From Prison Policy Initiative:
The criminal legal system views pretrial detention as a necessary sacrifice that prioritizes crime prevention and court attendance over personal liberty. However, detention is demonstrably ineffective on both fronts: when compared to releasing people pretrial, jail counterintuitively worsens these outcomes on day one while making the system decidedly more unjust for those behind bars. These failures come at a steep cost, as detention also immediately disrupts a person’s ability to work and increases their risk of death. Horrendous jail conditions are only partially to blame; on a more basic level, pretrial detention’s disruptive and stigmatizing effects help explain why it fails to live up to its promises, and no amount of newer, nicer jails can change that.
Judges contemplate the risk a person poses to the community if released, but — crucially — not the risk detention poses to individuals and the community. What are the risks of detention, how quickly do they materialize, and what might the system look like if they mattered in bail determinations? To answer these questions, we examined recent studies that measure pretrial detention’s impact on people, particularly within the first 72 hours in jail. Building on our investigations into pretrial detention’s role in destructive cycles of arrest and incarceration, the benefits of pretrial release, and the dangers of jail expansion, we find that there is no “safe” way to jail a person, nor is there an amount of time a person can be detained without escalating short- and long-term risks to themselves and their communities.
As we discuss below, if judges considered these harms and their implications for public safety when deciding whether to initially release or detain people, far fewer people would be jailed pretrial, shrinking the system to a tiny fraction of its current size.
Read the full report here.
|
|
|
|
