American Jails

Where approximately three-quarters of a million people are incarcerated each day

Dear Reader,

Welcome. Let’s take a walk together.

Pretend you are my social work colleague joining me on a client visit at the county jail (pre/post-COVID, of course). We both work for a holistic public defender agency, meaning that we provide or connect clients to legal, mental health, physical health, substance (ab)use counseling, housing, and other services to “address[] [our]clients’ most pressing legal and social support needs.”¹

Our client has been charged with a crime by the state and her preliminary hearing, an important pretrial hearing,² is happening next week. My colleague and I need to discuss some details about the incident with, and we anticipate it will be an emotional meeting.

We pull into a parking lot surrounded by barbed wire and plastered with “Keep Out Unless on Official Business” signs. We park facing a large building with slitted windows, not unlike the windows you might see in those old castles where archers would take aim at any unwelcome visitors, except these windows have bars over them.

We planned ahead and wore sports bras/bralettes because underwire bras are not allowed inside. No high heels with metal posts.

We pop the trunk, placing all of our belongings in there except for our IDs, pens, and blank legal pads. Phones stay. Wallets stay. Waters stay. Earrings, necklaces, rings stay.

Turning toward the building, we square our shoulders and walk inside a lobby with a large desk surrounded by thick glass and those weird metal speaker things through which we are to talk to the staff inside. Large portraits of the president of the United States, the governor of the state, and the sheriff of the county—all white men—glare at all who enter.

Arriving at the plated glass window, we wait for the two people behind the counter to acknowledge us.

“Hello, we are here to see Client Jones,” I say, speaking through the slotted metal hole in the middle of the window. “Here is my ID and bar card.”

“Who’s that with you?” The flat voice crackles through the speaker.

“She’s a social worker with our defense office and is assigned to Client Jones’s case. She has her ID and visits our clients here regularly,” I respond.

“Nope. We aren’t allowing social workers in today. She needs to make a separate appointment.” The voice brooks no argument, and it might have worked if this didn’t happen every single time we try to come see our clients. A new rule or regulation in place, making it harder to get in to see them.

“We have an appointment. Here is the email confirmation from your supervisor giving us both permission to be here. Our appointment is in 15 minutes.” I slide the printed email through the slot in the window. (I brought a few copies, just in case).

A loud sigh crackles through the speaker. “Hold on. Let me check.”

We wait for ten minutes. Twenty minutes. Thirty minutes pass by.

Finally, she saunters back behind the counter. “Okay. Fine. You both signed in? Wait for the door.”

A loud buzzing fills the room and a large, very thick door pushes open—not unlike the doors you may have seen on a bank vault, for example.

We enter a small windowless room with one of those X-ray machines like at the airport and three correctional officers. Shoes come off. Suit jackets and cardigans come off. All items are placed on the conveyor belt.

We step forward to be wanded and patted down, including under our breasts and between our legs. The female guard pulls out the fronts and backs of our pant waistbands and looks down each side. We’re cleared.

Then, we wait for about five minutes.

Another huge door buzzes and opens. A guard awaits us on the other side. The door clicks very loudly as it is secured. We step into a sterile hallway filled with linoleum and fluorescent lights, smelling institutional. Our shoes squeak on the floor as we walk in silence toward another huge door. It buzzes and we walk through into a very small room with no windows and one door at each end. Once the first door clicks secure, the other buzzes and opens. Then another room with two doors.

Four doors later, we enter a large room that vaguely resembles a dystopian middle school cafeteria, with two-tone linoleum and small tables with attached benches dotted across the floor. The furniture is bolted to the floor, everyone wears the same orange scrubs, except for the armed guards sitting and standing around a U-shaped desk with a bunch of screens.

It is loud. So very loud. Sound echoes off of every hard surface, ringing and clanging and shouting and laughing—our ears are overwhelmed by all the sound. I can only imagine what it’s like to be there 24/7.

The room is surrounded by two stories of open cell doors where corners of bunkbeds are visible. Metal-slatted platforms wrap around the room serving as floors to each story.

We are escorted to a small room off to the side containing a table bolted to the ground and four chairs, also bolted to the ground. It’s a fish bowl — windows on all sides.

I ask the guard if there is somewhere else we can meet with our client. Somewhere we can have some privacy because we are discussing some confidential and difficult issues related to her case.

