tax foreclosure and abandonment that can be put to more productive use and even generate needed revenue. Because of different inputs from different departments, its property data system contained duplication and gaps that prevented policymakers and stakeholders from getting a clear picture of these public assets. In partnership with city staff, CLiME helped to resolve the data organization problem and set property management on a new, more accurate and user-friendly course. Along the way, we learned details about the nature and amount of city-owned properties, how they’re zoned and where they’re located. We concluded that much more of this significant inventory can and should be put to work advancing long-held goals of equitable development. We built three demonstrations to simulate this usage that cover three major areas of policy: affordable housing production, commercial and industrial development and green space/environmental risk mitigation. Each of these is an area in which the Baraka administration is already active in setting aggressive policies. Some of those policies already make use of the asset of city-owned land. Until recently, it was impossible to see the scope of particular uses because the data did not readily permit it. Now the data is cleaner and clearer.

Individual break-out reports from the full report are also available:

Publication, ReportRutgers CLiMEFebruary 14, 2024Housing, Economic Development

What to Do: Domestic Violence

Domestic violence/abuse can be an incident or pattern of behavior in any relationship used to gain or maintain power and control over someone else. If you believe you may be a victim of domestic violence, you can speak to a trusted source such as a helpline, friend, family member, counselor/therapist, and/or take legal action. Keep in mind that domestic abuse is never the victim’s fault. However, there are consequences to taking action against domestic violence. For example, speaking to someone may lead to mandatory reporting (depending on the person), and taking legal action may mean police involvement and court appearances. No one deserves abuse, so do not let these consequences stop you from seeking help.

PublicationRutgers CLiMEFebruary 8, 2023What to Do

Losing Ground: The 2020 Displacement Risk Indicators Matrix (D.R.I.M.) Update for Newark

Newark housing is too expensive for its residents.

CLiME’s Displacement Risk Indicators Matrix—or DRIM—originated in 2017 as a tool to measure the risk of Newark resident displacement as a result of gentrification. We found then and now that displacement risk continues to be a serious threat to housing stability in Newark as rents rise dramatically among a city of mostly renters. Yet the cause does not appear to be traditional gentrification, because the demographic profile of who lives in the city, their incomes, educations and poverty rates have not changed as dramatically as rents.

The DRIM is divided into three sets of variables set across the city as a whole, the five wards and, for the first time, neighborhoods: vulnerability, market dynamics and “gentrifier population.” Vulnerability variables ask about the economic stresses that households feel. Market dynamics variables ask about rental affordability and new construction. Gentrifier population variables ask whether the city is seeing an influx in the people whose race, housing wealth and educational attainment is associated with gentrifying populations in other cities.

PublicationRutgers CLiMEOctober 11, 2022Housing, Gentrification

Who Owns Newark? Transferring Wealth from Newark Homeowners to Corporate Buyers

This report shows that the national trend in investor buying of 1-4 unit homes in predominantly Black neighborhoods is most acute in Newark, New Jersey where almost half of all real estate sales were made by institutional buyers. The trend grew out of the foreclosure crisis that wiped out significant middle-class wealth in particular Newark neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods became the targets of investors seeking passive returns from rents. Those largely anonymous outside companies now set neighborhood housing markets on terms that primarily benefit their investors.

While CLiME detected no illegal activity, the threats to Newarkers and government policy goals are significant. They include rapidly rising rents, decreased homeownership, higher barriers to affordable housing production goals, renter displacement and less stable communities. Sadly, this reality continues a long pattern of economic threats to predominantly Black and increasingly Latino neighborhoods in a state whose communities are among the most segregated in the country. From racial exclusion to predatory lending, from foreclosure to the extraction of rents, Newark’s experience demonstrates what can happen when local economies ignore equity.

CLiME’s analysis documents a dramatic increase in institutional investor activity in Newark’s residential market starting around 2013. As of 2020, almost half of all Newark’s residential sales were to institutional buyers.

