Research organization’s policy and data analysis helps group make sound recommendations
As a founding Kentucky Smart on Crime partner organization, KyPolicy has been an integral player, helping the coalition identify and advocate for data-backed approaches to some of the Commonwealth’s most-pressing and most-difficult justice issues.
Launched in 2011, KyPolicy is a non-partisan research organization focused on fiscal and economic policies that remove barriers to well-being and address social inequities at the local, state, and federal levels. The group’s research on reentry as well as their analysis of the impacts of increased criminal penalties for low-level heroin trafficking grabbed the attention of Catholic Conference of Kentucky, an organization that was participating in informal discussions about forming a broad-based criminal justice coalition. KyPolicy became one of several founding partner organizations of Kentucky Smart on Crime.
As someone who has been with the coalition since the beginning, KyPolicy Research Director, Ashley Spalding has seen the group grow in size and influence. This maturation was most evident in the successful 2021 session, where Smart on Crime reforms helped pass legislation on felony theft, no-knock warrants, juvenile justice, and reentry. “The strength of this coalition is that we find ourselves sharing the same perspective on criminal justice policy changes and working with groups that we typically don’t collaborate with on other issues,” said Spalding.
KyPolicy’s research and data analysis have since played an important role helping to inform the coalition’s positions on legislation. As policy analyst Carmen Mitchell notes, “high incarceration is an indicator something else is not working properly in communities. Incarceration related to drugs is one of the better recognized examples of that, but you see it in other issues like homelessness and mental health.” Mitchell points to KyPolicy’s examination of pretrial incarceration data as shining light on an aspect of the system that isn’t working. She also hopes a forthcoming KyPolicy survey of the volume of criminalization bills versus legislation designed to decrease incarceration will help better contextualize KY’s upward incarceration trend over the last 10 years.
As KyPolicy research demonstrates, much of the growth can be attributed to the perverse financial incentives for counties when it comes to incarceration. Pam Thomas is Senior Fellow at KyPolicy and provides the coalition with important insights from her time serving in the Justice Cabinet and on the Appropriations & Revenue Committee. Like her colleagues, she is concerned about the trajectory of incarceration in the Commonwealth, which dipped briefly in the spring and summer of 2020 after some administrative releases but has been back on the rise and now approaching pre-pandemic levels. “We have fallen down,” Thomas said. “We haven’t been vigilant enough, proactive enough, or responsive enough…the facilities that were crowded before are crowded again.”
Incarceration will continue to be a key issue as the coalition continues to work to help the Commonwealth charter a better course for its justice system, which is what makes KyPolicy’s contributions to SOC’s work so important
“KyPolicy’s contributions to the coalition are invaluable,” said Catholic Conference of Kentucky Executive Director, Jason Hall. “Their research is persuasive and always a reminder we have to keep pushing with a fierce sense of urgency.”