"No can do. We don’t have enough staff for that today. Gotta be here or you can reschedule.” The guard shrugs. “What do you want to do? Stay or go?”

“We will stay. We have a hearing coming up so we don’t have time to reschedule.” I sigh. “Oh! Can our client please have her hands free for our meeting? No cuffs? She may need to take notes.”

“No can do, again. Not enough staff for that either. She’s gotta stay cuffed. That gonna be a problem?” he inquires, eyebrows raised.

At this point, my colleague and I are nearly an hour into our visit and we have yet to see our client.

“No. Not today. But I will be bringing this up with my boss and with yours.”

“Suit yourself.” Shrugs again. He leaves to get our client.

While we wait, my colleague and I try to angle our bodies so that no one can read our client’s lips or see her facial expressions while we talk. It’s all we can do to protect her privacy in this moment.

Finally, our client shuffles in—all 5 feet of her, possibly 100 pounds soaking wet— ankles shackled together, chains dragging between and around her rubber slippered feet. Her wrists are shackled to a chain wrapped around her waist. The guard guides her by the elbow.

Our client sits down carefully so as not to trip or lose her balance. She gives us a tremulous smile as the guard shuts the door to stand just outside. Her nose wrinkles and wiggles, so she curls her head and torso downward so she can reach and scratch her nose with her shackled hands. And, we begin.

At the end of our meeting, Client Jones is taken back into the loud room and her shackles are removed.

My colleague and I are escorted back through the sterile halls and the small windowless rooms, doors buzzing and clicking loudly before and after us, though there was silence among us.

My colleague and I step outside of the building, blinking in the brightness of the day. The silence continues as we drag ourselves to the car, depleted.

I roll my shoulders and shake out my limbs to release the tension that’s been humming through my body for the last two hours. The tension that built as I stepped into the building, through each heavy buzzing and clicking door. Through the sensation of being trapped as we stood in windowless rooms between two secured heavy metal doors. Through the loud echoes of the pod. Through the searing, traumatic details of my client’s experience intimate partner violence, mental illness, and so much more. Through the physical sensation of anxiety, heaviness, fear, guilt, and anger that comes when I process all of the people who do not have the option to leave with us.

We open the car doors and sink inside its steamy heat, crack the windows, and thump our heads back against the headrest, closing our eyes. Though you might think we would want to drive away as quickly as possible, we have to regain the energy to do so first. It takes a few minutes.

I wonder if these visits will ever get easier, less draining. But, I know (or hope) it won’t. This experience should never feel “normal” or “okay” because it is neither.

To quote Dr. King, I endeavor to remain “maladjusted” to the dehumanization of human beings, disposed of and caged, with so many of us collectively allowing, permitting, or even promoting such practices. (Full Dr. King quote below).

With that thought, I pull myself together despite feeling like a limp noodle. We pull out of the jail parking lot and head back to our office to attend to the many other clients and issues we need to attend to that day.

Where are we? A prison or a jail?

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The answer is — jail. Though the scenario is made up, the details are what I recall from my own visits to various jails and pretrial detention centers over the years that are very similar in sight, sound, and experience.

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As you may have gleaned already, today, I begin a short series on jails.

Before I do, I want to provide a succinct two-part tutorial about the different institutions that currently incarcerate over 2 million people in the United States — jails and prisons.³

As a society, we tend to use jail and prison interchangeably. While it is true that “[b]oth ‘jail’ and ‘prison’ refer to secure facilities that are legally permitted to deprive people within the criminal [legal] system of [most] constitutional rights,⁴ they serve different roles in the system.

This edition explains jails (in generalities) and the next will explain prisons.

Jails

There are around 3,134 local jails in the United States and 80 jails in Indian Country, incarcerating between 631,000⁵ and 700,000⁶ people on any given day.

Most jails in the United States are operated by city or county governments, often by the county’s sheriff’s office.⁷ Some counties and cities choose outsource jail operations to private contractors, such as GEO Group or CoreCivic (former Corrections Corporation of America). Others still choose to contract with neighboring, larger counties instead of operating their own jail.

People arrested and charged with city or state law violations are typically sent to the jail in the locality in which they were arrested, or the nearest local facility.

