Lessons from an Evaluation of the Ford Foundation’s Strategy to End Mass Incarceration
/by Pilar Mendoza and Clare Nolan
Between 2016 and 2020, the Ford Foundation invested nearly $50 million in 50 grantees to address and end mass incarceration. The Foundation has sought to identify new models of justice reinvestment, support innovations in sentencing reform policies and practices, and increase government investments in crime prevention and public health programs in communities most impacted by mass incarceration. Engage R+D recently partnered with the Ford Foundation to look at the impact of this work. Our evaluation sought to understand:
What happened? What progress was made toward intended outcomes? What strategies were pursued and what got traction? Was there backlash, and how was it addressed? What was the role of state/local and national grantees, respectively?
Why and how did it happen? What are the factors that led to success, and how did Ford’s investment contribute? How did state contexts and ecosystems contribute to or constrain success? What does this teach us about how social change happens?
What now? How can the Foundation best invest in this work moving forward? How can Ford contribute to stronger state and local ecosystems and help grantees build their organizational capacity?
Below is a synthesis of what we learned:
What happened?
Overall, the strategy to end mass incarceration has made notable progress. Ford grantees have been highly successful in advancing policy improvements, organizing and building the base of constituents, and reducing jail populations. They’ve made moderate progress on expanding government funding for alternatives to incarceration. While more data over a longer time period are needed to assess progress in reducing state prison populations and racial disparities, the evaluation highlighted some promising indicators of positive change.
Despite much progress, backlash, or efforts to counteract decarceration efforts, created setbacks in several instances. Recognizing that challenges will continue, grantees and field leaders shared some common concerns the field is currently facing, including how crime rates are being used to justify rollbacks and the ways that underfunded and poorly implemented reforms can contribute to backlash.
How did change happen?
In addition to assessing successes and challenges, the evaluation also explored how change happens and the factors that supported success. We conducted 33 interviews with Ford grantees, field leaders, elected officials, and funders, and invited them to reflect on past progress and what’s needed to have even greater impact. Our interviews uncovered six critical change elements needed to strengthen impact on mass incarceration:
Coordinate across change strategies and actors. Inside/outside strategies, where some work to influence decision-makers through outside pressure in the form of organizing, advocacy, and media work, while others provide research and technical assistance to policymakers working inside government to sway peers, were critical to success. Coordinating across strategies and actors, however, required the ability to navigate differences in perspective regarding what qualifies as a win and the best way to get there.
Attend to narrative and messaging. Narrative change work strives to influence how people view issues, typically through a combination of journalism, storytelling, art and cultural engagement, and strategic communications. Determining the best messages in response to local and state context is critical.
Involve people personally impacted by incarceration. The leadership and priorities of those most impacted by incarceration is essential. Making sure that there are people with lived experience at the table when shaping strategies and solutions for change and ensuring their stories are heard by elected officials was critical across diverse settings.
Build the base and cultivate influential allies. There is value in both building the base and cultivating unlikely allies such as leaders, the faith community, rural communities, victims of crime, and people within the existing criminal justice system. Support from unlikely allies was critical to policy wins in more conservative states and helpful in muting backlash against reforms once passed.
Understand and point to what works. Understanding and elevating evidence-based solutions was identified as a critical element for advancing change. Elected officials in particular described the importance of data to inform policy processes, allowing them to cut through emotions and rely on numbers to back up decisions.
Build out alternatives and replacements. Decarceration is a worthy but insufficient goal. Building out strong alternatives and service infrastructure to support people diverted from jail or prison and/or transitioning back into the community after incarceration is critical to success as is reinvestment in communities to decrease crime and reduce recidivism.
What now?
“We really need examples from our movement of not just what we want to destroy and dismantle, but of things that we want to build.”
Ending mass incarceration in the United States is no small feat. The scale and complexity of the challenge both creates and demands a diversity of thought and ideas. The evaluation surfaced a number of insights for funders and other stakeholders about how to navigate across differences when advancing change strategies. This includes recognizing and normalizing common tensions in movement-related work, leveraging the insights of actors who hold different vantage points on key challenges, providing support for those working to collaborate across perspectives and differences, and tailoring approaches to local context. The Foundation is using these insights and additional recommendations from grantees and partners to refresh its funding strategy and approach moving forward.
