"But What Will Become of the Innocent?"

• In Event: 4155 - Section on Crime, Law, and Deviance Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 9. Monetary Sanctions, Pre-Trial Detention, and Misdemeanor Courts

Abstract

While a sizeable body of research has documented the expansion of carceral population, this literature has focused almost exclusively on prisons and felons, virtually ignoring jails and pretrial detainees. Most research on mass incarceration has focused on prison growth, with particular attention to the policies and practices that have put more people in prison and kept them there for longer (Mauer 1999; Alexander 2012; Travis, Western, and Redburn 2014). The complementary body of collateral consequences research that has documented the implications of incarceration has followed this trend, focusing—implicitly and explicitly—on the collateral consequences of prison expansion and incarceration (Mauer and Chesney-Lind 2002; Patillo, Weinman, and Western 2004; Hagan and Dinovitzer 1999).
Less research has focused on another form of carceral growth that has occurred simultaneously: the growth in the number and proportion of individuals being detained pretrial because they cannot afford bail. Moreover, most work on pretrial detention has focused on measuring the impact of pretrial detention on defendants’ case outcomes(Schlesinger 2007; Lowenkamp, VanNostrand, and Holsinger 2013; Oleson et al 2014), largely overlooking a critical fact about pretrial detention: many of the individuals who are detained are never convicted of a crime.
As part of a larger project that examines the lives, experiences, and outcomes of individuals who are detained pretrial, this paper focuses on individuals who are detained pretrial only to be released following an acquittal or dismissal of charges. This paper underscores the ways in which pretrial detention both mirrors patterns in mass incarceration and complicates assumptions about those patterns. Moreover, because this paper explores the experiences and implications of pretrial detention for individuals who ultimately are not convicted of the charges for which they were detained, this research offers a unique opportunity to consider the disjuncture between sociological conceptions of punishment and legal definitions thereof.

Author

• Mikaela Rabinowitz, Measures for Justice