Strategies

The mission of the CJCC is to assist in making sustainable, data-driven improvements to Charleston County’s criminal justice system (CJS) and thereby improve public safety and community well-being. The CJCC works collaboratively to improve the administration of justice and promotion of public safety through planning, research, education, and system-wide coordination of criminal justice initiatives. Following a first-of-its-kind analysis of the CJCC based on 2014 data, the CJCC prioritized a series of recommendations. The recommendations include:

• Improve data systems for more efficient and effective data sharing and analysis.
• Institute mechanisms to sort high risk from low risk, and prioritize jail use accordingly.
• Ensure similarly situated individuals are consistently treated similarly and work to reduce racial and ethnic disproportionality and/or disparity (REDD) in our CJS.
• Enhance capacity to address root causes of behaviors that bring people into the CJS and reduce the likelihood of repeat offending.
• Expand options of law enforcement to inform discretionary decisions to use jail on low-level charges and improve police and community relationships.
• Enhance the availability of effective treatment options in the community.
• Reform the management of pretrial populations to mitigate risk (i.e., amount of risk for flight or danger, rather than one’s ability to pay a monetary bond).
• Improve the timeliness of case processing in General Sessions, including assignment of counsel, receipt of discovery, and court scheduling practices.

The CJCC works to advance six strategies based on the above recommendations. A strategy implementation team spearheads each strategy. The teams are comprised of inter-agency and CJCC staff with related expertise and experiences. In addition, the CJCC partners with a host of community representatives from diverse sections of the county that provide input and feedback on the efforts.