Topic: Jail Populations

It’s summer in Chicago, and crime rates tend to rise with the heat. That is likely to mean one thing—we’ll soon be consumed with headlines of senseless gun violence within Chicago’s distressed communities.

You would think that Cook County Jail—which I oversee as Sheriff—would be bursting at the seams with the perpetrators of these violent crimes, who destroy neighborhoods and lives. And yes, all of these violent criminals do end up held in our jail, usually as a pit stop on their way to a lengthy state prison sentence. However, these people are the exceptions among the inmate population here.

One of our inmates named JM—I’m using her initials to protect her identity—is closer to the rule. She has been held in Cook County Jail for over 200 days on a bond of $10,000 that she cannot afford to pay. Her crime? She allegedly pulled a false fire alarm, which in Illinois is a Class 4 felony. At a rate of $143 a day, it has cost Cook County taxpayers well in excess of $29,000 to hold JM—likely significantly more due to the fact that we are also treating her for a serious mental illness.

There’s also WB. He allegedly stole a couple bottles of liquor from a convenience store and is being held on a $50,000 bond. WB, who is also suffering from mental illness and substance abuse issues, has no history of violence. In fact, his previous crimes have all been for petty theft or drug possession. Yet he’s been held for over 220 days at a cost of $31,460.

JM and WB fit the more common profile of inmates in my jail due to the fact that—as the Vera Institute of Justice has demonstrated in great detail in their recent report—American jails are being fundamentally misused. Cook County Jail is supposed to be reserved for Chicago’s most violent criminals—those who present such dangers to society that they cannot be trusted to fight their cases from home—or those that are at risk of fleeing before trial. Instead, America’s largest jail has turned into a warehouse for the poor and mentally ill. The majority of our inmates are held not because they are dangerous or accused of some abhorrent crime, but rather because they simply cannot afford the cash bond that has been set for them.

There is significant power of discretion to change the system held by the various criminal justice stakeholders acting in it. Police have discretion on whether to arrest, prosecutors have discretion on whether to charge, and judges have discretion on what bond to set. But jail administrators alone have little discretion. We do not control who comes into our custody, and we cannot say “no” when people like JM and WB are sent our way for indeterminate amounts of time.

There has been significant focus recently on finally addressing “mass incarceration.” That’s great progress on a timely issue. But we should extend the focus beyond the sheer numbers of incarcerated people. I urge everyone who cares about criminal justice reform to extend your purview to unjust local incarceration by focusing more on these individual cases and why they ended up in jail in the first place. In a system where public defenders are forced to maintain dozens of cases simultaneously and inmates can sometimes wait seven to eight years for their cases to go to trial, some critical thought and individual attention can go a long way and keep nonviolent individuals from falling through the cracks.

By getting jails back to their original purpose, we can keep the bad guys locked up while still moving towards a smarter and fairer criminal justice system.

In California, people who are arrested and incarcerated in jail often face arbitrary bail amounts that can be very different depending on which county you happen to be arrested in. Instead of functioning as a fair process for release, bail often functions as a preventative detention tool, because most people do not have the resources to pay their bail amounts.

This has led to a dramatic increase in the number of people held in California jails who have not been convicted of a crime. Often these are people of color and poor people. But what alternatives to paying the financial conditions of bail exist, and how would arrestees or the public even know about them?

In 2016, Santa Clara County reviewed the information that was available to people newly arrested, and saw only advertisements for commercial bail and private attorneys posted in the county jail near most of the phones available for use. We believe this led people to assume the only way out of jail was to pay a bail agent or possibly plead guilty in order to be released. Staff in our Office of Pretrial Services (PTS)—as well as the offices of Reentry Services, the Public Defender, and the Sheriff—did not believe this was acceptable. With the help of the John D. and Catherine T. McArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge, we sought to change this by instituting our No Cost Release Campaign.

We recognize being arrested and going through the booking procedure is highly stressful and traumatic. We also recognize that most people may believe their quickest release option is through the commercial bail industry. Many detainees have jobs, housing, and dependents counting on them and all of these could be jeopardized by spending time in custody.

This campaign seeks to inform those arrested, their families, and the public that there are free alternatives to commercial bail.  Through posters, brochures, a web page, and looped videos in English, Spanish, and Vietnamese, we advertised the free alternatives to commercial bail offered through PTS. The campaign also informs detainees of their right to counsel through the Public Defender’s Office (PDO), and other community-based resources available through the Office of Reentry Services (ORS).

