There’s one thing we know for certain about philanthropic funding for criminal justice reform: After rising dramatically from 2018 to 2020, funding commitments dropped by half in 2021 and have not recovered.
It would be easy to blame a large part of the dropoff on the COVID-19 pandemic, but the numbers say this isn’t the case. Funder commitments hit their all-time high in 2020. This means that dollars were still being promised in droves while COVID was at its peak, much of that probably driven by interrelated commitments to racial and criminal justice reform following the murder of George Floyd.
So why did so many funders take their metaphorical marbles and go home? Experts I consulted offered a wide range of reasons. One said the dropoff was a correction, following a time when almost anyone could get money for criminal justice reform. A few said that the movement hasn’t done the greatest job with communications. But a number of sources talked about two big reasons for the dropoff that include, but go beyond, funders’ well-known fickleness and the widespread disruption COVID caused.
This summary of thoughts in the field is the result of conversations with a dozen nonprofit leaders, funders and funding intermediaries on both local and national fronts, most of which were conducted in May as part of reporting for the first story in this informal series on criminal justice funding.
Tech funders, racial justice ties and very long fights
The boom and bust in criminal justice funding from 2018 to 2021 could have been exacerbated by the nature of some of the new funders who were briefly part of the mix and a lack of real commitment on the part of some of the more traditional funders who came on board when criminal justice reform emerged as the next shiny new thing.
From roughly 2016 to 2018, “a whole bunch of people came in,” said Chloe Cockburn, the founder and CEO of CJ funding intermediary Just Impact. The political moment was certainly ripe for money to start flowing. Police atrocities — including the killings of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and other Black men, women, and boys — had made increasing news since 2014, helped along by citizen journalists wielding cell phones. The Raise the Age movement to end incarceration of children in the adult system had been gaining ground for nearly a decade. Other criminal justice practices, from cash bail and civil forfeiture to sex offender registries, were the targets of rising, and in many cases increasingly successful, reform efforts.
It’s not surprising that an atmosphere of big wins would attract people with big money. According to Cockburn, that’s exactly what happened: From 2016 to 2018, billionaires began writing checks. “Which is great — lots of money, but not a lot of people. So when those individual givers hit a situation, that has huge implications for the field.”
Then, in 2020, the intertwined issues of criminal justice reform and racial justice became cause celebres following the police murder of Floyd. “There was an attention level to criminal justice in the wake of Black Lives Matter and George Floyd’s murder that has not been seen, really, for decades, and that translated to a dramatic increase in funding,” said Impact Justice President Alex Busansky.
The downside of being the issue of the day was that justice reform’s sudden popularity attracted funders without a long-term commitment to the arena, Funders for Justice Executive Director Lorraine Ramirez told me. Others came in with a radically different way of measuring outcomes. “Much of the funding that came in was from new tech philanthropists; people that are not institutional funders, and the way I think they approach funding is much more a venture capital or investment model that prioritizes quick returns,” said Busansky. “When that doesn’t happen, they’re done.”
As my colleagues Martha Ramirez and Tate Williams reported in 2022, funders had a mixed record of living up to their racial justice promises in the years following the summer of 2020, even before the current political and legal onslaught against racial justice policies. To the extent that racial justice and criminal justice reform have become as explicitly intertwined in funders’ awareness as they are in reality, it’s hardly surprising if both are suffering similar fates.
Even funders with more patience than VC bros can find themselves unpleasantly surprised by just how long some criminal justice battles can take. When the New York City Council voted to finally close the Rikers Island jail by 2027 after an eight-year push, one donor told Just Leadership USA President and CEO DeAnna Hoskins that “10 years is too long” and pulled out. “Funders, they like the intoxication of the fight,” Hoskins said.
Political pushback and “safer” priorities
A number of people I spoke with also mentioned the political and social backlash to criminal justice reform following the transient violent crime spike during the height of the COVID pandemic. Gina Clayton-Johnston, the executive director of Essie Justice Group, said that “some philanthropic partners, unfortunately, are buying into a counter-narrative that’s planted by the right to stall progress on ending mass incarceration. They’re doing that by discrediting leadership of organizations, stoking fear about criminal justice reforms and spreading misinformation about what criminal justice reforms could lead to. These are not new plays, but they have been effective.”
Backlash is inevitable in the face of any reform, if only because people on all sides of the political spectrum find change uncomfortable. Add organized and/or monied interests like the bail bonds industry, police unions and corporations that benefit from the current system, and their collective resistance is going to be even harder to overcome. Then, of course, COVID and 2020 election-related upheavals came along, making people feel unsafe on a level far beyond the ways a brief spike in crime would usually affect them. The result feels like a backlash on steroids. Funders aren’t immune to its effects.
“It does feel, and this gets more anecdotal, like certain funders are retreating a little bit based on backlash, when we had this resurgence of ‘tough on crime.’ Folks started to see that this was a space that could get difficult. And they were retreating,” said Public Welfare Foundation President and CEO Candice C. Jones.
Lenore Anderson, president of the Alliance for Safety and Justice, said that in her view, the dropoff has happened in response both to anti-reform pushback and concern about other crises that have arisen. “I suspect that it’s different for different philanthropists,” she said. “Some are more worried about the pushback on this issue, and others maybe are just getting pulled in a lot of different directions in this moment of crisis across the country.”
