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. 

Ballot measure roundup: Coloradans approve restoration of gray wolves, paid family and medical leave

Colorado voters approved the restoration of gray wolves and mandated paid family and medical leave Tuesday, the first time any state has done such things in a referendum, on Tuesday.

Those were just two of 184 statewide ballot measures, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Here are a few others, courtesy of NCSL:

• Arizona, Montana, New Jersey and South Dakota approved efforts to legalize recreational marijuana, while voters in South Dakota and Mississippi approved medical marijuana programs.
• Oregonians decriminalized small amounts of certain controlled substances, such as heroin and cocaine, and the Beaver State also legalized psilocybin—become the first state ever to do so. The drug comes from mushrooms and is used in rituals by some Native American tribes.
• Ranked-choice voting, which was adopted in Maine recently, failed in Massachusetts and looks likely to fail in Alaska.
• Virginia voters adopted a redistricting commission, and that change means most states will now have a commission of some kind, though some are merely advisory, or only come into being if the legislature fails to pass maps.
• Voters approved taxes on tobacco and electronic-cigarette products in Colorado and Oregon. Washington will require public schools to provide comprehensive sex education beginning in 2022. 
• California voters rejected stricter parole and sentencing policies and stopped the legislature’s efforts to replace cash bail with pretrial risk assessments.
• Kentucky passed Marsy’s law, the crime victims’ bill of rights.
• Florida voters raised the minimum wage.
• An effort to overturn California’s affirmative action ban failed.
• Two “Stand Your Ground” Rights measures pass in Alabama.
• Mississippians approved the state’s new magnolia flag design, which was put before voters after the legislature decided to replace the previous flag feature the confederate battle emblem.

Updates are at NCSL’s State Elections 2020 webpage and statewide ballot measures database.

Investigative journalists uncover public officials' racist or racially unbalanced actions in Alabama and Virginia

Two stories from the South illustrate the power of investigative local journalism to uncover questionable actions by public officials.

In Alabama, a Talladega police dog sent at least nine people to the hospital in a year spanning the summer of 2014 to 2015. A veteran police sergeant testified under oath that the police specifically wanted a dog that would attack Black residents, Challen Stephens reports for AL.com, in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system.

Brad Zinn of the Staunton News Leader in Virginia contrasted how two magistrates treated two defendants: a young Black man reportedly armed with a skateboard, and a middle-aged white man allegedly armed with two rifles and a handgun. Neither had a prior criminal record, 

Devin Turner, 22, was arrested after throwing his skateboard at a passing car. At his arraignment, one of the Augusta County magistrates ordered him held without bond at a nearby jail. He was eventually granted a $5,000 bond and released after spending the weekend in jail, Zinn reports.

Douglas Truslow, 57, aimed laser-sighted firearms at neighbors, including an elderly woman and a 5-year-old, and threatened to start shooting them. The sheriff's office and Charlottesville police responded. During the eight-hour standoff that followed, Truslow allegedly threatened to kill several officers. A different local magistrate gave him a $1,000 unsecured bond and he was immediately released. Truslow is the lone caregiver for his spouse, according to court records, Zinn reports.

When the News Leader asked the magistrate's office why the two suspects were treated so differently, Chief Magistrate Robyn Wilhelm said the magistrates stick to a rigid script when making bond decisions, and said neither the police nor the commonwealth attorney's office spoke up with concerns about either Truslow or Turner's bonds. Zinn reports.

Wilhelm said she couldn't comment on ongoing cases but told Zinn: "We're dealing with humans, so oftentimes there could be imperfections ... Certain judges will find people guilty of one thing but another judge ... could find someone innocent."

States keep prisoners in county jails to prevent covid-19 outbreaks in prisons, which causes problems in localities

Some states have slowed or halted the transfer of people from county jails to state prisons in an effort to prevent spread of the coronavirus in prisons. Not only has that resulted in overcrowding in county jails, which can make the virus spread faster among detainees, but it stretches the resources of the jails, Alex Sakariassen reports for Kaiser Health News.

