Every year, more than 11 million people cycle through American jails, mostly for low-level, nonviolent offenses, and only a fraction will ever be convicted of a crime and sent to prison.

On Thursday, the Obama administration announced a new initiative to drive that number down by cutting unnecessary arrests, holding fewer suspects until trial and proactively finding treatment services for mentally ill Americans, who are disproportionally arrested and jailed. “What we have seen as we’ve engaged with state and local leaders is that [these] are people who simply do not need to be in our jails,” said Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser to the president.

The administration’s Data-Driven Justice Initiative encourages local jurisdictions, of which more than 60 have already signed on, to use data to become smarter about who gets incarcerated and when. These efforts can, according to Jarrett, “reduce local jail populations, direct people to the services they need and often save money in the process, while importantly keeping their community safe”.

In Charlotte, North Carolina, for example, a computer-based assessment tool to identify and release “low-risk” people in jail has reduced the overall inmate population by 40%, and there has been no increase in reported crime. The reduction has even meant the closing of jail facilities there.

Jurisdictions participating in the initiative will share research and program designs with one another, and also have access to technical resources, including technical help from companies such as Amazon, Mastercard and non-profits such as Code for America.

“If they’re not a risk to my community and will return to court for hearings, there’s no reason they should be held in jail,” said Ben McAdams, the Salt Lake City mayor. (The Utah city is another of the dozens participating in the initiative.) McAdams pointed out how jailing people unnecessarily can cause disruptions in people’s lives that affect their ability to work, take care of their children and maintain a place to live. “It’s also very expensive for government. There’s better ways for us to use our dollars than just to lock people up who don’t need to be in jail,” McAdams said.

Risk-assessment strategies are not without their problems though. There is compelling evidence that the effects of institutional racism in criminal justice distort these risk ratings in ways that are biased against blacks. A ProPublica investigation into risk assessments in Broward County, Florida, found that black defendants were “77% more likely to be pegged as at higher risk of committing a future violent crime and 45% more likely to be predicted to commit a future crime of any kind”, after controlling for all the relevant variables.

Another city involved in the initiative, Knoxville, Tennessee, has focused heavily on providing alternative services for homeless and mentally ill residents who might have otherwise been arrested. According to the city’s police chief, David Rausch, since 2008 Knoxville has housed more than 950 people and provided “key services” to more than 50,000, “instead of arresting these same people over again, only to see them back on the street days and weeks later, no better, and often worse”.

“There’s almost nothing more frustrating to a police officer than seeing someone who clearly needs help, and having the only options available be jail and hospital emergency rooms,” Rausch said.

The announcement follows similar efforts at persuading cities, towns and counties to drive down unnecessarily high jail populations. In April, 11 jurisdictions agreed to slash their jail populations by as much as 33% in exchange for grants of $1.5-$3.5m from the MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge. Nine of those jurisdictions are also participating in the White House initiative.

“When you’re talking about systems reform, there is no silver bullet and there is no panacea,” said Laurie Garduque, director of justice reform at the MacArthur Foundation. “But as a first step of just being aware of having a problem, this is helpful. Just raising awareness about who goes to jail, how long they stay, and whether or not it actually improves public safety.

“Often these problems have the sense of being intractable and what [the initiative] highlights is there are potential solutions,” she said.

The 60 jurisdictions involved in the initiative include major metropolitan areas such as New York, San Francisco, Dallas County in Texas and Miami-Dade County in Florida. The launch follows another criminal justice reform push the administration rolled out last week when it announced more than $70m in grants across housing, education and job training for the re-entry of ex-inmates. The Obama administration has made a push in its past two years for a series of criminal justice reforms including curbing the use of solitary confinement and releasing nonviolent drug offenders.