> This amounts to nearly half a million people sitting in jail each day, despite being presumed innocent under the law
Ok, but it's not the same half million on any given day. A huge number of those people got picked up the night before and will be out (on bail or otherwise) by the end of the business day. Incarcerating people is expensive. Even if getting them out doesn't involve the state getting an interest free loan the state still has an incentive to get them out.
In functional jurisdictions the turnover is high. I know that there's a litany of exceptions for the authoritarian (and therefore more inclined to lock people up for no good reason) and well moneyed (and have the money to do it) jurisdictions in the Boston-DC corridor (and please nobody construe this as me giving the Southeast or west coast a pass, they suck too but do it differently) but the underlying problem there is societal. If you reform bail the well moneyed authoritarian jurisdictions are still well moneyed and still authoritarians and will simply spend that money using the system to screw people some other way.
Interesting. I'm curious to see the statistics you are pulling. Do you mind sharing a link?
And how does it compare with other countries? Can anyone provide statistics and plausible explanations?
Those are all people that are presumed innocent under the law... They may spend only minutes or hours in jail as police gather and verify their information... Run their prints to see if their given name is false and their a criminal with a warrant for their arrest... Etc....
So the commenter saying the stats might be misleading is very accurate ... Jails have revolving doors, and that's probably a good thing. It would also be a good thing to eliminate cash bond, without changing jails otherwise -- because jails serve a very real and practical benefit to society for less-than-a-day holding off individuals while their identity is verified and their information/case is reviewed to determine if a bond of any kind will be even offered.
Does that sound reasonable?
If that seems like an unreasonable proportion of your time to be spending in jail, it's probably also an unreasonable proportion of the population to be keeping in jail.
They may. But we're talking about those in pretrial detention, which excludes all the folks you're talking about. And the average length of pretrial detention is 50-200 days.
Would you be able to keep your job, pay your rent/mortgage and care for your children if you were sitting in jail for 3-6 months?
Cash bail and pretrial jail time exist to force quick plea bargains and criminal records on poor people. There’s not really justification for it. If you aren’t suspected of a serious violent crime or other crimes against people (rather than property), you shouldn’t be in jail.
This sounds fine in theory but in practice it leads to repeated infractions just shy of the incarceration limit.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/california-prop-47-shoplifting-th...
https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/ny-subway-men...
While its not perfectly divided this way, it's worth noting that the US has different things called “jails” and “prisons” and that the former are mostly for pretrial and short-sentence incarceration and mostly run by local governments, while the latter in state systems are almost exclusively for post-conviction felony sentences, while they are used for all purposes in the federal system.
This is important, because while the number of pre-trial confinements in the US is way too high, if you fail to understand that distinction statistics about the proportion of jail inmates that are on pre-trial confinement may be grossly misleading.
There is a graphic overview of the whole detention picture here: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html