According to a new report released by the VERA Institute of Justice, on any given day, in an average jail, 62 percent of the inmates have not even been convicted of a crime.
They are either awaiting a hearing, or the resolution of a plea agreement, or a simply too poor to post bail.
The report, Incarceration’s Front Door: The Misuse of Jails in America, proposes that the problems with the nation’s highest in the world incarceration rate are not related to federal penitentiaries or state prisons, but can be traced to local jails and the criteria for putting people in them.
Jails are supposed to house criminals deemed too dangerous to be at large while awaiting trial or those who may be a flight risk, and indeed they do that. However, the VERA report notes that jails are housing people convicted minor traffic offenses, minor drug possession or petty shoplifting, and they are there because they are too poor to post even a $500 bail.
Some of the other points highlighted in the report:
•75 percent of the inmates are there for non-violent traffic, drug, property or public order offenses, and
•African Americans are jailed at nearly 4 times the rate of Whites.
Locally, the Allegheny County Jail Collaborative has instituted a number of changes aimed primarily at recidivism, which address some of the VERA report concerns. Among these are providing services and referrals to help with housing, behavioral health, drug and alcohol treatment, transportation and employment for those reentering society.
Common Please Judge Joseph K. Williams III, who was named chairman of the jail oversight committee last month, said he hopes to “rebrand” the way people think of participants in jail re-entry programs.
“We have a duty to take care of a population that we think of as ‘them’ … but I hope under this administration we begin to think of them as ‘us’ because they are us. They’re our nephews, our cousins, or neighbors, our people who, for one reason or another, fell through the cracks.”
Those initiatives, however, do not address the issues on the front end—arrest, sentencing and bail—that the report says are costing people their jobs, their families and their futures. And a disproportionate number of these people are African Americans.
State Rep. Ed Gainey, D-East Liberty, who has scheduled a Feb. 28 forum on Education vs. Incarceration at the Kingsley Center, said the current system makes no sense.
“We can’t keep going down the same path,” he said. “How can we tell people to be productive if there is no consideration of that in any of the steps along the school to prison pipeline?”
The report says there are six key decision points—arrest, charge, pretrial release/bail, case processing, disposition and sentencing, and supervision and reentry—that need to be reexamined.
Michael Quigley, associate professor of Organizational Leadership and director of the Black Male Leadership Development Institute at Robert Morris University, said there is no question the disparate incarceration of young Blacks shows the need for more restraint at the beginning of the process.
He said that due to the lack of proper legal council or financial resources, young men are being horded into the system often for nothing. And these decisions are made by rank and file police officers and hearing officers “going by the book.”
“A lot of the time their discretion can determine if young men go to jail or receive a warning or citation or some other mechanism,” he said. “These men are losing jobs, educational opportunities because they’ve been in jail for six weeks waiting for a judge—they lose access to social services. It has a myriad impacts beyond losing freedom for a month or two.”
The full report is available at www.vera.org/incarcerations-front-door.
(Send comments to cmorrow@newpittsburghcourier.com.)
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