Chapter 4 Jail and Prison Administration
| Jurisdiction | United States |
The decision to place individuals under correctional supervision and limit their movement and freedom is never taken lightly. It is an even weightier decision to confine individuals to correctional institutions, where they are stripped of most of their liberties. While the majority of the correctional population serves a sentence in the community (as discussed in the previous chapter), confinement in jails and prisons remains the most visible form of punishment. Confinement serves the penological goal of incapacitation, and of removing and separating individuals from the community. To understand this form of punishment, it is essential to first examine the structure and administration of jails and prisons. This will help us to, in turn, examine the judicial discourse around these institutions. We begin our discussion by looking at jails.
A jail is a facility that is authorized to hold pretrial detainees and sentenced misdemeanants for periods longer than 48 hours. Initially, jails were designed to detain suspected offenders before trial and for short periods of time before their sentences were decided. Perhaps because they occupy this unique short-term position in the overall criminal justice procedure, jails have not traditionally been considered places of punishment and their relationship to the entire criminal justice system has largely been neglected by criminological and penological research and discourse. Today, however, many jails are places of both detention and punishment, as they often hold convicted offenders who are sentenced for up to a year of incarceration. Some facilities hold offenders for even longer periods. This is a primarily a result of prison overcrowding, as many offenders with longer sentences must wait for space to open before they can be transferred. In fact, Ingraham (2015:1) notes that the United States operates more jails than degree-granting institutions (i.e., colleges and universities) and that "at any given time, hundreds of thousands [of] individuals are locked up in the nation's 3,200 local and county jails." Similarly, Lerman (2013) shows that the growth in spending on state corrections has outpaced increases in states' expenditures for educational programs and Medicaid. A report by Minton and Zeng (2015) estimates the number of inmates confined to county and city jails at about 750,000 at mid-year 2014. However, the actual impact of jails on individuals and communities is much larger. Each year, millions of people revolve in and out of local jails after staying there for short periods of time. In fact, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, from June 2013 to June 2014, local jails admitted about 11.4 million people. With numbers like these, jails affect the lives of more people than any other correctional or penal institution. The astronomical number of people who pass through these facilities places an enormous challenge on jail administrators and staff, who are required to manage an extremely diverse body of individuals: pretrial detainees who cannot afford bail to people accused of felonies as well as misdemeanors, mentally ill offenders, offenders who are chronically ill, and even extremely violent and dangerous offenders (Kosiak, 2011). This diverse population and the transient nature of jails—they tend to have more admissions and discharges than any other correctional facility— make for very complex and often punitive environments.
The highly diverse population in jails is echoed in highly diverse management styles, physical conditions, and rated capacity. Rated capacity refers to the number of beds placed or built inside a jail when it was first designed and constructed, but that number can change as a result of renovations or additions (Cornelius, 2008). Jails also differ in their operational capacity, which refers to the number of people that can be housed safely and with continued smooth day-to-day operations. Some facilities, such as Rikers Island in New York City and Chicago's Cook County jail, are outliers in terms of their size and capacity. These are large jail complexes. On the other hand, there are much smaller jails across the country, some of which have a capacity of no more than two dozen to three dozen beds. It is within this context of physical conditions, capacity, and architectural style that many jails across the country are characterized as overcrowded, dangerous, unhealthy, and inhumane. It is also within this context, in 1979, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Bell v. Wolfish that inmates confined to jails who are not yet convicted and are in a pretrial state cannot be punished. We discuss this case in more detail throughout the chapters of this book; however, at this point, it is important to understand that this ruling was an important turning point in judicial intervention in jail practices, and in particular those pertaining to pretrial detainees. In that regard, the Bell v. Wolfish case was a clear warning to local jails to revise their policies and clean up substandard practices.
Diverse populations, varied structure, and high turnover all pose significant challenges for jail staff and administrators attempting to identify and responding to the various needs of jailed individuals, particularly those who suffer from mental illness. According to Fearn (2011), the transient nature of jail populations impedes the ability of jail staff and administrators to address the needs of mentally ill offenders, who are being pushed to the bottom of the to-do list, after more pressing concerns of safety and security. This is a considerable problem, because almost two-thirds of the nation's jail population has been identified as suffering from some form of mental illness. When compared with state or federal prison inmates, jail inmates tend to have markedly higher rates of mental illness or mental disorder symptoms, a fact that makes the management of jails very difficult and places its administrators in a higher risk of being litigated.
Overcrowding and deplorable confinement conditions have also inspired very aggressive judicial intervention. In the early 1980s, for example, a federal court took over the supervision of the Davidson County jail in Tennessee due to the unconstitutional conditions that resulted from overcrowding (Cornelius, 2008). One of the main contributors to jail overcrowding is prison overcrowding: many convicted offenders sentenced to state and federal facilities continue to be held in local jails, waiting for space to become available. Jails, however, have no other alternative for dealing with their own overcrowded facilities. While state and federal prisons can, and do, transfer inmates from one facility to another, jail administrators do not have the same privilege and the only way overcrowding can be alleviated is through the granting of bail, speedy trials, and judges' decisions to intervene. Overcrowding is particularly serious in large urban jails, such as the Cook County jail in Chicago, the Los Angeles County jail, and the jail on Rikers Island in New York City.
While jail overcrowding tends to be one of the main concerns in jail administration, their diverse population presents further challenges. Jails are not just diverse in the populations they hold, but also in their structure, administration, characteristics, and programs. Some jails offer an impressive array of programs, while others offer none. Inadequate programming—and the idleness and violence that can come from a lack of services—has also served as a catalyst for litigation.
The Political Context for Jail Administration
As a social institution, jails have failed to adapt to the enormous social changes that have shaped our society. Until recently, even officials most closely related to jails have had little or no interest in problems associated with jails, much less evolving or reforming them. American jails remain, in most instances, a local responsibility that is administered by local political authority, which reflects local prejudices that tend to be corrupt (Moynahan & Stewart, 1980). A majority of the jails in the United States are the responsibility of the sheriff, an...
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