Funding for Criminal Justice Reform: A Quick Rise Followed By a Hard Fall

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The entire philanthrosphere knows that funding has its cycles. Just like any other area of human activity, philanthropic funders are subject to shifts in public opinion, the revelation of new information, or even just the allure of the next shiny new thing. But seldom has funding for a set of related issues caught fire, and then lost steam, with the whiplash-quick speed of criminal justice reform.

In just two years, from 2019 to 2020, data gleaned from Candid shows that philanthropic commitments to criminal justice reform nearly doubled — from $388 million to $682.2 million. The next year, they were down by half, and preliminary data suggests that 2022’s numbers may not rise that far above 2021’s total of $341.2 million.

There are a lot of caveats regarding the exact dollar amounts involved. It’s difficult to quantify exactly how much has been committed to the field, let alone its numerous constituent parts. This is thanks to the differences in spending categories between Candid’s Foundation Directory Online and the funders whose 990s it compiles; and the complexity of the criminal justice reform sector and the number and variety of nonprofits and individuals working within it. Still, multiple, credible data points show that when it comes to funding for criminal justice reform, what went up didn’t just come back down. Instead, it fell on its face. 

There are some obvious parallels between criminal justice reform funding and the broad promises (and not-so-sterling follow-up) of funders after the police murder of George Floyd in 2020. A quick scan of the secondary categories that Candid assigns to criminal justice funding shows a not-insignificant number of commitments flagged as being partially racial-justice oriented.

It stands to reason: There was never a moment when funders publicly banded together specifically around criminal justice reform with the singleness of focus they briefly demonstrated toward racial justice in 2020. So while the trends in criminal justice giving echo what has happened with racial justice philanthropy, it’s also important to understand that funders don’t always see the issues as intertwined. To give just one example, tech folks who funded efforts to decriminalize marijuana were no doubt aware of the disproportionate impact of the law on Black people, but that was probably not the main reason many of them gave to the cause.

This IP report is the result of interviews with leaders of six criminal justice nonprofits, researchers from two institutions and a funding intermediary; input from three of the field’s largest funders; my own research conducted via Candid; and two separate sets of Candid data compiled and analyzed three months apart by researchers at the Bridgespan Group. It is the first of an informal series of articles looking at the current state of criminal justice funding that will examine trends in the field, possible reasons for them, and their potential impacts. 

As for this piece, it’s a story about numbers. But as every movement leader knows, these numbers are far from dry or irrelevant. Every single one of them could mean progress made, or lost, against a system that incarcerates people at a higher rate than any other country in the world. 

“A very imperfect source” tells a startling tale about criminal justice funding

An analysis of 10 years’ worth of Candid data on funding commitments to criminal justice, conducted by Bridgespan group researchers in May of this year, tracks with the many successful criminal justice policy reform efforts during that time frame. From 2012 to 2015, funding commitments grew unevenly from $110.6 million to $116.1 million. Then, in 2016, commitments went up by more than $20 million for the first time, rising to $153.1 million. Growth continued to rise unevenly between 2016 and 2018, with a $62.1 million increase in 2017 followed by an increase of $34.8 million for 2018. 

From 2019 to 2021, the trend looks like a roller coaster with a single, very steep hill. After increasing by more than $100 million for the first time in 2019, criminal justice commitments grew by just over $300 million in 2020, reaching an all-time high of $682.2 million. The next year, the bottom fell out: In 2021, commitments dropped by half, to $341.2 million. Data for 2022 is still incomplete, but what is available indicates only a comparatively slight improvement, with $376.6 in commitments so far. 

While everyone consulted for this article agreed that funding for reform overall is contracting, it would be a mistake to take the numbers above as an exact reading of the situation. For one thing, Candid makes changes to and within its funding categories, or fields, on a frequent basis. This process can be further complicated by delays in the filing of 990 forms — an issue that was exacerbated by the COVID pandemic.

