Can Mass Incarceration Be Ended Where it Begins? Establishing the Relationship between Pretrial Detention and Prison Commitments

• In Event: The Big House Next Door: Exploring the Overuse of Pretrial Detention in Jails

Abstract

During the past ten years, efforts to reduce the size of America’s prisons have focused on state legislative reforms. But as Tonry (2014) explains, legislatures “have made only modest changes.” Furthermore, even when legislatures do act boldly, it’s never a foregone conclusion that sentencing reform will translate into smaller prisons because the implementation of these laws are in the hands of local-level criminal justice officials that have discretion with respect to whom they arrest and prosecute and the criminal charges they pursue. Consequently, the federal government and national foundations are reorienting their focus to local justice-systems. If jails are in fact the “front door” to mass incarceration (Subramanian, et al 2015), it follows that abating the use of pretrial detention will reduce inmate populations in state prisons.



This paper draws upon 45 years of nationwide county-level jail data and county of commitment-level data on state prisoners to examine how the use of the county jail is related to the number of commitments to prison. Longstanding research on the deleterious effects of pretrial detention on sentencing outcomes, along with the likelihood that pretrial detention proxies for punitiveness, suggests a consistent and positive relationship between pretrial detention and prison commitments.

Author

• Christian Henrichson, Vera Institute of Justice