For people cited and released on a misdemeanor in Antioch, CA, 57 percent failed to show up for their first court date. Courts blamed the defendants. But I figured out what was really going wrong, and then designed the program that cut that rate by more than two-thirds. Later, I found that in 2016, 27 people accounted for 142 of the city’s low-level arrests, and designed CoCo LEAD Plus to divert them into treatment and housing.

In Contra Costa, no one could say what the County as a whole was doing with its justice dollars, so I followed the money myself. I found $5.46 million in realignment funds not used for their intended purpose, criminal justice fees collected for years without oversight, property seized without a conviction, and a private “community court” run by a debt collector.

In four counties in four states, public officials were preparing to build new jails, and had hired architects to design them. But while jails are buildings, incarceration is public policy. So instead of starting with construction plans, I examined how they were using the jails they already had, and why. Each time, I changed the questions being asked: not “how many new beds do we need?” but “what are we doing this for?”

Contra Costa County was locking up kids for misdemeanors and billing their parents for it, at a cost of 76 cents for every dollar collected. I led the campaign to challenge detention and end the fees. Within fifteen months, the Board of Supervisors suspended and then repealed the fees, forgave $8.8 million in uncollectible family debt, and began issuing refunds to families the County had wrongfully charged.

In 2010, Contra Costa County, CA, had a well-established system for incarcerating people and almost none for helping them come home and succeed. No one was responsible for building that system, so I began designing it: Reentry Solutions Group, the County’s AB 109 operations plan, the Reentry Success Center, the Youth Justice Initiative, the Office of Reentry and Justice, CoCo LEAD Plus, Stand Together Contra Costa, and the Holistic Intervention Partnership.