People arrested and charged with federal offenses (a daily average of 62,300 people), are detained by the U.S. Marshals Service (“USMS”). However, USMS does not have its own detention facilities.⁸ “Eighty percent of the prisoners in Marshals Service custody are detained in state, local and private facilities” that contract directly with USMS.⁹ Approximately 9,000 people are detained pretrial on behalf of the USMS in U.S. Bureau of Prisons (“BoP”) jails.¹⁰

Why are people in jail and for how long?

Jails typically incarcerate people for shorter periods of time (i.e. less than one year).

Whether people are being held by the city, state, or federal government, jails generally contain people who:

• have been arrested and are awaiting arraignment/first appearance to hear the charges against him and determine if they may be released on their own recognizance, must pay bail, or will remain detained until their case is resolved;

• have been arraigned and either

  • cannot afford the bail assessed by the judge, or

  • has been denied bail altogether, and thus,

• are awaiting trial or the resolution of their case (via dismissal, or, much more likely, plea deal);

• have pled guilty or been found guilty at trial and are awaiting sentencing;

• have been sentenced to a period of incarceration and await transfer to a long-term carceral facility — a prison;

• have been sentenced to less than one year incarceration (usually for a misdemeanor); or,

• have an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainer (hold) and await transfer to an immigration detention facility.¹¹

At any given moment in the United States, more than 700,000 people are in jail.¹² The U.S. Department of Justice stated that there were “10.3 million [jail] admissions in 2019.”¹³

More on who is represented in the jail data discussed today, as well as the conditions of confinement within these facilities in upcoming editions.

For now, pause and consider the sheer enormity of the numbers outlined above. The great reach and profound ripple effect jails have on those in our communities, perhaps on you directly. Indeed, “[j]ust under one in two (45 percent) Americans have ever had an immediate family member incarcerated.”¹⁴

Every number represents a person, and connected to every person are many more. A fact we cannot at any time ignore when we discuss jails.

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Next edition, prisons—what they are, who runs them, why people are there, and how many people are detained behind their walls.

Thank you for reading.

Respectfully,

Amy

Dr. King’s Speech on Remaining Creatively Maladjusted

Dr. Martin Luther King spoke to the Southern Methodist University (in Dallas, TX) community on March 17, 1966. In his speech, he talks about remaining “creatively maladjusted” to the many dehumanizing actions, structures, and systems at work in our society.

For me, this speech, in addition to his “Three Evils” speech and “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” (all of his work, really) remain powerful magnetic fields guiding my moral and ethical compass. I hope you find that these words catalyze you, as well.

Here are Dr. King’s words:

You know there are certain technical words in every academic discipline which soon become stereotypes and clichés. Every academic discipline has its technical nomenclature. Modern psychology has a word that is probably used more than any other word in psychology. It is the word maladjusted. It is the ring and cry of modern child psychology and certainly we all want to avoid the maladjusted life. We all want to live a well-adjusted life in order to avoid the neurotic and schizophrenic personalities. But I must honestly say there are some things in our nation and the world to which I am proud to be maladjusted and wish all men of goodwill would be maladjusted until the good society is realized.

I never intend to adjust myself to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to a religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few, leaving millions of people smothering in an air-tight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism and the self-defeating effects of physical violence.

In a day when Sputniks and Explorers and Geminis are dashing through space and guided missiles are causing highways of death through the stratosphere, no nation can win a war. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence; it is either nonviolence and non-existence. The alternative to disarmament, the alternative to a greater suspension of nuclear tests, the alternative to passionate and determined negotiated settlements of conflicts in the world, like Vietnam, the alternative to strengthening the United Nations and thereby the whole world, may well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of annihilation and our earthly habitat will be transformed into an inferno that even the mind of Dante could not imagine.