Despite existing since 1969, the options available through PTS were not widely known to the general public. This campaign maximizes access to that information by targeting our local jail system, from the lobbies and booking areas to inmate dormitories. We also dispersed the informational materials to county departments, community partners, stakeholder agencies, and the general public. The video will also be broadcast on local public television channels.

The Sheriff’s Office has further made the materials available for review during the booking process. Clients then become active participants in the release process by completing the voluntary interview with PTS. Eligible defendants can have their case reviewed for potential release on their own recognizance (OR) or supervised own recognizance (SORP) during the pre-arraignment process. These services do not cost the individual, their family, or friends any money. By contrast, paying a commercial bail agent typically involves paying 10 percent of the total bond, which is non-refundable regardless of the disposition of the case or if they show up for all their court appearances.

Pretrial justice reform continues to evolve in Santa Clara County. The Safety and Justice Challenge grant came at an opportune time for rallying support for this campaign following Santa Clara’s published recommendations in the Final Consensus Report on Optimal Pretrial Justice in August of 2016. Stakeholder support has been essential as we have worked toward implementing these recommendations for reform. In recent years, Santa Clara County has initiated many cross-department collaborations creating fertile ground for implementing the No Cost Release Campaign which serves to further these reform efforts.

To measure the campaign’s impact, stakeholders will collect data regarding the use of these jail release alternatives in order to identify gaps in service or opportunities to improve the overall process. We are expecting substantial benefits to individuals, public safety, county resources, and the community. The Sheriff’s Department is collecting data regarding the number of cases released on OR or SORP, on financial bail, and other release types while PTS is reviewing individuals’ awareness of the campaign at the time of booking. For those released on OR/SORP, Pretrial Services will also collect data on the number of individuals showing up for all court appearances and will track the number of individuals not rearrested prior to the completion of their supervision term.

Through this No Cost Release campaign we strive to reduce the number of people in our jails who are simply waiting for their cases to be heard. By informing the public of their rights and options we make our criminal justice system a more just and equitable system for all.

Most discussions about the potential of criminal justice reform center on decreasing the number of people we put in prisons—state and federally operated facilities that hold sentenced people. Equally important, though often absent from these conversations, is the role that local jails play in our criminal justice system. The number of annual admissions to jails—which hold people who are awaiting trial or are serving short sentences, often under a year—has nearly doubled in the past three decades. As a result, county and city justice systems now contain a third of the country’s incarcerated population on any given day. Paying close attention to our use of jails can reveal both the high costs they carry and the wide potential for reforms they offer.

Our recent report on the true price of jails confirmed what we suspected: they cost more than most policymakers and the public realize. The price tag is more than the commonly quoted $22 billion per year because significant jail costs often sit outside jail budgets—costs like employee pensions and the health care and educational programming incarcerated people receive. In a quarter of the jurisdictions we surveyed, costs were 20 percent higher than their budget allowed for, and one jurisdiction’s were more than 50 percent higher.

There is, however, promise for change, as reinvestment of jail savings into the things that help communities thrive stands a better chance of succeeding at the local level than in larger systems. Leaders close to their communities know best how to reallocate funds for positive outcomes, both inside and outside of the criminal justice system. And because cities and counties commission and pay for community based-services, they are well positioned to redirect savings that meet the needs of the people they serve.

Through my years at Vera and beyond, I have seen firsthand how local justice reform can achieve real change. Our organization was formed in 1961 in response to a local problem—the overuse of cash bail—and the solution that Vera and New York City came up with was soon spread nationwide by influencing the 1966 Bail Reform Act. Even large counties and cities like New York are nimble enough to act on opportunities to safely reduce the number of people they incarcerate—more nimble than state and federal systems. Local jurisdictions also have many system players with discretion to act, from prosecutors and judges to law enforcement officials and mayors’ offices. Finally, jails don’t oversee large populations of people serving long sentences, like prisons do. As just one example of recent success, Bernalillo County in New Mexico achieved a 39 percent decline in jail population in two years after creating an emergency jail population reduction plan due to a federal lawsuit it faced.

The Safety and Justice Challenge is an opportunity not only to reinvest the high costs of jail use, but also to rebuild and restore the trust that has been absent between many communities—particularly communities of color—and their law enforcement and local leadership. I look forward to watching what the 20 jurisdictions selected to be part of the Challenge Network do with this opportunity.