Who’s really inside America’s jails? (audio)

According to a 2020 report by the Prison Policy Initiative, 74% of people in American jails have not been convicted of a crime. Sometimes this is because they’re considered a flight risk or danger to society, but the majority of individuals in jail are there because they can’t afford bail. And while inside, they’re often given a choice: plead guilty and get released, or stay in jail until a trial is scheduled, and hope they’re proven innocent.

Most people take the plea bargain.

The idea that individuals are innocent until proven guilty is supposed to be at the heart of our criminal justice system. But in reality, it’s not, says Alexandra Natapoff, a professor of law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. “We are letting the pressures of the criminal system decide who will sustain a conviction,” she says. “So we are already committed, in some terrible sense, to punishing the innocent.” 

In Episode 1 of “Perception Gaps: Locked up,” our reporters explore the history of mass incarceration and the long-reaching effects it has on communities.  

Note: This is Episode 1 of Season 2. To listen to the other episodes and sign up for the newsletter, please visit the season landing page. 

This audio story was designed to be heard. We strongly encourage you to experience it with your ears, but we understand that is not an option for everybody. You can find the audio player above. For those who are unable to listen, we have provided a transcript of the story below.

AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

[Interview montage]

News Channel 11 WJHL: Both officers and inmates are at their boiling point in a jail that’s simply busting at the seams.PBS: ... in a country that incarcerates more people than anywhere else on earth… CBS News: Experts warn that those who work and live inside U.S. jails and prisons are especially vulnerable to the coronavirus outbreak...Senator Tom Cotton via NBC News: As for the claim we should have more empathy for criminals, I won’t even try to conceal my contempt for this idea.CBS Sunday Morning: It is physically impossible to do social distancing in a three-foot-wide tier...WISH TV: ...the jam-packed jail is causing safety concerns for the staff and the inmates…

Samantha Laine Perfas: If the American jail and prison population were a city, it’d be the 5th largest city in the country, with almost 2.3 million Americans locked up right now. But did you know that most people in jail have not yet been proven guilty. So what’s going on? 

This is Perception Gaps.

[Theme music]

I’m Samantha Laine Perfas and this is Perception Gaps: Locked Up by the Christian Science Monitor.

Welcome to Season 2 of Perception Gaps: Locked Up. In Season 1, we looked at 10 different topics in which public perception doesn’t line up with reality. Some of the topics we explored were crime, substance use, political polarization, and poverty. If you haven’t listened, go back and do so! You can find all the episodes at csmonitor.com/perceptiongaps.

For Season 2, we’re gonna try something a little different – we’ll spend the entire season exploring one issue: mass incarceration in America. 

We’ll be diving deep into the criminal justice system, and the misperceptions about history, politics, race, and the economy that contribute to our attitudes toward crime and the people within the system. We’ll explore how the coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated many of the issues we found in our early reporting. And in our final episode, we’ll look at potential solutions and where we’re seeing progress. 

In this episode, we’ll explore a lot of the high level misperceptions around mass incarceration as a whole and how the U.S. got to a place of locking up more people than any other country.

So back to our perception gap. . . many people don’t know that the vast majority of people locked up in American jails have not actually been convicted of

