Community Justice Project

In 2010, Community Advocates merged with Justice 2000, a non-profit organization established in 2001 to promote the safe release and community reintegration of criminal offenders. With the merger, the Public Policy Institute incorporated Justice 2000’s Community Justice Reinvestment Project. Funded in part by the local Greater Milwaukee Foundation and the national Open Society Foundations, this project aims to educate the public and other key stakeholders in Wisconsin about the value and importance of implementing comprehensive, evidence-based policy change within the statewide criminal justice system. The Public Policy Institute is also engaging in community outreach and coalition building to create an ongoing forum for discussing criminal justice reform and related community issues.

Increasingly, conservatives and liberals alike have begun to realize that we've created a criminal justice system that grows when it fails rather than one with incentives to deliver the best public safety return for every taxpayer dollar spent.

In Wisconsin, spending on corrections has risen faster in the past 20 years than nearly any other state budget item. Between 1999 and 2009 the budget of the Wisconsin Department of Corrections (DOC) rose by over 70 percent to $1.2 billion. Substantial increases in costs have been projected for the next 10 years. Despite mounting corrections spending, incarceration rates remain high.

Community-based alternatives to corrections—including diversion, deferred prosecution and alternatives to parole revocation—can potentially reduce prison costs and crime.

State funding that would otherwise be allocated to Corrections should be “reinvested” in the community in order to implement such evidence-based alternatives to incarceration.

The Community Justice Reinvestment Project promotes a shift away from current policy that overutilizes incarceration to one that focuses on early intervention, treatment programs and community supervision, particularly for those individuals at greatest risk for committing crimes.

This project is modeled on successful initiatives in Minnesota and other states with lower numbers of prisoners but comparable crime rates to Wisconsin that have already developed community corrections legislation and policies to:

  • Strengthen the quality and efficiency of the criminal justice system;
  • Promote community-based programs that provide cost-effective, evidence-based alternatives to incarceration;
  • Empower collaborations between local criminal justice system partners and community organizations to plan, implement and evaluate a continuum of services to address local criminal justice and community needs;
  • Create strong incentives to reduce utilization of expensive prison beds, and develop and implement effective community-based programs; and
  • Produce cost savings from reductions in prison admissions, thus allowing counties to reinvest a portion of the savings in innovative, outcome-based programs and healthy neighborhood initiatives that will further reduce recidivism