Multnomah County has received a $2 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to help reduce the county’s jail population through alternatives to detention for pre-trial defendants.

Black and Latino people are overrepresented in nearly every stage of Multnomah County’s adult criminal justice system, and the racial disparity in their arrests has grown since 2014, a 2019 report by the Oakland, California-based W. Haywood Burns Institute found.

The Burns Institute study was produced as part of the MacArthur Foundations’s Safety & Justice Challenge grant awarded to the county in 2015. At that time, the foundation gave $150,000 to the county.

The county continues to look for ways to reduce the number of people taking up its more than 1,300 jail beds by finding alternative sanctions for misdemeanor offenders who have violated probation and by increasing supervised release options for those awaiting trial on certain felony charges.

Multnomah County is one of five locations selected for additional funding.

The county’s goal is to reduce the county’s average daily jail population by 14.4 percent in two years while keeping the jail at 85 percent of its budgeted capacity, according to county officials. The county also will consider how to improve its processing of cases, provide more services for people with mental illness or drug or alcohol addictions and reduce the racial and ethnic disparities in the jail.

“We will collectively look at ways to improve our pretrial system — improvements that are based on national best practices, public safety, and equity,’’ said Erika Preuitt, director of Multnomah County’s Department of Community Justice.

-- Maxine Bernstein

Email at mbernstein@oregonian.com

Follow on Twitter @maxoregonian

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