USA Africa Dialogue Series - Jails: Time to Wake Up to Mass Incarceration in Your Neighborhood

In 2013, there were nearly 12 million admissions to jails, almost double the 1980 figure and nearly 19 times the number of prison admissions.


Jails: Time to Wake Up to Mass Incarceration in Your Neighborhood
Wednesday, 04 March 2015 00:00 By James Kilgore<http://www.truth-out.org/author/itemlist/user/49334>, Truthout | News Analysis

In February, the MacArthur Foundation launched a $75 million grant initiative<http://www.macfound.org/press/press-releases/macarthur-launches-75m-initiative-reduce-americas-use-jails/> to support counties and cities in developing strategies to reduce jail populations. Julia Stasch, MacArthur's president, noted that "jails are where our nation's incarceration problem begins [and] too often serve as warehouses for those too poor to post bail, nonviolent offenders, or people with mental illness." The MacArthur initiative represents a belated awakening to the reality that jails are the local face of mass incarceration and, in many places, the New Jim Crow.To date, popular knowledge about jails has remained a compendium of scenes from "Cops," MSNBC's "Lockup" or the pics circulated by Mugshots.com on their website<http://mugshots.com/> and their widely distributed magazine<http://www.tcdailyplanet.net/news/2013/04/06/busted-paper-and-other-mugshot-magazines-why-they-are-and-will-likely-remain-legal>. But the critical lens is widening. Even small Midwestern towns are taking action.On February 23, the city council of Urbana, Illinois, passed a resolution condemning mass incarceration. The resolution went on to urge their county board, currently debating a much contested $32 million jail proposal, to stop jail planning until funding was mobilized to alternatives to incarceration.As a recent major report<http://www.vera.org/pubs/special/incarcerations-front-door-misuse-jails-america> by the Vera Institute asserts, "jails matter."



The sheer scale of jail operations supports this argument. According to the Vera report, in 2013, there were nearly 12 million admissions to jails, almost double the 1980 figure and nearly 19 times the number of prison admissions. While at a given moment jails hold only about 30 percent of the nation's 2.2 million people behind bars, turnover in jails is much faster, resulting in the enormous admissions levels. Virtually everyone in prison is serving at least a year, but the average jail stay in 2013 was 23 days. Paul Wright, editor of Prison Legal News, which has covered the issue for many years, told Truthout, "In some ways, jails affect a lot more people than prisons do."

Part of the impact of jails is that they are everywhere - almost every county as well as many cities have one. They range from the 20,000-person Los Angeles County facility spread across eight different sites to Mayberry-style lockups in O'Brien County, Iowa, with a capacity of 44. ...............................................................................


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