“Who Begs To Go To Prison?” A Marshall Project analysis found that there are 175,000 people sentenced to county jails instead of state prisons in the last eight years.
Due to “sweeping changes to California’s justice system” intended to ease prison overcrowding. And it has – but it’s shifted the overcrowding crisis onto jails, which were built to hold people for a short period of time, and which now struggle to handle incarcerated people with chronic medical and mental-health problems. Deaths in California jails have jumped by 26 percent since they started receiving long-term prisoners.
Summarized by Lillian Kalish