Abstract
Jails appear in a range of jurisdictions throughout the United States and outnumber state prisons 3,280 to 1,719 (Vera Institute of Justice, 2018). Jails operate under the aegis of county or municipal governments and are usually located in the heart of a specific jurisdiction, allowing police officers to expedite the transport of arrestees from scattered lockups to local courtrooms for their initial appearances and bond hearings. In contrast, prisons are usually built in rural areas away from largely populated city centers and function under the auspices of state or federal governments. Throughout the history of the United States, jails were designed to house the most destitute, disturbed, and troublesome members of a community. They have always been repositories of human misery and neglect. America’s Jails: The Search for Human Dignity in an Age of Mass Incarceration by Derek Jeffreys (2018) and Insane: America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness by Alisa Roth (2018) pair detailed firsthand accounts of life in jails with broader discussions of the political, social, and economic considerations that impinge on jail operations and populations.
Size of Jails
Jail size is determined by the size of the jurisdiction, the physical space the jail occupies, and the population it detains. Unsurprisingly, these factors are intercorrelated. Larger jails can be found in more densely populated areas and house a greater number of detainees. These detainees typically have a wide range of behavioral, health, or control problems. Smaller jails can be found in less densely populated areas and house a smaller number of detainees with a narrower range of problems. Mega-jails can be as large as prisons with respect to their rated (the number of detainees that planners or architects intended for the facility) and occupied (the number of detainees that the facility actually houses on any given day) capacities. Jails can hold many detainees or only a few at a time. For example, Los Angeles County (Los Angeles), Riker’s Island (New York City), Maricopa County (Phoenix), and Cook County (Chicago) jails house a daily average of 20,000, 15,000, and 10,000 detainees, respectively. Gonzales County Jail (Gonzales, Texas) and Marion County Jail (Jasper, Tennessee), on the contrary, house a daily average of 90 and 131 detainees, respectively (Vera Institute of Justice, 2018). In general, rural county jails generally hold far fewer detainees than do urban (metro) jails. This is because the former tends to serve less populous jurisdictions than the latter (see above). However, rural jails have significantly higher detention rates and house a significantly disproportionate number of people of color than do urban jails (Kang-Brown, 2016). As both Jeffreys and Roth observe, detainees can experience challenging, abusive, and dangerous conditions in jails of all sizes, which emphasizes the fact that the experience of being processed for detention and confined in a jail environment are often inherently deleterious, irrespective of the size of a jail’s population or geographic footprint.
By the middle of 2016, the number of Americans jailed was 714,700 (Zeng, 2018). Nationally, two thirds of detainees are currently at the pretrial level (i.e., they have not been convicted). The vast majority are men (85%) and more than half are non-White. Admissions to jails (11 million people annually) are 8 times higher than those to state and federal prisons (Vera Institute of Justice, 2018). Most jail detainees are confined for 25 days on average, but confinement can range from weeks to months (Zeng, 2018). Most prison inmates are confined for years or decades. In 35 of the nation’s prisons, one in 10 inmates are incarcerated for a decade or longer (Courtney, Eppler-Epstein, Pelletier, King, & Lei, 2017).
Purpose of Jail
Despite their ubiquity, the basic nature of jails is widely misunderstood by the American public. Journalists and politicians, for example, regularly use the terms “jail” and “prison” interchangeably (Lurigio, 2017). Although jails are thought to be places for the confinement, incapacitation, and punishment of serious offenders, they are instead mostly way stations. Arrestees, who are devastatingly poor, uninsured, and unstably housed, languish in these jails while they wait for their cases to be adjudicated or for their state prison sentences to commence after a felony conviction (Lurigio, 2017).
Jails are local institutions designed to confine and punish community residents, touching neighborhoods with greater immediacy and impact than prisons do. With the continual movement and turnover of detainees (population flow), jails are more chaotic settings than prisons. “Prisons take and hold inmates while jails take and release them” (Schlanger, 2003, p. 43). Following the “shock of [first-time] confinement” (Safety and Justice Challenge, 2019, p. 3), detainees often enter jail in a state of confusion, agitation, and crisis, explaining, in part, the significantly higher rates of suicide among members of the jail population (46 per 100,000), compared with those in the prison (15 per 100,000) and general (13 per 100,000) populations. With notable exceptions (Irwin, 1985), less attention has been given to jail confinement and its consequences on the lives of Americans, despite the notion that “jails are where our nation’s incarceration problem begins” (Safety and Justice Challenge, 2019, p. 2). Jeffreys and Roth provide insights into how jails can seriously disrupt the lives of detainees and their families (cf. Digard & Swavola, 2019; Harcourt, 2015).
