Interest-group report on Kentucky and Tennessee jail costs show how and why rural jails are getting more crowded

The Grayson County Detention Center in Leitchfield, Ky., has added another wing with 200 beds for women since this picture was taken. It houses many state prisoners and federal detainees, to the benefit of the rural county's budget.

A new report from the Vera Institute of Justice examines state spending on local jails across the rural-urban spectrum in Kentucky and Tennessee in 2019. It's a topic worth examining, the report says, because millions of people are booked into local jails for crimes related to poverty, mental illness, and substance use. Most people in jail haven't been convicted, and are incarcerated because they can't afford to pay bail. Putting a community's most vulnerable in jail instead of treating them is "a harmful practice that diverts scarce resources away from the community," says the Institute, which generally opposes cash bail. 

Jails are also increasingly holding state-sentenced prisoners and detainees ofederal authorities such as the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the U.S. Marshals Service, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the report says. Jails are typically paid a daily rate for people they house for such authorities, which effectively creates a market for jail beds and ties county revenue to continued incarceration.

"While jail populations have been declining in the nation’s major cities over the past decade, they have continued to rise in small and rural counties," the report says. "And although many communities saw substantial declines in jail populations following the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, many jails began to refill in the second half of 2020. By the end of that year, three out of five people incarcerated in local jails were in smaller cities and rural communities." Read more here.

The report shows how jail spending varies across counties in both states and how reducing the locally held jail population could reduce government spending.