PublicationRutgers CLiMEApril 29, 2022Housing, Economic Development, Gentrification, Inequality, Poverty, Race

Investing in the Equitable State: How New Jersey’s Tax Incentive Programs Fail to Bring Equitable Growth

This report and accompanying matrix are a critical evaluation of New Jersey’s tax incentives programs through the policy lens of equitable growth. Persistent inequality between New Jersey’s communities and households hurts all of New Jersey. We assumed that the expenditure of taxpayer dollars for private economic gain should further a public interest in making weaker markets stronger—i.e., equitable growth. We identified every state tax incentive that contained some aspect of economic fairness and analyzed each for how well it contributed to producing equitable growth. As the matrix at the end of the report shows, we found few gains and many lost opportunities.

If economic development broadly represents New Jersey’s interests in promoting economic welfare, then equitable economic development refocuses state policy on the state’s interest in improving economic welfare in the places where market need is greatest. Since many of these needs converge in communities of the state that have struggled with disinvestment and undernourished markets for many years, we believe a critical public purpose is served when the state steps in to revitalize markets where no one else will. This represents a policy of equitable economic development, an expansion of growth and opportunity.

PublicationRutgers CLiMEApril 13, 2022Economic Development

The New Jersey Housing Crisis in a COVID Era: Mapping Strategic Processes

Affordable housing is increasingly scarce within the United States, and COVID-19 has dramatically exacerbated the simmering crisis in affordable housing. In New Jersey, the risk of eviction is greater than across the country, as 393,000 households are delinquent on their rent, (22.3% of households in renter-occupied housing units in New Jersey as compared with 15.8% across the country). ¹ In New Jersey, eviction pressure is faced disproportionately by residents of color, by households with children, and in urban municipalities, where more renters and more low-income households are especially vulnerable.

The New Jersey Housing Crisis in a COVID Era: Mapping Strategic Processes was a research project funded by the New Jersey State Policy Lab to explore strategic development and organizational learning in the provision of emergency rental assistance funding during the COVID-19 pandemic. This research focused on five New Jersey municipalities: Camden (Camden County), Elizabeth (Union County), Jersey City, Newark, and Trenton (Mercer County).

PublicationRutgers CLiMEFebruary 24, 2022Housing

Housing Gaps in Cities of Color: Affordability Trends in Newark's Inner-Ring Suburbs of Irvington, Orange and East Orange

Orange, East Orange, and Irvington are Black working-class suburban communities. While home to just under 20% of Essex’s population, they are home to almost 40% of all Black residents and only 2% of White residents. These communities are also growing fast, with surging Latino and immigrant populations from the Caribbean.

These inner-ring suburbs are challenged by elevated rates of poverty and a growing unaffordability, and they have few resources to address these pressing needs. In 2020, Orange, East Orange, and Irvington residents generated only $30,000-$40,000 in tax basis for essential public services, such as police, education and sanitation. Meanwhile, nearby Summit residents generated almost four and a half times as many resources as any of these communities, and to serve a much smaller population.

PublicationRutgers CLiMENovember 12, 2021Housing, Inequality, Gentrification

Brutality by Design: Understanding Police Misconduct as Structural Inequality

This is a structural analysis of police brutality, primarily the exercise of lethal force against unarmed persons, following the 2020 summer of racial reckoning when millions braved a virulent pandemic to protest the lack of legal and institutional accountability that predictably follows the police killings of unarmed black people. A consistent lack of accountability is what binds the individual acts to a design structure in which evidence clearly shows that black bodies are subordinated to some other systemic goal. We do not identify that goal, but we do evaluate the structure that produces predictable outcomes. Our aim is to set out much of the reform landscape—the issues, approaches and proposals from law to policy—and to evaluate them on structural grounds.

PublicationRutgers CLiMEApril 19, 2021Race, Inequality

Land Banks as Instruments of Equitable Growth: CLiME’s Recommendations to the City of Newark

Land banks are government-created institutions whose mission is to return vacant, abandoned and tax-delinquent properties into productive use. Land banks are empowered to acquire land, eliminate back taxes and tax liens attached to a property in order to create a clean title, maintain the land in compliance with local and state ordinances, and convey the property back into active use. As a mechanism for expediting the disposition of city-owned and/or abandoned properties, land banks can be a significant local government tool either for equitable growth or for more conventional economic development.

PublicationRutgers CLiMEOctober 14, 2020Gentrification, Inequality, Housing

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