Why CJCCs Need a Policy Framework
ARTICLES AND PUBLICATIONS
Kristy Danford
A room full of legislators
On August 25, 2026, I stood in front of state legislative leaders and told them a ten-year story. The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) invited me to its policy forum in Portland to present the ten-year report I wrote on Charleston County's Criminal Justice Coordinating Council (CJCC).
The forum was funded by the MacArthur Foundation through its Safety and Justice Challenge, and it was the last in the series. The first was held in Charleston years ago. Closing the series with Charleston's ten-year story felt like coming full circle.
Ashley Pennington joined me. As the former Ninth Circuit Public Defender and CJCC Co-Vice Chair, he has worked in Charleston's justice system since long before the council existed. His perspective gave the numbers a history, and I walked through what the data showed.
The full slide deck is on my site for anyone who wants the details.
I came home with more than a finished presentation. I came home with a project.
Real progress, and its limits
Charleston's story is one of real progress. Local leaders sat at one table, looked at shared data, and changed how the system worked.
The numbers show it. Charleston is the only jurisdiction in South Carolina with ten years of public, cross-agency justice data. Public defender representation at bond court grew from zero to 43% of those eligible. The booking rate fell 63% since 2014, three times faster than the decline in reported crime.
Jail population is only one measure, and this work was never just about the jail. It is about safety and justice, accountability and transparency, and effective stewardship of public resources.
It is also a story about limits. Cases now take a median of 559 days to resolve, more than three times the national benchmark. South Carolina's own standard is that no more than 20% of pending cases be over a year old. In Charleston and statewide, the share is more than double that.
Jail bookings had already fallen 52% by 2019, and in 2025 they were still less than half the 2014 level. Yet the average daily jail population, 1,111 in 2014 and 661 at its low, reached 1,163 in 2025, because people awaiting trial are staying longer.
Decisions made far from the local table shape those numbers. State policy and budgets reach into local safety, local justice, and how well public resources are used.
That was my message to the legislators. Local progress is real, but it is fragile without sustained attention and intentional focus. When state decisions reach local systems, they can help or hinder, whether or not that is the intent.
The same theme, session after session
Ours was not the only presentation at the forum. As I listened to the others, the same point kept surfacing. The places that held their gains had infrastructure and focused collaboration behind them.
That is what a CJCC is. It is the standing structure that lets a community keep working a problem after the grant ends, the champion retires, or the headlines move on.
It also made something plain to me. CJCCs spend a great deal of energy reacting to policy and not enough time informing it.
A model policy framework for CJCCs
The field already has the National Standards for CJCCs. They describe how to structure and run a strong council. What we do not have is a shared framework for the policy side of the work.
I want to help build one. A shared policy framework would give states and lawmakers a clearer picture of their own systems. It would also give them the infrastructure to strengthen those systems in a more intentional, data-guided way. It starts with questions like these:
Which state and local policy changes have most shaped local systems, for better or worse?
What infrastructure does every state need for its councils to succeed?
What incentives and/or consequences, would help councils align with the national standards?
I have wanted to do something like this for a long time. The forum made it concrete. The answers already exist in pieces, in councils and states around the country, and the work is to gather them.
That work is underway. A first step is the October 2026 annual meeting of the National Network of Criminal Justice Coordinating Councils (NNCJCC) in Charlotte, where I am partnering with the Justice Management Institute. The agenda spans the full system: the challenges councils are facing, reentry, building public trust through media and community engagement, working with state legislatures, and using performance indicators from crime rates to recidivism to drive results. It builds to a closing conversation on turning CJCC measurement into data-informed policy, which I am excited to co-facilitate.
My hope is that it sets the stage for a shared policy framework, and that the network takes it up as a priority.
Let's build it
If your council has found a good way to work with state or local policymakers, I want to hear about it. If you are a legislator with ideas for how local councils could be more useful to your work, I want to hear those too.
My thanks to NCSL for the invitation, to the MacArthur Foundation's Safety and Justice Challenge for a decade of investment in places like Charleston, and to Ashley for sharing the stage.
A note on the numbers: figures here come from each year's own published CJCC Annual Report rather than later restated versions, since criminal justice data changes over time. Some may differ from those in my ten-year report for that reason.