And so we need maladjusted men and women where these problems are concerned. It may well be that our whole world is need of the formation of a new organization, the International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment. Men and women who will be as maladjusted as the prophet Amos, who in the midst of the injustices of his day cried the words that echoed across the centuries, “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” Maladjusted as Abraham Lincoln, who had the vision to see that this nation could not survive half slave and half free. As maladjusted as that great Virginian Thomas Jefferson, who in the midst of an age amazingly adjust to slavery, could scratch words across the pages of history words lifted to cosmic proportions, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” As maladjusted as Jesus Christ, who could say to the men and women around the Galilean hills, “Love your enemies. Bless them that curse you. Pray for them that despitefully use you.” And through such maladjustment, we will be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.¹⁵

1. “Holistic Defense, Defined,” The Bronx Defenders, available at: https://www.bronxdefenders.org/holistic-defense/

2. Here is a description of preliminary hearings by the Maryland court system:

“A preliminary hearing is a hearing held in the District Court that determines if probable cause exists to charge you with a crime. You are not allowed to testify or offer evidence at this hearing. You do have the right to hear the evidence against you and to cross examine the state’s witness. If the court finds no probable cause, charges may be dismissed. (The state's attorney may refile charges later.)

You have a right to a preliminary hearing if you are charged with a felony or crime which must be tried in circuit court and you have not been indicted by the grand jury. You must request one within ten (10) days of your first appearance before the commissioner. If you waive your preliminary hearing, or if it is held and the court finds there is sufficient probable cause, the state’s attorney must:
  • file a charging document in the circuit court within thirty (30) days;
  • enter a nol pros (unwilling to proceed) or stet (a stay of proceedings) in the District Court; or
  • amend the charges so that they can be tried in the District Court.”

“Arrested: Frequently Asked Questions,” District Court of Maryland, available at: https://bit.ly/3KZRKM2.

3. “The United States is the world’s leader in incarceration,” The Sentencing Project, available at: https://www.sentencingproject.org/criminal-justice-facts/.

Additionally, this number does not include the over 50,000 people detained in immigration detention centers in our country. “Immigration Detention 101: The United States government maintains the world’s largest immigration detention system,” Detention Watch Network, available at: https://bit.ly/343jXRM.

4. Laura Cahn, “The Real Difference Between Jail and Prison,” Reader’s Digest (Nov. 20, 2021), available at: https://www.rd.com/article/jail-vs-prison/.

5. Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner, “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2020,” The Prison Policy Initiative (Mar. 2021), available at: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html.

6. “Small but Growing Group Incarcerated For a Month or More Has Kept Jail Populations High,“ Pew (June 23, 2020), available at: https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2020/06/23/small-but-growing-group-incarcerated-for-a-month-or-more-has-kept-jail-populations-high. See also Zhen Zeng and Todd D. Minton, “Jail Inmates in 2019,” U.S. Department of Justice (Mar. 2021), available at: https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/ji19.pdf.

7. According to a 2015 study by the National Association of Counties, 87% of jails around the country were run by counties. Natalie Ortiz, “County Jails at a Crossroads.” National Association of Counties (Jul. 8, 2015), available at: https://www.naco.org/resources/county-jails-crossroads.

8. On an average day, USMS “houses approximately 52,000 detainees in federal, state, local and private jails throughout the nation,” contracting with “approximately 1,800 state and local governments to rent jail space.” “Defendant and Prisoner Custody and Detention,” U.S. Marshals Service, available at: https://www.usmarshals.gov/prisoner/detention.htm.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. Some cities and counties have an agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “287(g) is a program for allowing state and local agencies to act as immigration enforcement agents.” See “National Map of 287(g) Agreements,” Immigrant Legal Resource Center (Dec. 6, 2021), available at: https://www.ilrc.org/national-map-287g-agreements.

12. “Small but Growing Group Incarcerated For a Month or More Has Kept Jail Populations High,“ Pew (June 23, 2020), available at: https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2020/06/23/small-but-growing-group-incarcerated-for-a-month-or-more-has-kept-jail-populations-high. See also Zhen Zeng and Todd D. Minton, “Jail Inmates in 2019,” U.S. Department of Justice (Mar. 2021), available at: https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/ji19.pdf.

13. Zhen Zeng and Todd D. Minton, “Jail Inmates in 2019,” U.S. Department of Justice (Mar. 2021), available at: https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/ji19.pdf.

14. Peter K. Enns, et al., “What Percentage of Americans Have Ever Had a Family Member Incarcerated?: Evidence from the Family History of Incarceration Survey (FamHIS),” Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World (Mar. 4, 2019), available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2378023119829332.

15. “Transcript of Dr. Martin Luther King's speech at SMU on March 17, 1966,” available at: https://www.smu.edu/News/2014/mlk-at-smu-transcript-17march1966.