Montana is one state that implemented such a policy for a time. It has the second-lowest prison infection rate in the nation. Colorado, California, Texas, and New Jersey also suspended inmate intakes from county jails this spring, Sakariassen reports, "But it’s also shifted the problem. Space was already a rare commodity in these local jails, and some sheriffs see the halting of transfers as giving the prisons room to improve the health and safety of their inmates at the expense of those in jail, who often haven’t been convicted."

Sakariassen adds, "Unlike convicted offenders in state prisons, most jail inmates are only accused of a crime. They include a disproportionately high number of poor people who cannot afford to post bail to secure their release before trial or the resolution of their cases. If they do post bail or are released after spending time in a jail with a covid outbreak, they risk bringing the disease home with them."

Fact-checking President Trump's RNC acceptance speech

CNN did not mince words in its fact-check of President Trump's speech yesterday at the Republican National Convention.

"President Donald Trump is a serial liar and he serially lied during his speech accepting the Republican nomination," Daniel Dale and others report. "CNN counted more than 20 false, exaggerated or misleading claims from Trump on Thursday night. That's in addition to a number of falsehoods from other speakers. Trump's dishonesty touched on a range of topics, from the economy to his administration's performance during the coronavirus pandemic. Some of Trump's most egregious false claims were directed at Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden."

Here's some of what CNN's fact-checkers caught:

• Trump suggested Biden wants to remove the border wall, but Biden has specifically said he will not, and will only stop further construction.
• Trump said Biden's immigration plan calls for open borders. It does not.
• Trump said 300 miles of border wall has been built during his administration, but that's not 300 miles of wall where no barriers existed before. About 275 miles of barriers have been built along the U.S.-Mexico border during the Trump administration, but only five miles of barriers were erected in areas where none had existed.
• Trump claimed he had "very good information" that China wants his foe to win because Biden would help its agenda more. CNN acknowledges that it doesn't know what information Trump may have, but a recent intelligence assessment reported that China wanted Trump to lose because he was "unpredictable," and because of the trade war.
• Biden opposes school choice and wants to close all charter schools, Trump claimed. The claim about charter schools is an exaggeration; the Democratic platform only recommends barring for-profit charters from receiving federal funding. The claim about school choice is debatable, since the phrase is so nebulous. Biden and his school task force oppose vouchers for private schools, but he supports some alternatives to standard public schools.
• Trump claimed he has done more for Black Americans than any other president since Abraham Lincoln. At the very least, President Lyndon Johnson's advocacy and signing of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act dwarfed anything Trump has done, CNN says.
• Trump said he "took on Big Pharma" and signed orders that "will massively lower" the cost of prescription drugs. It's unclear whether executive orders Trump signed in July will ever take effect or lower drug prices. Also, prices have continued to rise throughout the Trump administration, though the growth rate has slowed by some measures.
• Trump pledged that he and the Republican Party will "always, and very strongly, protect patients with pre-existing conditions." However, his administration is actively trying to dismantle the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which does offer such protections, without providing an alternative plan.
• Trump made a number of misleading or exaggerated claims about his administration's record on the coronavirus pandemic.

The Washington Post's fact-checkers also weighed in:

• A Biden-appointed task force calls for abolishing cash bail, "immediately releasing 400,000 criminals onto the streets and into your neighborhoods," Trump said. Biden's task force said that "poverty is not a crime" and that Democrats want to eliminate cash bail because no one should be imprisoned for failing to pay fines or fees. However, in states that have moved to abolish cash bail, pre-trial defendants haven't been released—including in New Jersey, where Republican Chris Christie, a Trump ally, led a coalition to abolish cash bail. 
• Biden would abolish American production of coal, shale oil and natural gas, which would devastate economies of states that rely on those industries, Trump claimed. Biden's energy plan doesn't call for the end of fossil-fuel production. It does call for the U.S. to expand low- and zero-carbon technologies and offset fossil fuel emissions by other means. Biden has said he will allow hydraulic-fracturing operations to continue but wouldn't grant new permits on federal lands.
• Trump claimed he passed "Veterans Choice," a program in which veterans can get VA-funded health care from private providers. That's misleading; Obama signed Veterans Choice into law in 2014, Trump merely updated it in 2019. 

