Rural Criminal Justice Summit at SMU's Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center

Visual notetaking at Summit by Michael Lagocki (White Board No. 1)

We're winding down Day 2 of this pathbreaking summit at Southern Methodist University's Dedman School of Law.  This event, organized by SMU's Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center, is turning a rural lens on criminal justice reform.  I going to take this opportunity to bullet point some of the issues we've discussed:

• defining rurality and rurality as a continuum, from exurbia (e.g., Williamson County, Texas) to remote (where you can walk all day and not see another person, e.g., parts of California, Idaho, Montana)
• county size--typically larger in the west, which can present additional challenges when the county is responsible for service provision; 
• ditto state size, e.g., Montana is the fourth largest state in land area; Arizona is the sixth largest
• pretrial detention and appearances, including whether represented by counsel 
• Texas has three counties that provide representation at first appearance; soon they will have five 
• Montana is interested in "tele-representation" of clients at first appearance, in part to deal with conflicts of interest 
• lack of services, including social services, mental health services, drug treatment and many others.  (And, as I sat at the summit, a student emailed me this story about mental health services being provided at a Walmart in Carrollton, Texas, through a contract between Walmart and Boston-based Beacon Health Options, a behavioral health services company.  With a population of 131,000, Carrollton is hardly rural, and it is part of the Dallas-Forth Worth Metro area).
• lack of justice system resources, including adequately resourced and staffed public defender offices and contract defenders.  (The study Beth Colgan and I did of Arizona's delivery of indigent defense is here).  
• the challenge of material distance and lack of public transportation, a recurring theme
• conflicts of interest, including lawyers "wearing multiple hats," e.g., part-time/contract public defenders who may be prosecutors in neighboring counties and judges in still others.  
• multiplex relationships within the legal community and within the wider social community/environment, e..g, the prosecutor as basketball coach of the team on which the judge's daughter plays; the parent of the teen who has just been arrested for minor in possession as the high school classmate of the prosecuting attorney.   
• rural homelessness and the rural housing shortage as just one barrier to successful re-entry.
• the rural jail expansion boom (documented so well by the Vera Institute; see links below)  
• the pros and cons of lack of anonymity and multi-plex relationships in rural communities, including the "usual suspects" phenomenon.  

I think I've talked about all of these issues at one time or another (typically multiple times) on this blog.  

Some startling data points that I've heard at this summit, not all related to rurality:

• one in four jail admissions is a woman 
• Oklahoma is the state with the highest rate of female incarceration, per capita
• By sheer number, more women are incarcerated in Texas than in any other state, and 81% of the women in Texas prisons are mothers.  
• USDA rural development grants are being used to build rural jails 
• "tying the jail to community values" is in the playbook of architects who specialize in building jails; these architectural firms advise counties on how to secure funding for jail expansion or construction; such "values" can include community safety.  
• building jails is pitched as creating "good, clean jobs"--to contrast them with extraction industry jobs that have disappeared in recent years, often devastating rural economies.  

Don't miss the Vera Institute's work on rural jails and other rural criminal justice issues.  A smattering of those are here.