Topic: Jail Populations

John and Sam were trapped in a vicious cycle of incarceration. When money was scarce, John would make Sam’s court payment instead of his own so she could stay out of jail and care for their child. It was a heartbreaking choice that he made more than once. John has been incarcerated four times for failure to pay fines and costs—each time for 10 days. Even though John and Sam were on the brink of homelessness, the court never asked about their financial ability or offered an alternative to payment.

This is modern day debtors’ prison.

Since 2009, numerous ACLU investigations have revealed that people are being jailed simply for being too poor to pay their fines and fees. These practices damage communities, waste taxpayer dollars, and frequently trap victims in a cycle of incarceration and poverty, while also flagrantly violating the law. Even more troubling, debtors’ prisons create a two-tiered system of justice in which the poor often receive harsher punishments and end up paying more in fees for the same crimes as their wealthy counterparts, simply because they are poor.

In 2013, the ACLU of Ohio issued The Outskirts of Hope, detailing debtors’ prison in Ohio, and created a series of videos to highlight the stories of those affected. We also sent legal demand letters to courts where debtors’ prison occurred and issued an action alert that prompted hundreds of Ohioans to ask the Ohio Supreme Court to take administrative action. As a result of this work, thousands of Ohioans have been released from jail, and over $180,000 has been credited to people for the time they were unconstitutionally jailed.

Shortly after the release of our report, the chief justice of the Ohio Supreme Court met with the ACLU of Ohio and pledged to help stop debtors’ prison practices in Ohio courts. In addition to providing training on how to properly collect fines and costs and to step in where debtors’ prisons occur, the Ohio Supreme Court pledged to create a “bench card.” The bench card is a concise resource for judges that clearly lays out proper and improper methods to collect fines and costs, and even outlines the process for a court to substitute community service for court costs.

Since the bench card’s release, debtors’ prison-related complaints have severely dwindled. The ACLU believes in the simple principle that no one should ever be jailed for being too poor to pay their fines. After years of investigation and advocacy, along with firm guidance from the Ohio Supreme Court, this simple principle is becoming reality, and thousands of Ohioans are able to start new lives.

The Ohio Supreme Court’s bench card was the first of its kind in the country, but after widespread media attention, other jurisdictions have begun to use it as a model to help stop de facto debtors’ prison practices in their own state.

Learn more about the ACLU’s current efforts to end debtors’ prison across the country.

This post originally appeared on the Vera Institute of Justice’s Current Thinking blog.

Crime and punishment are generally perceived to be urban problems, not rural ones. This is not surprising considering that the largest jails — such as New York City’s Rikers Island and the Los Angeles County Jail — get the most nationwide attention. But would it surprise you to find out that small counties are the places where jails have grown the most, and are where nearly half of our nation’s jail inmates are now held?

Last month, the Vera Institute of Justice released In Our Own Backyard: Confronting Growth and Disparities in American Jails. The headline finding of the report is that small counties (those with fewer than 250,000 residents) have contributed the most to the four-fold nationwide growth of the jail population since 1970. The jail populations of small counties have increased by 6.9 times since 1970, far exceeding the pace of growth of 4.1 times in mid-sized counties (those with 250,000 to 1 million residents), and 2.8 times in large counties (those with more than 1 million residents). Smaller counties together now hold 44 percent of the nation’s jail inmates — a significant change since 1970, when they held only 28 percent. If jails in small counties grew at only the rate of mid-sized counties, there would be 120,000 fewer individuals incarcerated in jails today.

The animated image below illustrates that small, mid-sized, and large counties each trended upwards at roughly the same rate until 2000, when the incarceration rate in small counties continued to grow, as it subsided in large and mid-sized counties. The “bubbles” are used to group data for large, mid-sized, and small counties and are scaled to the number of incarcerated individuals.

For more, you can investigate these trends for each state in this data visualization.

