Nearly $10M to be invested in reforms of justice system
The Heinz Endowments will invest nearly $10 million over the next three years in programs that aim to reform the criminal justice system and steer young people away from the school-to-prison pipeline.
Several grants have already been approved, including one totaling almost $500,000 to the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh Foundation to implement behavioral health services for youth in the criminal justice system.
Other areas that the funds will target include advocacy efforts to change policies about bail and fines that disproportionately affect the poor and minorities, boost substance abuse treatment programs for incarcerated individuals, and provide better re-entry programs for people transitioning out of jail.
It’s not unusual for a philanthropy to focus grant-making on specific issues by funding various organizations that address those topics.
For instance, the Ford Foundation, with assets of about $12 billion, announced in 2015 it would allocate $1 billion over five years to strengthen up to 300 organizations worldwide that focus on social justice.
One of the largest charities, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, with assets of about $52 billion, specifically targets its
global giving for health and poverty and its giving in the U.S. for education.
The Heinz Endowments’ decision to pump a significant amount of its grantmaking into criminal justice reform is part of its ongoing strategy to address disparities in the Pittsburgh region caused by race, gender, income and other factors, said Grant Oliphant, Heinz Endowments president.
“We kind of couldn’t avoid it,” he said, because much of the data and research about equity and fairness “kept leading us back to the criminal justice system.”
For instance, the booking rate for black men in Allegheny County was almost double the rate of black men nationally, according to data cited in a 2016 report by the University of Pittsburgh’s Institute of Politics’ Criminal Justice Task Force.
The same report said black individuals comprise 49 percent of the county jail population.
Key reasons driving the high rate of incarceration in Allegheny County, the report said, include local jurisdictions arresting more people and holding more individuals who are not convicted and accused of nonviolent crimes.
Among youths, school disciplinary practices and implicit bias are among significant factors why many minority students end up in the juvenile justice system, according to a report released in August from Pitt’s Center on Race and Social Problems.
That report, funded by the Heinz Endowments, found that black male and female students in Allegheny County were suspended from school at seven times the rate of nonblack students and that blacks and Latinos receive more frequent and harsher penalties for their behaviors than white students.
“What we know from evidence in the report is that students who are suspended early and often end up having more interaction with the criminal justice system later,” Mr. Oliphant said. “Once you brand a kid as a bad kid, it becomes a selffulfilling prophecy over time.”
The Downtown-based philanthropy, with assets totaling $1.6 billion, distributed $61.5 million last year to nonprofits — primarily in southwestern Pennsylvania — for programs in the arts, culture, education, families and children, workforce readiness, the environment and public health.
The grant-making for criminal justice reforms is among the largest sums the endowments has targeted for a specific focus area.
Other large investments in the past have been made to the Pittsburgh Promise scholarship fund and to the endowments’ Breathe Initiative — a project to reduce air pollution in the region.
The endowments’ board in October approved the strategy around criminal justice reform and an initial round of funding for the following grants:
• $499,957 to the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh Foundation for behavioral health services for youth in the criminal justice system;
• $150,000 to the American Civil Liberties Foundation of Pennsylvania to address areas in the legal process such as court fines that disenfranchise low-income individuals;
• $100,000 to the Jail Collaborative Fund of the Pittsburgh Foundation for programs that help reduce recidivism among individuals leaving incarceration;
• $75,000 to Duquesne University to provide representation for youth in the county juvenile justice system. Students from the university’s law school and social work students at the University of Pittsburgh will participate in the advocacy efforts.
“We have an opportunity in our region to make substantial inroads and maybe model a path forward for the rest of the country,” Mr. Oliphant said.
One overall objective of funding criminal justice reform is to reduce the number of individuals being sent to the Allegheny County Jail and the Shuman Juvenile Detention Center, he said.
“The more beds you have in a jail, the more you tend to fill them. And so reducing reliance on those systems is one clear goal.”
Carmen Anderson, the endowments’ director of equity and social justice, said change can be accomplished during the three-year window in which the charity plans to focus funding for criminal justice reform.
“We might not be able to point to systems’ overhaul in that time, but I do believe we’ll be able to point to changed practice, hopefully changed policy and some actual individuals whose outcomes are different,” she said.