Arrestees are often confined to jail because they are unable to afford bail or are considered a flight risk or danger to the public. It is there they must await the disposition of their cases in a trial or a sentencing or plea-bargaining hearing. Some detainees are convicted for misdemeanor crimes, which are punishable with up to 1 year of incarceration, or for violations of their probation or parole conditions. Others are ordered to receive drug or alcohol treatment before or in lieu of sentencing, which is often a factor when substance use plays a key role in an arrestee’s charges. In such cases, drug treatment is offered through a jail- or court-based recovery program. Diversionary courts for people with mental illness, veterans, and victims of sexual exploitation also work with jails in providing special housing and services to populations with special needs (Center for Prison Reform, 2015). Therefore, detention can be utilized for punitive or rehabilitative purposes (Lurigio, 2017).
Pretrial release decisions are frequently based on brief assessments that employ statistical tools, and are thus widely accepted as valid. Nonetheless, such tools can be limited in their predictive accuracy and can be deliberately manipulated to yield conservative decisions. A detainee could receive a higher or lower bail amount or no bond altogether depending on the results of a sometimes-cursory evaluation (Jeffreys, 2018). As elected officials, judges usually err on the side of caution. They keep low-risk detainees locked-up even if they are likely to reappear in court and remain arrest-free during their release period (Jeffreys, 2018). For example, the deliberate adjustment of the cutoff scores of risk assessment tools at intake can increase or decrease the size of a jail’s population based on political or financial considerations rather than valid assessments of reoffending or absconding. Such adjustments are most likely to affect poor people of color (Desmarais & Lowder, 2019). In 2017, New Jersey significantly restricted the use of cash bail. Throughout the state, judges may now only order defendants to be jailed based on a suspect’s criminal history or charges, which significantly reduced the unnecessary confinement of indigent arrestees. The state’s overall jail population was drastically reduced following this reform effort (Jeffreys, 2018).
Detention and Its Consequences
Collateral Damage and Disproportionality
Even if they face a relatively short period of confinement in jail, “tens of thousands of people exit U.S. jails every day only to find their lives in tatters” (Jeffreys, 2018, p. 99). A few weeks or months in jail can result in the loss of employment, housing, and familial relationships (Rabinowitz, 2010). Jails further disadvantage the disadvantaged. Poor Blacks often face longer stays and are detained at a rate 3.5 times higher than Whites (Zeng, 2018). Although racial disparities in jails have recently declined, “black people have historically been, and continue to be, significantly overrepresented in local jails nationally” (Vera Institute of Justice, 2018, p. 1).
As a group, Black detainees are more likely to be legally represented by overworked and underresourced public defenders. They are also more likely to plead guilty to lower-level offenses to hasten their release. This is true even when they are innocent of their charges (Rabinowitz, 2010). All other factors being equal, they are also more likely to be sentenced to prison simply because they are confined to jail while awaiting the disposition of their cases (Lyons, Lurigio, Roque, & Rodriguez, 2013). Jeffreys’s and Roth’s portrayals of detainees and their circumstances highlight these racial disparities.
Overcrowding and Violence
Jeffreys’s and Roth’s narratives also touch on the perpetual overcrowding of jails. For incarcerees and detention officers alike, overcrowding has led to horrific consequences, such as detainee neglect, abuse, and violence (Noonan, Rohloff, & Ginder, 2015). It has also led to vicious attacks on officers (Jeffreys, 2018; Roth, 2018), which can involve “getting gassed” with a “nauseating slurry” (Roth, 2018, p. 61) of feces, urine, and saliva that is usually flung from inside the detainees’ cells. Gassing is more likely to occur in jail segregation units than in general population units. According to Jeffreys and Roth, people with mental illness are regularly placed in solitary confinement or segregation units for their safety and security and that of the unit’s officers. Despite these reasonable intentions, isolation can exacerbate detainees’ symptoms and further stigmatize and dehumanize those with severe psychiatric disorders (Jeffreys, 2018; Roth, 2018).