Candid data on CJ commitments from 2015 to 2022 pulled and analyzed by Bridgespan researchers in January and provided to me by Vera Institute President and Director Nick Turner show very different totals than results pulled just three months later for every single year listed in the data. The earlier figures also indicate that CJ funding commitments peaked in 2019, not 2020, before mostly dropping in subsequent years. It’s also important to note that Candid tracks funding commitments. Nonprofit leaders are aware that not all of those commitments end up in their organizations’ bank accounts.

There’s also the fact that Candid’s fields don’t necessarily match the ways that funders themselves categorize their giving. Armed with Bridgespan’s January analysis, I did my own dive into Candid to determine the database’s top listed criminal justice funders for 2019-2021. 

According to Candid, each of the top three CJ funders in 2019 — the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the former Laura and John Arnold Foundation (now Arnold Ventures) — sharply decreased their CJ giving during 2020 and 2021. For example, the Candid data showed that MacArthur cut its CJ commitments to zero in 2021, which is an unlikely prospect for any major grantmaker with commitments in a given field, made even more unlikely by the fact that its Big Bet on criminal justice isn’t supposed to sunset until next year. 

All three funders provided different CJ commitment figures than were supplied by Candid. MacArthur, unsurprisingly, told Inside Philanthropy it made 58 grants for a total of $49 million in 2021 alone — not zero. And Arnold Ventures said it gave nearly double the amount that Candid listed for 2019: $47.6 million, not the $23.9 million reported in Candid. Arnold’s internal records also show giving levels far above Candid’s for 2019-2022. And while Arnold did decrease its CJ commitment by nearly $11 million, that didn’t happen between 2019-2020; it occurred between 2020 and 2021, before increasing again by roughly $12 million in 2022.

As for Ford, Candid reported that in 2019, the funder committed a whopping $116.4 million before pulling back to $34.3 million in 2020 and $29.3 million in 2021. Amanda Simon, Ford's head of press and social media, called Candid's 2019 number "a little skewed because it includes a $100 million commitment to the Justice and Mobility (JAM) Fund,” a multi-year commitment to increase the economic mobility of formerly incarcerated people. After subtracting the JAM commitment, she said, Ford committed $12.9 million to criminal justice reform in 2019. In 2020, Ford's total $117.1 million commitment was part of the foundation's $1 billion social bond for racial justice. In 2021, the funder committed $22.3 million.

“Candid is the best source that we have, and Candid is a very imperfect source,” said Bridgespan partner Marina Fisher. But even if its numbers understate the extent of giving, she said, “the thing that is the same about the story is there was a peak a few years ago and funding commitments have fallen since then. That was true in our [January] analysis and that is true now.”

Every criminal justice leader consulted for this article agreed: Funding has fallen. Even leaders of organizations that are bucking the overall trend say they have heard from peers whose nonprofits are struggling through a drop in grants to their organizations.

Why is this happening? The reasons include everything from political backlash and right-wing fear-mongering about crime to changes in criminal-justice-related priorities among funders still in the field; from limited commitments that are coming to their scheduled end to funders’ well-known tendency to be as easily distracted as the dog Kevin from “UP.” We’ll examine all of the above in future pieces. 

There’s also the fact that a lot of the news about criminal justice, particularly in the years before the COVID pandemic, covered progress being made toward system reforms. From the decriminalization of marijuana and federal rulings that current sex offender registries violate the Constitution, to bail reform and the election of progressive prosecutors, the momentum was toward criminal justice reform for several years. The positive press may well have led to some funders feeling, individually, like their contributions weren’t as necessary as they had been in the past. 

As part of this series, we’re going to do our best to examine several pressing questions, from why criminal justice funding has decreased so dramatically to which issue areas (and nonprofits) seem to be bucking the trend, and which funders remain committed to criminal justice reform.

For now, the most important thing for funders to remember may have been summed up best by Vera’s Turner: “No one can argue that with 2 million people in prison and jail, we’ve accomplished our mission.”