© Reuters/Tony Gentile
Local jails in the US are full of poor, mentally ill and drug-addicted detainees accused mostly of minor violations, and they have been jailed for longer periods over the past 30 years given their inability to pay court-ordered fines, a new report says.
According Vera Institute of Justice's new report, "
Incarceration's Front Door: The Misuse of Jails in America," there are, on any given day, about 731,000 people held in America's 3,000 local and county jails - nearly 20 times the number of annual admissions to state and federal prisons.
Even though both violent and property crimes in the US are down 49 and 44 percent, respectively, from peak levels more than 20 years ago, the annual numbers of those jailed has doubled since 1983, to 11.7 million, many of whom are repeat offenders.
The study found that those incarcerated in local jails are spending an increasing amount of time in jail, staying there from 14 days to 23 days given bond requirements that are out of their financial reach.
Three out of five people there have not been convicted of a crime but are too poor to post bail while their cases are processed.
The overwhelming majority of jailed pretrial detainees and sentenced offenders are in for nonviolent infractions, such as traffic, property, drug or public order infractions.
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Underlying the behavior that lands people in jail, there is often a history of substance abuse, mental illness, poverty, failure in school, and homelessness," the study found.
The report echoes typical grievances surrounding the US police-court-prison mass incarceration system, which has received heightened scrutiny since the fatal police shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., last August.
On Feb. 8, lawsuits were filed against Ferguson and Jennings, another St. Louis suburb, alleging systems akin to a modern debtors' prison. The mass of excessive fines and jailings over minor offenses issued in those cities, they argued, amount to a "municipal scheme designed to brutalize, to punish and to profit."
The new study also focused on the disproportionate amount of people of color within the local jail system.
Comment: The prison-industrial complex profits by keeping prisons full. Most of the prisons and jails in the U.S. are outsourced to mega-corporations who are concerned about profits not rehabilitation. The way the police state is progressing in our society, with the restrictions on our freedoms, there is not, and will not be much difference between being locked up and living in society.
The prison state of America