Hiding the Rabble
Building on Irwin’s (1985) classic treatise, Jeffreys, and to a lesser extent, Roth characterize jails as long-standing places of confinement for the rabble. Jails remove and conceal from public view the most marginalized members of the community. They function as an essential mechanism of state coercion and social control. Jeffreys and Roth outline the sordid history of American jails, which have always been appalling environments rife with brutality, wanton violence, filth, and unsanitary conditions. The state of America’s jails remains execrable, as reflected in the authors’ compelling depictions of everyday life in the Los Angeles County (Roth), Rikers Island (Roth), and Cook County (Jeffreys) jails. Although the authors describe the largest jails in great detail, they also sprinkle their discussions with many examples of medium- and small-sized jails, lending greater generalizability to their conclusions. Both books also detail the inept, and sometimes cruel or neglectful, treatment of detainees with mental illness. These detainees were swept into the ever-growing criminal justice system in an era of draconian drug laws, get-tough criminal justice policies, and mass incarceration.
Treatment for Detainees With Mental Illness
Roth presents a highly illuminating and insightful explication of the factors that have allowed a rising number of people with mental illness to be confined in our nation’s jails and prisons instead of being placed in psychiatric facilities where they could receive proper treatment. A seasoned journalist, she discusses the parallel trajectories of the criminal justice and mental health systems over the past 50 years. The former has become more justice-driven, replacing rehabilitation with punishment as the primary goal of sentencing. The latter has become more decentralized, impoverished, and less capable of caring for people with chronic and persistent mental illness. These patients cycle between correctional and psychiatric facilities with little or no follow-up care in the community.
Jeffreys notes that much of a jail’s activities and operations are hidden from public scrutiny “in plain sight” within the shadowy margins of legal rational authority (Irwin, 1985; Weber, 1922/1978). As observed in the Vera Institute’s report on jails, “their omission from scrutiny results in an incomplete picture [of the true nature of jails]” (p. 1). Nevertheless, as Jeffreys and Roth observe, numerous legal cases and consent decrees have helped illuminate and alleviate (though not eradicate) the deplorable conditions of our nation’s jails, which have now become de facto psychiatric facilities (U.S. District Court for Illinois, 2015). Legal advocacy and case precedents have compelled jails to reevaluate themselves to respond to the extensive mental health needs of their detainees. Notwithstanding, the shift from punishment to treatment has been incomplete and superficial.
The sine qua non of jails has never really changed, creating an ongoing fundamental disconnect that expresses itself in repeated instances of role confusion among jail administrators and detention officers. This disconnect also leads to tension between the demands of medical correctional staff and the security imperatives of correctional facilities, the burgeoning demands for mental health services, and the misuse of solitary confinement as a “treatment” option (Roth, 2018). In “Sanctioned Torture,” one of the most disturbing and poignant chapters in either book, Roth describes heart-wrenching examples of detainees with serious mental illnesses who are confined to disciplinary segregation units. Detainees with mental disorders are more likely to be held in solitary confinement for a gamut of infractions and to remain confined there for longer periods than are detainees with no mental disorders. Solitary confinement frequently exacerbates, and sometimes even causes, the symptoms of such illnesses (Jeffreys, 2018; Roth, 2018). Whether solitary confinement actually precipitates the symptoms of mental illness is dependent on several factors, including the type and length of confinement and, most important, the preexisting psychological health of the inmate being placed in confinement (Metzner & Fellner, 2010).
Roth brings to light the painful and unimaginable anguish suffered by incarcerees with mental illness. Her book also chronicles some of the most horrific cases of detainee death from mistreatment or suicide, which includes those both in and out of solitary confinement in both jails and prisons. She also elucidates on-going debates, such as those surrounding the insanity defense and restoration to fitness programs.
