If you take a step back and look at the mechanics of where law enforcement meets the justice system, the structure operates like a coin-counting machine; one coin is released on bail, another coin gets sent to pretrial detention, another is sent to a judge who can recommend parole under supervision while awaiting a trial hearing.
However, at the current rate of incarceration, that coin jar is more like a dump truck to the court's sorting tray, and there simply aren't enough maintenance workers on site to handle that much crude capacity. Because those dump trucks show no signs of stopping, the coin-counter is going to have to start rethinking how it counts coins.
Up ahead, we'll look at how court counties like Cleveland, Ohio have succeeded at making meaningful change within their existing court processes to expand access to win-win bail alternatives that a) spare tax-paying communities the expense of holding jailed citizens in a costly pretrial purgatory, and b) don't garnish the detainees' livelihoods.
Currently, there are 1.8 million human beings incarcerated. Of those, 1.3 million are in state prison and 575,000 are in jail. Of those in jail, 70% (402,000) are awaiting pretrial and haven't been convicted of anything. Some of these individuals can spend 18 months in jail before their case is heard by a judge. In every case, this holding pattern interrupts the detainee's ability to work, support their family, and thrive in society.
For some individuals, indefinite incarceration exists as the only true option upon being arrested. While many prisoners can be released the minute they post bail, some simply cannot afford the high price tag, and thus jail becomes an unfortunate consequence. The median felony bail bond is more than $10,000, whereas the average yearly income of a man who can't afford bail is $16,000, and $11,000 for a woman. To pile on hardship, 66% of those women are also raising minor children.
The numbers of individuals held in pretrial detention awaiting trial are only increasing. Since 1983, the pretrial detention population has increased by over 63%. And holding every one of those prisoners in indefinite institutionalized confinement is expensive. The average cost to hold one person in jail is about $34,000. This year, jails cost U.S. taxpayer a total of $25 billion, with $13.6B tax dollars spent on pretrial detentions alone.
Our tax dollars aren't even enough to meet the rising demands of jail costs. About 20% of jails are overcrowded as is. About 2/5 of state and local corrections dollars went to jails this year. 1/17 of all county dollars are spent on jails. And state budget deficits are expected to reach up to $680 billion by 2022.
The problem is clear: too many human lives are being held captive systemically at a cost their counties can't afford to keep up with. The dollar-wise solution lies in providing low-income citizens options that exist outside of: a) go broke or b) go to jail. Luckily those solutions do already exist, they just require an allocation of effort to properly implement them.
Some court counties have been able to reduce their jail capacities by increasing the efficiency with which their judges review cases. In many cases, assigning an arrested individual to parole under supervision is a win-win; the arrested individual, if determined not to be a threat to society upon examining their prior conviction history, can maintain employment / care for their family / live their lives, while the court county (and thus the taxpayer) is spared the expense of holding that individual captive in pretrial detention for as many working hours as are required to process their case in the order it is received.
Counties looking to reduce their budgetary deficits and increase their revenues really have an opportunity to do this once they start examining their workflow efficiency. A lot of county clerks are still relying on paper-based filing systems to organize and manage their caseloads, which is the exact pressure point at which the flow of human life through the justice system gets bottlenecked. In a paperless, cloud-based world where working remotely and managing data electronically is the norm, paper-based case management creates a backlog problem that can be avoided with a digital upgrade.
Cities like Cleveland, Ohio – which has a population of more than 385,000 people and processes about 508 parole suitability assessments per month – have successfully made a leap into the digital age; after Cleveland's court system successfully implemented an integrated case management and risk assessment system, their 'Failure to Appear' numbers dropped from 42% to 19% in 2019, and 6% in 2020. With all the process redundancy they were able to eliminate by managing and processing all their case data electronically, court staff were freed up to process more cases with fewer life-altering delays.
What drove Ohio's second largest city to find tangible systemic progress was ultimately a true desire and concerted effort to seek alternative pathways besides pretrial detention. To get started, all they needed was a commitment of time and resources to scan in the hordes of paper holding them back from serving their communities more responsibly and efficiently.