From Vera:
Across the country, more than 1,300 counties have expanded existing jails or built new ones over the last 20 years—increasing the nation’s capacity to lock people up in jails by almost 40 percent. One of the drivers of this growth is the prospective revenue that local jails can receive from neighboring counties, state corrections departments, and federal agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the United States Marshals Service (USMS), which all rent county jail beds.
This practice allows these departments and agencies to lock up more and more people, unconstrained by the capacity of their own facilities. For example, the mass detention and deportation plans advanced by President-elect Trump rely, in part, on utilizing the beds available in local jails, supplemented by temporary and private facilities, to detain many more immigrants.
Further, these rental arrangements can incentivize local officials to build newer, bigger jails based on perceived economic benefits—not on any local criminal legal system-related needs. Counties can become reliant on this revenue—and subsequently become further entrenched in the system of mass incarceration. This practice ties communities’ fates to future incarceration, and it can saddle counties with fixed expenses for decades if revenue doesn’t meet projections. Continue reading >>>
|
|
|
|