Alexandra Natapoff: I begin the book with a story about Gail Atwater, who is a mother of two who lived in Texas, and she was the defendant in a very famous Supreme Court case named after her. Atwater vs. Lago Vista. Alexandra: In that case, Gail Atwater was driving her children very slowly around the local park in their neighborhood because her son Mac had lost a toy in the park, and she let the children out of their seat belts to look out of the window of the car, hopefully to see where the toy had fallen. She was pulled over by a police officer who arrested her for driving without a seatbelt. She was arrested, put into handcuffs in front of her children. Her children were hysterical and crying, watching their mother be arrested. She was taken to jail. She was booked, fingerprinted, held in a cell. Alexandra: This is unfair. This is unreasonable. You shouldn’t be able to arrest people and put them in jail for crimes for which they could not be incarcerated even if they were found guilty. And the Supreme Court ruled against Gail Atwater. It’s an extraordinarily important case because as you can see, it opens the door to all kinds of incarceration.  Alexandra: The vast majority of our criminal system is devoted to misdemeanors like loitering, trespassing, DUI. Some dockets include assault or domestic violence, low level theft. And our jails are filled with people who are incarcerated because they are facing low level charges. They are detained pretrial and cannot afford bail. Sam: Does this have an impact on people who take plea bargains? How does that fit? Alexandra: So one of the great injustices of the bail system and the low level misdemeanor system is that it exerts pressure on individuals to plead guilty because it is so costly for them to remain incarcerated. They may lose their jobs. They may have children. They may be evicted. They may face all kinds of terrible consequences. So, in effect, putting this kind of pressure on individuals to plead guilty is like an end run around the criminal system itself. Sam: We’re a nation founded on this idea of innocent until proven guilty. Does that no longer exist in our criminal justice system? Alexandra: The presumption of innocence, the idea that we should only punish people who have been proven guilty, is a fundamental notion of fairness that I think many people believe drives our criminal system. And in many ways, that’s just not how our criminal system works. The role of innocence and the idea that people should not be punished until they have been proven guilty all too often falls by the wayside. We are not requiring proof of anything. We are letting the pressures of the criminal system decide who will sustain a conviction. So we are already committed in some terrible sense to punishing the innocent. Alexandra: So part of the challenge of our criminal system is that it’s opaque. The public doesn’t actually know a lot about how it actually works. And we have ideas about who’s in prison or who’s in jail that are derived as much from popular culture and television and assumptions as they are derived from reality.   Alexandra: 11 million people pass through American jails every year. That means over ten million people are experiencing incarceration every year. Sam: I think it really turns things on its head when you think about what is the purpose of prison in jails, because I think many people think it is to keep the public safe. But are the people we’re locking up really keeping the public safe? And how does that misperception of the connection between who we lock up and for how long and why actually relate to public safety? Alexandra: The majority of individuals in our prisons and jails suffer from substance abuse challenges. Very high percentages have mental health disabilities. So when we talk about who is in our prisons and jails, in many ways it’s a reflection not of terrible, dangerous people who are engaging in terrible, dangerous conduct, but people who have been failed by the social safety net, who have been failed by our health care system, who have been failed by our economic system. And we are using our prisons and jails to respond to those failures. I think one of the great mistakes that American democracy has made is to overrely on the criminal system to do all kinds of work that civic society could do in a far more positive and less destructive way.  Sam: What’s the ripple effect of locking people up who are not a danger to society?  Alexandra: When we lock someone up, we are not just burdening and punishing them. We are burdening and punishing their family, their children. We are burdening communities. We are stripping communities of their wage earners, of their potential wage earners, of their workers, of the people who could otherwise contribute. And because people do eventually, for the most part, come home, we are then burdening those same families, those same communities, when we send people home from prison and jail, having gone through that traumatic experience without the tools and support for reentry. We need to retire the idea that getting a misdemeanor conviction is petty, is no big deal. It can haunt people for a lifetime. Bruce Western: The United States 200 years ago was a pioneer in the area of social policy. Bruce: One insisted really on a type of solitary confinement for people who had been convicted of crimes and the other looked more like a workhouse. And the underlying idea between both of these penitentiary systems, that people who had come into conflict with the law, who had been convicted of crimes, shouldn’t be subject to corporal punishment. Instead, they would be institutionalized. They’d be incarcerated. So initially, these were progressive social reforms. And the United States was really a pioneer. Bruce: The idea that mass incarceration in America is historically new is really important. People who know about American criminal justice often think of the current situation as being with us forever. The very, very high incarceration rates really only emerged over the last couple of decades.Bruce: So criminal justice policy really went through a very, very radical transformation through the 80s and 90s. Through the 1960 of course, you had tremendous progress in the expansion of particularly African American citizenship through the civil rights movement. And liberal and progressive political forces all around the country were mobilizing on behalf of civil rights. [Historical audio insert, civil rights marching and protest sounds]And then by the time you get to the 1970s, a political backlash has started. There was an appetite for punishment among voters, or at least certain segments of voters. And this tough on crime language, which is often highly racialized, associating the problem of crime, particularly with African American men. This becomes part of the political conversation and it’s the political impetus that’s pushing penal policy in this very punitive direction.  