Jail conditions in the U.S. are a national crisis – many jails are unsafe, overcrowded, and lack basic medical healthcare. Hundreds of people die while in jail every year. And the majority of people in American jails – on any given day, around 540,000 people – are being detained before trial. Here, we follow jail conditions across the country.
Under The Arch, a podcast put out by our friends at ArchCity Defenders and Action St. Louis, sat down with The Bail Project's Mike Milton and former TBP director of strategic partnerships Thomas Harvey to talk about pretrial incarceration in the city....
A new analysis by Prison Policy Initiative finds that people who are jailed have much higher rates of social, economic, and health problems that cannot and should not be addressed through incarceration....
"The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to cancel a nearly $2 billion contract to build a mental health-focused jail and will instead explore funding community-based mental health and substance abuse care for residents."...
In Spokane County, Washington—one of the places where The Bail Project operates—Black people are jailed at 13 times the rate of whites, and the Native American rate is six-and-a-half times greater and Latinos at one-and-a-half times....
"A jail officer found 27-year-old Layleen Polanco unresponsive in her Rikers Island cell in June. She had been in custody since mid-April, unable to post $500 bail after an assault arrest."...
"Suicide, long the leading cause of death in U.S. jails, hit a high of 50 deaths for every 100,000 inmates in 2014, the latest government data available...