Since we released the report, many have asked us the same question: “Why have jails in the smallest counties grown the most?” We have only begun to investigate the possible answers to this question. It could be because larger counties have a wider tax base to draw on to fund health and social service programs to address needs that otherwise would land people in jail, or because the spotlight on the largest jails has helped to suppress their growth. In fact, it is jails in large and mid-sized counties — such as New York City, Bernalillo County, NM, Hampden County, MA, and New Orleans, LA — where jail populations have been most likely to decline in recent years.

But while the cause of this trend isn’t clear, its implications are: Reform is necessary in all counties — not just the largest — to end the misuse of jails in America. This is why the small jurisdictions participating in jail reduction efforts as part of the MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge — such as Pennington, South Dakota, and Mesa, Colorado — are just as instrumental to ending our overuse of incarceration as the large ones, like Houston and Chicago. And data is fundamental to reform. Vera’s new report is a publication of our Incarceration Trends Project, the centerpiece of which is a new data tool that collates and analyzes publicly available, but disparately located, jail data dating back to 1970 for every one of the approximately 3,000 U.S. counties. The tool can be used to explore your own county’s data, including jail population, admissions, and length of stay, and how these trends compare to those of similarly situated counties.

No one formula can tell us what size each jail should be. But the wide variation in incarceration rates among counties that are otherwise similar indicates that the number of people behind bars is not inevitable, but largely the result of choices in policy and practice. With new information about our jail trends in hand, communities large and small can begin to make better informed choices.

This post originally appeared on Medium.com. 

The Decision Points blog series explores the seven key decision points during the typical criminal case where choices can be made to reduce jail populations.

Judges play a critical role in a typical criminal case, not only in the most direct ways—delivering bail and sentencing decisions—but also through managing trial speed.

Through my work as an Administrative Judge and Chief Judge, I have learned that it is vital to understand, measure, and monitor judicial workload because caseflow has a direct effect on the jail population. For example, it is estimated that two-thirds of Palm Beach County’s inmates are awaiting court appearances. The circuit needs to ensure that these cases are handled in a timely manner to avoid unnecessary pretrial detention.

Recognizing the importance of effective caseflow management in ensuring timely disposition of cases, I created a tool called the “In/Out Report” that judges can use to verify, on a monthly basis, that cases are moving efficiently through the court system. Additionally, this report helps measure judicial workloads and make sure that the cases are equitably assigned among the judges and divisions, such as civil court, criminal court, and family court.

The In/Out Report incorporates four kinds of data to give a comprehensive snapshot of the current docket that can be used to make informed caseflow decisions:

• Pending cases—the number of active cases within a specific judicial division on the day the report is run;
• Reopened cases—the number of cases that were closed and then subsequently reopened (as of the date the report is run);
• Filings—the number of newly filed cases assigned to each division; and
• Dispositions—the cases in which all issues are resolved and no further judicial action required.

With the information provided by the monthly In/Out Report, our judicial docket now has an 88-day average period from a filing to disposition for misdemeanor and felony cases and an above-state-average clearance rate of 107.9%—which means that we dispose more cases than we receive in a given time period.

What bolsters the effect of using this new report is that the judiciary is not working alone in this endeavor. In Palm Beach County, the circuit, as well as its court partners, are carefully analyzing each decision point that affects our criminal justice system; from law enforcement point of contact through arrest, booking, first appearance hearing, appointment of counsel, bond hearing, arraignment, case disposition, sentencing, and possible reentry. Together, we are fine-tuning the various processes.

Most recently, with the added resources made available by the MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge funding, the county, court, and court partners are collaborating further to carefully evaluate the criminal justice issues that impact our community with the goal of reducing the county’s jail population, without compromising the safety of our citizens. Creating judicial workflow reports is one example of the kind of data-driven reform effort that can help achieve this goal.

The Hon. Jeffrey Colbath is the Chief Judge of the Fifteenth Judicial Circuit in Palm Beach County Florida. He is in his second term as Chief Judge having served since July of 2013. Previous to the Chief Judge position, Judge Colbath served as the Administrative Judge of the Circuit Criminal Division of the Court which included a divisional caseload in addition to the administrative responsibilities.

Note: This piece also ran on the Huffington Post (“Decision Points: Reporting on Caseflow Affects Pretrial Jail Populations”)