July Spotlight on Criminal Justice: Resource Allocation and Alternate Pathways to Accountability

Law enforcement agencies, courts, and communities across the country face pressure to improve their criminal justice practices. Meanwhile, resources to do so remain constrained—even more so in recent months. Officers are stretched thin as agencies face recruitment and retention challenges, court dockets are overflowing and backlogged, and taxpayers are left footing the bill for a system that often struggles to deliver positive outcomes.

These challenges have given rise to community-based alternatives that steer low-level offenders away from incarceration toward treatment, services, and accountability.

“Deflection,” as it has come to be called, isn’t a new idea—it simply represents a formal process within the criminal justice system to ensure we lock up the right people, reserving resources for those who may be better served through other accountability mechanisms.

By creating non-arrest and non-prosecution pathways for individuals—particularly those struggling with mental health issues, substance use problems, and other underlying needs—criminal justice professionals can focus on addressing serious crime. Keeping low-level offenders out of the system and in their communities gives law enforcement greater bandwidth to combat more urgent public safety threats.

Furthermore, these alternate pathways allow individuals to address the underlying issues driving their behavior, give them the ability to remain in the community without disruption, and reduce the stigma that comes with a criminal record. Additionally, they allow justice officials to recalibrate resource allocation while maintaining accountability for offenders who successfully complete the program. When implemented well, deflection can relieve law enforcement workloads, ease court backlogs, and reduce recidivism rates, all while improving outcomes for communities.

Today, officers spend a significant amount of time handling low-level offenses, often related to mental health crises or substance misuse. These calls for service can take hours to resolve and frequently do little to address the root cause of behavior. In contrast, deflection produces fewer hostile interactions with those experiencing behavioral health episodes, reducing the administrative work of processing low-level arrests and freeing up time to dedicate to proactive policing.

Case clearance rates for violent offenses are at historic lows—below 50 percent—and officers spend (on average) only about 4 percent of their time working cases involving violent crime. Giving officers back time is critical to improving these numbers and getting closure rates back above 90 percent, as they were in the mid-1960s.

When possible, removing low-level offenders from the criminal justice system entirely proves beneficial for courts as well. The ripple effects of understaffed court systems and case backlogs can be severe, including delays in hearings, lengthy pretrial detention, and the increased taxpayer costs that come with a slow system. Low-level offenses clog court dockets unnecessarily, as these cases rarely merit the time and resources spent addressing them.

Deflection can help overburdened prosecutors, judges, and public defenders by removing cases from their workload and resolving them outside of the courtroom. In turn, courts can prioritize cases involving serious and violent offenses, which both improves efficiency and boosts confidence in the justice system as the public sees the most pressing cases moving through quickly.

Perhaps the most compelling benefit of deflection is its ability to reduce repeat offenses by addressing the root of criminal behavior, particularly for individuals with behavioral health problems like substance use or mental illness. Even temporary pretrial incarceration greatly increases the likelihood of reoffense. Conversely, arrest alternatives boost people’s social capital—the networks of relationships, resources, and knowledge that produce thriving societies. Like money in the stock market, social capital compounds, generating “social compound interest,” a virtuous cycle that produces disproportionate returns over time.

Policymakers nationwide are looking for solutions to strained budgets, particularly because pandemic-era federal funding has largely dried up. Deflection offers a simple, meaningful, and effective solution to help address many current system inefficiencies and save taxpayer dollars.