The Inequality of Prison

 The US uses jails as a “warehouse for people who have problems in our society,” says John Raphling, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch (HRW).

Incarceration has become the “response to so many societal problems, like homelessness, mental illness, drug abuse and poverty,” he explains.

With more than 2 million people locked up in jails and prisons and more than 4.4 million under parole or probation supervision, the US has the highest known prison population and the highest per-capita incarceration rate in the world. 

Mass incarceration in the US costs state and federal governments $182bn.

The number of women in US jails has grown at a faster rate than any other correctional population, increasing by more than 700 percent between 1980 and 2019. About 80 percent of women in jails are mothers – and are primarily single parents and the sole caretakers for their children. Black and Hispanic women are imprisoned at far higher rates than white women. 

About 15 to 20 percent of children entering the foster care system have incarcerated parents. One out of every 12 American children – more than 5.7 million children under the age of 18 – has experienced parental incarceration at some point in their lives. Meanwhile, one in nine Black children has an imprisoned parent. In a 2016 study of pretrial defendants, 56 percent of the detained defendants were parents. More than 40 percent of those in the study said pretrial detention would change or had already changed, the living situation for a child in their custody.

Parental incarceration, including short-term jail, results in “extreme trauma” for children, ranging from depression and anxiety to aggression and delinquency. Children with an imprisoned parent also face more challenges in school and are more likely to be expelled or suspended. Children who experience parental incarceration and those who are placed in foster care also have a disproportionate risk of ending up incarcerated themselves.

If a defendant is unable to pay the bond, whether personally or through a commercial bail bondsman, she can be imprisoned until her case is resolved or dismissed – essentially leading to an explosion of “legally innocent” people being held due solely to their disadvantaged economic status, according to rights groups.

Black and Hispanic defendants are much more likely to be held pretrial than their white counterparts; they also receive bail amounts that are twice as high as bail set for white defendants – despite being less likely to be able to afford it.

In 2015 dollars, people in jail had a median annual income of $15,109 prior to their incarceration, which is less than half of the median for non-incarcerated people of similar ages. People in jail are poorer than those in prison and are dramatically poorer than their non-incarcerated counterparts.

America’s bail system is “the point in which wealth and race matter the most,” says Tiffany Roberts, an Atlanta-based civil rights and criminal defence lawyer who works for the Southern Center for Human Rights (SCHR). “You can look at wealth and race and guess what is most likely going to happen to a person when they’ve been arrested and whether they will be detained pretrial.”

An estimated 32 percent of women in jails suffer from a serious mental illness – major depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia, among other conditions – a rate more than double that of jailed men and more than six times that of women in the general public, according to the Vera Institute of Justice. Women in jails also report high rates of childhood sexual abuse, sexual assault, intimate partner violence and PTSD. Prolonged solitary confinement of people who experience psychiatric disabilities creates a substantial risk of serious psychological harm. That harm can result in dramatic worsening of symptoms, decompensation, psychosis, self-injury, and suicide.

“The criminal justice system is a destabilising force,” says Mary Hooks, former co-director of Southerners On New Ground (SONG), an Atlanta-based LGBTQ advocacy group. “It dictates the ways in which families operate and the ways in which they now have to engage with the state. And on top of that, there’s emotional trauma experienced by young people and children who are separated from their families and having to bear witness to someone you love being arrested and taken away.”

About 97 percent of felony convictions at the federal level and 94 percent at the state level are obtained through a plea bargain – when a defendant pleads guilty in exchange for a more lenient sentence, according to the Marshall Project. Plea deals often result in shorter prison sentences, and research shows there are significant racial disparities in plea bargains offered to white and Black defendants.

“Pretrial detention contributes to things like forced confessions, false confessions, unfair plea bargains, or even just taking pleas just to get out and not fully appreciating what that felony charge means for you in the future,” explains SCHR’s Roberts. “But that’s not what’s on the forefront of people’s minds,” she adds. “They’re thinking about getting back to their families and their jobs and getting out of cages where they’re fed rancid food and are held in horrible conditions.”

‘Treated worse than animals’: Black women in pretrial detention | Black Lives Matter | Al Jazeera