Bruce: People often point to the crime bill as the origins of mass incarceration. I think its influence was smaller than that, but it was symbolically very important because it demonstrated that a consensus had emerged around very punitive crime policy in which a main response to the social problems of violence was incarceration. Sam: Were there misperceptions at the time around the types of crimes that were being committed and the types of people that might be impacted by this legislation?Bruce: I think it was well understood that this was going to have a huge effect on low income communities of color. I’m not sure there was a well-founded belief that this would solve the problem of crime in those communities. But there was certainly a belief that this was doing something. If you look at Black men born in the late 1970s, among those Black men, if they dropped out of high school, if they never finished high school, we estimate that 70 percent of them have been to prison. It’s happened at a time when crime rates are at their historically lowest level in 40 years. To me, it’s a really dramatic and tragic inequality. Bruce: There are about 60,000 people in the United States who are currently on so-called life without parole sentences. And so these are people that will never be released. In Western Europe, the number of people serving life without parole sentences, natural life sentences, they call them over there is about 50 people.  Sam: I also think that when people hear, this person is serving life without parole, they probably a lot of people think, well, then they must have done something that’s worthy of that sentence. But when you compare us to Western Europe, then obviously that is a very, very striking difference. And it seems hard to believe that that many more people would have acted in a way worthy of that sentence and so few people in another part of the world. Bruce: Yeah, I think you put your finger on it, right. You visit Western Europe, it’s not terribly different from the United States. America’s not sort of an utterly chaotic and violent place. So, what is different? I think there’s a connection between the emergence of mass incarceration and America’s centuries long history of racial injustice. The entire history of the African American community has been this political struggle over freedom and citizenship. And I think to be able to lock someone up for the rest of their lives, you have to dehumanize them. This long history of dehumanization, that’s the political context in which we adopt sentencing policies that send people away for the rest of their lives. Juleyka Lantigua-Williams: Today, 70 million Americans have a criminal record. Juleyka: Oh, it creates an incredible talent deficit for the country. And that talent deficit translates into real economic impact. So, for example, combined across all 50 states, there are something like 27,000 professional licenses for which someone with a criminal record can simply not apply for. It is an immediate deficit for the economy.Juleyka: In some extreme cases, they’re not even being allowed... Like, the New York City Housing Authority does not allow someone who is returning from after serving time, to live in public housing with their own family. That’s the law.  Juleyka: One of the episodes from Season 2 this year looked at the impact specifically on Black women of having a significant other or a parent or a sibling be sent to prison for a meaningful amount of time. And Black women categorically bear the greatest burden, because they have to become the sole providers for their immediate family and often a provider for the extended family. I grew up in the South Bronx in the 80s and 90s, and I am very much aware of what happens when overnight a big brother disappears. An uncle disappears, that gets sent away.  Sam: You had mentioned that storytelling and the narrative component of people’s stories is a really big part of 70 Million. How does that approach help address some of the biggest misperceptions around those who are convicted?  Juleyka: You know, I can spew numbers at you all day long, but if I tell you the story of a woman in Texas who lost her child because they would not give her medical attention when she went into labor...  [Audio excerpt from 70 Million, Shandra Williams: And Dr. Hayes took me, took my hand, and he shook it and he grabbed it real tight and he just hugged me. The sheriff’s department was already trying to put me in handcuffs. And the lady said, he’s gone. On October 30th. They called it stillborn.] Juleyka: ...that’s going to stay with you. Right. And if I tell you the story of another woman who was in jail with her, who was in prison with her, who interviewed her and wrote down notes... [Audio excerpt from 70 Million, Diane Wilson: I remember it was Christmas and, and I remember she came in real late at night. … The next day, her family came and picked her up, I remember that. But I did get her story.] Juleyka: ...and then 15 years later, we reunited them to show that the second woman had started a nonprofit organization to make sure that mothers in Texas were not chained to a bed during labor, and that they would receive proper medical attention...  [Audio excerpt from 70 Million, Diana Claitor: It was very easy to go into offices and say we have two bills. One is for medical care for pregnant women in jails. The other is to stop shackling them while they’re in labor and childbirth. And people would just freeze and say tell me you didn’t just say that.]   Juleyka: ...that’s a story that’s going to stay with you. Juleyka: I have seen how one person has created, you know, a chain reaction. And that’s really all it takes sometimes, just one person to say, “Enough. Something has to be done and I’m going to be the one to do it.” Brittany Williams: We were living in Glendale Heights - so that with roughly, maybe a 30 minute drive from the city of Chicago. And we just had, it was just amazing being out there. It was amazing. You know, I love the values that I grew up with, and I knew that I could have the same with my boys. Tim Williams: It was actually a good day. I had just left from... me and my wife was having lunch. It was our anniversary. So I had just had lunch with my wife. I was going to the store and we were going to meet back up. But I was pulled over by police.Tim: I’m not quite sure how did she decide what my bond was.I wasn’t sure why I had a bond like that, but I knew I couldn’t pay that bond. Brittany: I googled every day … sorry [starts crying]... for 10 days straight to find something. And I came across their number on Google, and I called and I remember leaving a voicemail. And I can’t remember his name, but he called me back in two or three days. Brittany: It was very difficult. I did a lot of praying and just keeping my mind focused on, he’ll be home. And just knowing that I have to be strong, not just for myself, but also for the children, because now they’re, you know, questioning, where’s Dad? And, you know, what’s been going on? I felt like a failure more than anything, like I have failed my children. Here we are, going from everyone having their own space, we’re comfortable to now, living with my sister-in-law in the city of Chicago, my first time ever living in the city. So it was quite an adjustment. Brittany: It took time for us to build the life we have now and we’re still thriving. We’re definitely not where we want to be as a family and as entrepreneurs. I don’t think that the justice systems understand how communities and families are torn apart. I don’t know what I would have done if I wasn’t thinking straight, because now I’m just thinking about how I’m going to provide. And just imagine so many other women or people out there who have gone through this and may not be able to emotionally bring themselves strong enough to just be decent and just get through it.