Social power dynamics and the effects of proximity are probably also coming into play. Most funding decision-makers don’t socialize or otherwise cross paths with system-impacted individuals. Many, though, have contact with political actors — politicians who are being lobbied by police unions and all the industries that benefit from the current status quo.
One source said on background that they have heard from funders who decided that criminal justice reform is too controversial because people they know in government claimed those reforms were behind increases in the crime rate. The fact is that the number of most-reported crimes have fallen sharply since the 1990s. But the spike in murder rates that accompanied the pandemic still looms large in the public’s mind, and high-visibility offenses like car theft and carjacking remain fairly high. Given those issues, combined with what feels like an epidemic of mass shootings in the country, it’s not surprising that those who haven’t been harmed by the current system — funders included — might be persuaded to look to it for their safety.
Perhaps in response, a number of funders are moving into the politically safer but allied issues of community safety and employment, and housing support for formerly incarcerated individuals. “There’s huge amounts of work being done in the space and moving the ball on less sexy issues [that are] no less important,” said David Safavian, general counsel of the American Conservative Union Foundation’s Nolan Center for Justice. “You’re seeing things like mitigating for people who have been victims of trafficking or sexual violence when they were young. You are seeing record sealing, you are seeing fines and fees [reduction and elimination], you’re seeing occupational licensing. You’re not seeing a wholesale reduction in sentencing. But you’re seeing a lot of those smaller pieces fall into place.”
Those “smaller pieces” are vitally important. When formerly incarcerated people can’t get a job or secure housing, it’s hardly a surprise when they get caught up in the system again. But those less direct reforms arguably won’t do much to change the fundamentals of what’s already in place: a carceral machine that imprisons more people than any other country on Earth. Punitive justice is a nearly $300 billion industry and a profit-generating concern for corporations, both for those providing services to the industry and those that benefit from the virtually free labor of incarcerated people. That’s a lot of wealth arrayed behind the status quo.
Amid concerns about backsliding, opportunities for a more sustainable future
The stark dropoff in funding for criminal justice reform efforts may have grave impacts on the progress that has been made so far to decrease racial disparities in incarceration and the number of people being imprisoned. As we have seen in areas from racial justice to abortion rights, opposition to reform doesn’t go away in the face of progress; instead, opponents can hold steady or even redouble their efforts. At the same time, there is still much that needs to be done, from combatting wealth-based pretrial incarceration to ending the constitutionally permitted practice of using incarcerated people as slave labor, thanks to a 19th-century legal arrangement, the 13th Amendment’s exception clause, that feels abhorrent to 21st-century sensibilities.
Winning on these fronts will require philanthropic giving; sustaining those wins will require consistent, sustained support over multiple decades. “Criminal justice work is not a zeitgeist,” said Jones from the Public Welfare Foundation. “It’s not a shiny thing that you just sort of dip into and dip out of. It’s a fundamental pillar of a healthy democratic society and it needs the kind of deep and sustained attention that we would provide to any other pillar of a healthy functioning society like health or education.”
Though the rise and fall in criminal justice funding over the past few years is cause for concern, the numbers provide some room for optimism. Yes, funding rose by almost half from 2019 to 2020, fell by half from 2021, and hasn’t recovered since. However, the amount promised in 2021, $341.2 million, was still far higher than the $250 million to which funders committed in 2018. The preliminary figure for 2022, $376.6 million, is close to the amount for 2019. If funding continues to grow even slowly from this point, that still puts the field roughly 30% ahead of where it was six years ago.
There’s also evidence that, while some billionaire funders have left the field, other funders are potentially coming in to take their place. Just Impact’s Cockburn said that she has been seeing interest from a number of smaller family foundations that had never given for justice reform before. “Just as a million people giving $25 [each] is a lot of money,” she said, if enough of these smaller funders, who may each give $300,000 a year to an issue, can be persuaded to give to criminal justice reform, “it adds up to a lot of money.” And also, potentially, to more sustainable money over time.
That sustainable money is going to be needed. As Jones said, the criminal justice system is a pillar of our democratic society. Right now, it’s a very damaged pillar. The recent, well-publicized trials of a former president and now-convicted felon have made it starkly obvious how much deference the judicial system gives the wealthy. Meanwhile, roughly 50% of Americans have a close relative who has been incarcerated. Many of these people have had the frequently humiliating experience of visiting their loved ones behind bars or have been collateral damage in the “endless trap” of parole. These kinds of experiences — and the vast disparity in outcomes between the rich and the less well off — make the criminal justice system just another institution that Americans have cause to distrust.
Meanwhile, the “tough on crime” rhetoric spread by anti-reform forces, coupled with concerns about an increase in some nonviolent offenses, is making more people question whether or not the country is too “soft” on crime. In this climate, the gains reformers have made are in a very shaky place, presenting donors with a stark choice: Stay the course and protect the progress that has been made so far, or watch as much of that progress is turned back.
In addition to criminal justice reform funding, Dawn Wolfe covers issues including women’s & girls issues and abortion rights, racial and economic justice, and philanthropic reform. You can reach her at: dawnw@insidephilanthropy.com