The authors underscore the serious and systematic efforts expended in the jails of Los Angeles and Chicago to manage detainees with mentally illness compassionately and competently. However, they also recognize that it is deplorable that the legal authority of jails lies in the hands of unaccountable administrators who do not allow for transparency regarding jail practices. Moreover, jail administrators are customarily hamstrung by labor unions in their attempts to discipline or terminate abusive detention officers. Despite the secretive nature of jails, Jeffreys and Roth are genuinely grateful for the openness they experienced while pursuing their investigative endeavors in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and elsewhere.
Human Dignity
Jeffreys’s philosophical analysis centers on the concept of human dignity. He laments how easily jail detainees are dehumanized, degraded, and stigmatized. The erosion of the personhood of detainees is driven especially by the public’s fear and loathing of “criminals.” The correctional officers who manage detainees can also harbor these sentiments. Detainees are typically kept in spaces so noisome they can elicit physical revulsion. The wretchedness of many jails can itself implicitly communicate that its inhabitants must be deserving of such indignities, and can, therefore, reinforce the repulsion that their jailers might feel for them.
According to Jeffreys, repulsion begets contempt, and contempt begets abuse. The degrading conditions of jails foster a deeper level of disgust, contributing to a cycle of continued loathing and a disregard for the humanity of detainees, constituting an “assault on human dignity” (Jeffreys, 2018, p. 5), which is made even more disturbing by the fact that the majority of jail detainees are unconvicted. “Many of those who find themselves in the Cook County Jail represent little or no threat to others. Instead, they endure its degradations and brutality because they are too poor to post bail” (Jeffreys, 2018, p. 34).
Effecting Change
America’s Jails and Insane level scathing indictments against our nation’s correctional institutions, particularly with respect to their treatment of people with mental illness. The authors describe an overwhelmingly bleak picture of U.S. jails as grotesque and primitive. They are run by detention officers who range from calmly indifferent to outright sadistic, as they respond to the plight of the mentally ill. Jeffreys and Roth also recognize the officers and medical care providers who rise above the constraints and exigencies of the criminal justice system. These workers are able to relate to incarcerees in a clinically meaningful and sympathetic manner. In addition, the authors examine certain court-ordered modifications of correctional settings and staffing requirements that have legally obligated jails to become safer and more therapeutic environments.
Neither Roth nor Jeffreys is a criminologist or a penologist, and this allows them to bring interesting and unexpected perspectives to the discourse on correctional facilities. Roth covers the topic in a broader and much more engaging fashion than Jeffreys does. Her reportage is dramatic, and her ability to document events and trends is compelling and impressive. An experienced print and radio reporter, Roth is unrelenting in her investigation of correctional environments fraught with incivility and maltreatment. Her narrative is quite forceful throughout. On the contrary, Jeffreys’s discourse is more academic and esoteric. From the beginning to end of his book, he discusses the fundamental, shared principles of humanity and the inherent dignity of all people, predominantly those who are weak or vulnerable.
America’s Jails and Insane help flesh out new perspectives and ideas for improving the plight of all incarcerees. Jeffreys does not recommend that jails be abolished altogether. He begrudgingly acknowledges that jails are needed for public safety purposes. The author enumerates a number of reasonable and practicable recommendations for ameliorating the conditions of America’s jails. These include reducing jail populations by implementing pretrial diversionary programs and extensive bail reform measures, as well as rescinding policies that promote aggressive policing tactics, such as broken windows policing. However, in Jeffreys’s paradigm, the only real solution to the jail crisis is to affirm and respect the inherent humanity of detainees. Both authors focus principally on detainees with mental illness who represent a large percentage of people behind bars. National studies suggest that approximately 14% of male jail detainees and 31% of female detainees suffer from mental illness (Safety and Justice Challenge, 2019).
The authors recommend lowering the overall correctional population thorough diversionary police and court programs, which perforce will decrease the proportion of detainees with mental disorders. In addition, they recommend that federal and state governments define mental illness as a serious public health problem. Furthermore, they argue that there should be more funding for community-based programs and long-term institutional care for people with the most intractable psychiatric illnesses, who are also the most likely arrestees to become chronic habitués of the mental health system and the criminal justice system. Roth and Jeffreys are hopeful for change while still maintaining a sense of realism when it comes to the forces that render such changes so formidable.