Rural places keep building jails as moneymakers, but report from advocate of bail reform says they may not pay off

The Grayson County Detention Center in Leitchfield, Ky., houses many federal prisoners and is expanding.

While the overall incarcerated population in the U.S. has fallen over the past decade, jail and prison capacity has increased, especially in rural areas that increasingly rely on jails for revenue, according to a new report from the Vera Institute for Justice, "Broken Ground: Why America Keeps Building More Jails and What It Can Do Instead." (For simplicity's sake, it refers to prisons as "jails.")

Nationwide, jail capacity grew by 86,400 beds—over 11 percent—between 2005 and 2013, mostly in smaller cities and rural areas. "To justify this growth, incarceration is still often framed as a solution, rather than a problem, positioning jail expansion as a pragmatic answer to growing jail populations," the report says, but it says more jail and prison capacity almost ensures increased incarceration rates.

"There are several reasons why rural counties have steadily built out their jails over the past decade, but one of the biggest ones is the potential to turn the facility into a money generator," Emma Coleman reports for Route Fifty. "By building a new jail, or adding an expansion on to an existing one, counties are able to rent the extra space out to other counties, or to the state and federal government, when their facilities experience overcrowding." In recent years, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has become a big customer, the report says.

"Usually a county could get paid $50 to $100 per day for housing people from outside their jurisdiction," report co-author Chris Mai told Coleman. "It makes people think a larger jail is a sound financial decision."

However, the report shows that pursuing jail expansion could be a long-term risk. Though jail populations have always increased eventually, "growing bipartisan support for policies like the elimination of cash bail, the decriminalization of marijuana, and diversion programs, coupled with falling crime rates, could change that calculus," Coleman reports. "Instead, new jails right now are being built for a shrinking market—and county taxpayers are on the hook for larger, more expensive facilities that may very well sit empty." The Vera Institute favors bail reform.

Democratic debate recap: Buttegieg wades into corn-vs.-oil feud, Warren wants public service jobs for federal lands

Last night 10 presidential hopefuls took the stage in Atlanta for a debate hosted by The Washington Post and MSNBC. Here are a few rural themes the candidates discussed:

• Mayor Pete Buttegieg of South Bend, Indiana, criticized the trade war with China, saying "We shouldn't have to pay farmers to take the edge off of a trade war that shouldn't have been started in the first place." Farmers' bailout money is insufficient, he said, adding that hardship waivers for oil refiners are hurting the ethanol industry. He spoke in favor of breaking up large agribusiness monopolies, and said farming should be a key way of fighting climate change.
• Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii promised to end the cash bail system and enact prison and sentencing reforms.
• Former Vice President Joe Biden questioned competitor Tom Steyer's bona fides as an environmentalist and criticized his past involvement with the coal industry.
• Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts advocated increased public-service opportunities: "I want to bring in 10,000 people who want to be able to serve in our federal lands to be able to help rebuild our national forests and national parks as a way to express both their public service and their commitment to fighting back against climate change."
• Warren also criticized the federal government for not building more affordable housing. She has a plan for 3.2 million new affordable housing units, she said.

Read the complete transcript here.

Bail-bond firms fight efforts to abolish or reform cash bail

More than 25 states have passed laws or enacted changes to reform the practice of bail bonding, but a CNN review of all 50 states and Washington, D.C., "found that the powerful industry has derailed, stalled or killed reform efforts in at least nine states, which combined cover more than one third of the country's population," Collette Richards and Drew Griffin report.

The issue disproportionately affects the poor, who often can't make bail and must pay bond companies (typically 10 percent of the bail) to get out of jail. Those who can't bond out are stuck in jail, contributing to the overcrowding that's especially pronounced in rural and county jails. The numbers of people awaiting trial far outnumber people serving sentences, CNN reports.

"Reform efforts across the country seek to make the bail system less burdensome on the poor. The majority of states addressing the issue are trying to make money bail the last resort, by mandating that judges apply the 'least onerous release conditions possible' and consider the defendant's ability to pay, as well as eliminating money bail for low-level charges," Richards and Griffin report. "As a result, the $2-billion-a-year bail bonds industry is in a fight for its very survival."

