What Jail Population Projections Tell You About a Government’s Aspirations
By Michael Jacobson, Executive Director, and Victoria Lawson, Research Project Director
The following is an excerpt from an article originally posted on Vital City.
One of the many essential roles of local government is to run and operate jail systems which primarily incarcerate pretrial detainees, people who have not been found guilty of any crime. The deprivation of liberty is a hugely consequential judicial decision given that even short jail stays are potentially harmful to those who are incarcerated in terms of their physical and mental health and other negative impacts that go along with separating people from their communities, family and work. As a result, these systems should be used with great parsimony, holding only those who present a significant public or community safety threat or who are at high risk to flee. Other than those two categories, nobody else should ever be in any jail system in pretrial status. (We note that New York State is unique in the nation in limiting the permissible bases on which a judge can deprive a person of his or her liberty pretrial to a consideration of whether the person will return to court.)
Given that, a fundamental question for any local government is: What is the right size of a jail system? This is not a theoretical question. All over the country, policymakers must decide whether they need more or less capacity now and in the future. Whether it is replacing an aging jail, reducing capacity due to underuse, trying to figure out the impact of new laws that can affect jail populations or creating a new system from scratch (which perhaps best describes the situation New York City finds itself in), projecting jail populations into the future and then building (or downsizing) to those projections has enormous real-world implications. Overbuild, and these governments will wind up needlessly spending huge amounts of scarce capital and expense dollars. Underbuild, and the same governments will be forced to create emergency capacity (which is almost always expensive, temporary and can be dangerous for those incarcerated as well as for staff).
The answer to all these questions lies in accurately projecting the need for jail beds into the future. While the methodological details of projections are of course important (how many historical data points are used, for what time periods, using what statistical techniques, etc.), the heart and soul of these sorts of projections are the policy, legal, demographic and operational assumptions that are made about what the future holds and how all these will affect the need for jail capacity.
