Why jails are important

While some defendants are detained because a court deems them a significant safety or non-appearance risk, many are there simply because they cannot afford to pay cash bail.

This finding is in line with our research showing that jail populations nationwide have been creeping up since late spring. While populations are still lower than they were pre-pandemic, the data suggests the early reforms instituted to mitigate COVID have largely been abandoned. With most people in local jails still unvaccinated, this has put vast numbers of people at enormous and unnecessary risk for COVID One especially troubling finding in the Impact of COVID report: The decrease in jail populations did nothing to address the glaring racial disparities in jails.

In June of , Black people were incarcerated in jails at about 3. These findings reflect the dangers of not centering racial justice in decarceration.

In all, the BJS Impact of COVID report proves that local and state justice systems can quickly and significantly reduce jail populations, as shown by the initial responses to COVID — but it also shows that they could have diverted from jail or released far more people, and far more equitably. Although jail populations dropped significantly at the beginning of the pandemic, these changes did not reduce racial disparities in incarceration, nor did they sufficiently reduce pretrial detention.

Even after reducing jail populations, the U. Moving forward, justice system authorities should make permanent the strategies that led to the jail reductions achieved during the pandemic, and push themselves to go further now that they have seen what is possible. The number of people jailed for misdemeanors or held pretrial, as well as the number of women in jails, should never return to pre-pandemic levels. Finally, states and counties must take deliberate action to eliminate racial disparities in jails as they take the next steps toward decarceration.

Other articles Full bio Contact. Quick action could slow the spread of the viral pandemic in prisons and jails and in society as a whole. Can you help us sustain this work?

Where the jails are so lacking in capacity that they have revolving doors for all but the very worst offenders, the alternative sanctions become toothless and lose their effectiveness.

We are already seeing the results in California. Auto theft, the category most directly affected, is up alarmingly relative to the rest of the country. As the satirist H. Mencken said, for every problem there is a solution: neat, simple and wrong. The idea that we can save money and solve our overcrowding problem by simply releasing prisoners and do so without endangering law-abiding people is incredibly tempting, and many well-meaning people have fallen for it. It is an illusion, and a dangerous one.

Join Opinion on Facebook and follow updates on twitter. Topics: criminal justice , inequality , jails , prison and prisoners. Can the use of jails be reformed to reduce the number of inmates without increasing society's risks?

Stasch, MacArthur Foundation. Nicholas Turner, Vera Institute of Justice. Marc A. Some convicted prisoners can spend years in remote labour colonies, pre trial detainees a few weeks in city centre lock ups or many years beyond legal guarantees and amongst sentenced prisoners. The experience of very many prisoners- perhaps the majority — continues routinely to involve often gross violations of basic human rights and seemingly makes scant contribution to either the rule of law or to the creation of safer communities.

The failings of prisons often reflect chronic problems of maladministration, chiefly under resourcing in terms of buildings and staff, compounded by often severe overcrowding and weak management and accountability. In principle these are matters that can be put right. But there is an often unspoken question: How much are the obvious failings of imprisonment due to inherent flaws in the nature of institution itself rather than weaknesses in its practical elaboration?

While much more attention needs to be paid to finding new ways of preventing and responding to crime, in the short term priorities would seem to include ensuring prison is used as a last resort and for the shortest possible time; minimising the use of pre trial detention especially in Africa , South Asia and Latin America; modernising national prison laws and rules which sometimes date from colonial times; and while applying existing international standards and working towards an updated and comprehensive framework of norms across the globe.

For prison administrations, the collation, flow and analysis of information are key for policy development, budgeting and resource allocation, sentence management, ensuring access to justice and provision of appropriate specialised services.

While there is much to gained by the use of information management systems, these will only facilitate good practice based on the collation and use of valid, reliable data and work best in locations where there is suitable infrastructure and adequately trained staff.