Lawmakers have described the bail industry's involvement in even modest reform efforts as "nasty and contentious," CNN reports. However, Jeff Clayton, the executive director of the American Bail Coalition, said the whole process is fraught and that the bond industry has been unfairly called predatory. He told CNN that people have the right to use bail-bond services, and said that while the ABC has participated in discussions about bail policy reform and has had a significant impact he doesn't believe they were the "driving force" behind any bill's success or failure.

The bail bond industry sometimes continues the fight even after a reform passes. "Last year, California lawmakers passed the most far-reaching legislation yet—ending cash bail altogether," Richards and Griffin report. "But shortly after the passage of that law, the bail bond industry, and the insurance companies that underwrite their bonds, raised more than $3 million to fund a ballot referendum that put everything on hold. The effort was successful, and voters will decide the issue on the November 2020 ballot."

Most politicians pursue bail bond reform because of the consequences the practice has on the poor and on their communities. Those who can't afford to make bail often lose their job, which can jeopardize housing and food for their families, CNN reports. Though it can take years to assess the effects of reforms, bail bond overhauls have been shown to reduce recidivism rates and ensure that people show up for their court dates, according to studies of several counties.

Apply for justice reporting fellowships by Friday, July 19

The Center on Media, Crime and Justice at the City University of New York's John Jay College is accepting applications for a second round of paid fellowships to learn more about the impact of bail and poverty on incarceration rates. The deadline to apply is Friday, July 19.

The Crime Report, published by the center, explains: "Few Americans are aware that prisons and jails confine thousands of people whose main offense is that they are too poor. Confronted with an accumulation of fees and fines associated with both felony and non-felony convictions as well as unpaid tickets and other civil penalties, they wind up behind bars in what amounts to a 21st century version of debtors’ prisons."

The fellowship will cover travel, hotel and related expenses for attending workshops in New York City Sept. 26-27. Fifteen to 20  U.S.-based reporters will be selected, based on project pitches related to the theme of "cash register justice." Click here for more information or to apply.

California legislature is on the verge of virtually eliminating money bail, an increasing problem in much of rural U.S.

Both houses of the California State Legislature have voted to "virtually eliminate the payment of money as a condition for release from jail," Jazmine Ulloa and Maya Lau report for the Los Angeles Times. Senate Bill 10 passed the Assembly 41-27 and returns to the Senate for approval of amendments, including one "that gave judges greater power to decide who should remain incarcerated ahead of trial."

The virtual end of money bail in the nation's largest state would be likely to spur similar efforts across the country, drive partly by overcrowding in jails, especially in rural areas.

Most inmates can't afford their bail bonds, raising questions about how bonds are set, the policies and lobbying of the commercial bail-bond industry, and the decisions of prosecutors and judges, which may be harsher on the accused in rural areas, Cherise Fanno Burdeen, CEO of the nonprofit Pretrial Justice Institute, said at a conference for journalists on rural jails last month.

Research shows that money bonds have no discernible impact in terms of improving outcomes and public safety, Burdeen said: “Money bonds only detain people who are too poor to post that bond, and they let bad guys who can afford to post bond get out without being assessed or having conditions that would improve public safety.”

Some inmates stay in jail because they can't afford even “incredibly small bail amounts,” said G. Larry Mays, Regents Professor Emeritus of Criminal Justice at New Mexico State University and author of Trouble in the Heartland: Challenges Confronting Rural Jails.

The California bill, much like one Indiana passed two years ago, would require counties to create pretrial services agencies that would use a risk-assessment tool analysis, "to evaluate people booked into jail to determine whether, and under what conditions, they should be released," the Times reports.

Because of the Assembly amendments giving judges more discretion, some "criminal justice reform groups have rescinded their support and are actively working to kill the legislation — landing on the same side as a bail industry that has worked to sink the bill from the beginning," the Times reports. "The American Civil Liberties Union became the latest major supporter to move its stance from neutral to opposed on Monday. Three of its executive directors said the new bill fell short of its intended goals and would compromise the right to fair court proceedings for criminal defendants."