Photo via Flickr user my_southborough
Inside the historic Woolworth Building in downtown Manhattan, a dozen floors up from its impressive All Gold Everything No Tourists Allowed lobby, Chris Henrichson speedily directs his mouse across a map of the United States, hovering his cursor above various counties. When he does, an info box pops out, which helpfully tells you the name of the county you're looking at. Beneath that is a percentage, often preceded by a plus sign, and the option to "Click for details."
We're in a conference room in the Vera Institute of Justice, where Henrichson serves as director of the Cost-Benefit Analysis Unit. He's also the lead and author on its latest project, In Our Own Backyard: Confronting Growth and Disparities in American Jails, a comprehensive, immersive, and interactive undertaking that shows in eye-opening clarity just how massive the American jail system—a separate beast from the prison system—has become. But the report doesn't just show that jail populations have grown, but also pinpoints exactly where.
Made public Tuesday, the report on Incarceration Trends took Henrichson and a sizable team at Vera, whose stated mission is "to make justice systems fairer and more effective through research and innovation," six months and thousands of man hours to complete. In that time, they analyzed all 3,000 US counties and the jails within their borders using info from every Census of Jails from the Bureau of Justice Statistics taken since the 1970s. Vera's resulting report represents 14 million pieces of data, and in the sprawl a few very red flags emerge, some of them surprising, others starkly depressing.
These days, more people are booked into jails and their stays are longer. What were nine-day average waits behind bars in 1978 now average three weeks. And while it's often the large jails that grab the most attention from media and policymakers, the report shows it's mid-sized and small counties where jail populations have exploded over the past 45 years, increasing 4.1 times in mid-sized counties and 6.9 times in small ones. Large counties also saw growth, but it was comparatively small: by a factor of 2.8. On any given day in 2014, those large counties saw an average of 271 inmates reside in jails per 100,000 people between the ages of 15 and 64. In small counties, that number was 446. Out of the just over 11 million inmates cycled through the American jail system in 2014, nearly five and a half million were incarcerated in small counties, compared to just over two million in large county jails.
Numbers like that begin to make more sense when you begin clicking on various small counties on the interactive map and see that places like, Jefferson County Colorado, experienced 614 percent growth since 1970. Or that another relatively obscure spot Stearns County, Minnesota saw a 5368 percent increase over the same time.
Other takeaways: In mid-sized and small communities, African Americans have the highest incarceration rates, and they make up nearly 40 percent of America's jail population despite comprising just 13 percent of the general population. The report also shows that female incarceration rates have blown through the roof, particularly in America's smallest counties. "Since 1970, there has been more than a fourteen-fold increase the number of women held in jail," the report states. "From fewer than 8,000 women in 1970 to 110,000 women in jails in 2014."
The number of women in jail has grown 14x since 1970, compared to 4x for men:
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