Jail Life

Heather Mac Donald wrote a great article about life in New York City Jails that captures the chaos, danger, insanity, and striving for order that represent large city jails.

An excerpt.

“Standing in the well of a jail on New York’s Rikers Island as profanities rain down on you from the cells above, you realize the absurdity of academia’s most celebrated book on incarceration. Discipline and Punish, by the late French historian Michel Foucault, criticized jails and prisons for subjecting inmates to constant, spirit-crushing surveillance. The truth is that surveillance goes both ways in correctional facilities. Inmates watch their keepers as intensely as they are watched—and usually much more malignly.

“Jails are the ideal testing ground for romantic myths about incarceration. As policing has gotten more efficient at nabbing wrongdoers over the last decade and a half, it has pumped a growing volume of increasingly troubled individuals into the jail system. Governing that population is a management challenge more complex than that faced by any other criminal-justice institution. Yet jails, unlike prisons, remain largely out of sight and out of mind. This public ignorance is unfortunate, because jails have been evolving important principles for controlling criminal behavior of late, ideas that directly contradict the Foucauldian critique.

“To understand the difficulties of running a large jail, imagine that your job is personally to shepherd each of the thousands of commuters streaming through New York’s massive Penn Station to their trains safely and on time . . . except that the commuters are all criminals who keep changing their travel plans, and their trains, to which they don’t want to go, have no fixed timetables. A cross-section of the entire universe of criminal offenders, from the most hardened murderer to the most deranged vagrant, cycles through the nation’s 3,365 jails. But the majority of jail inmates show up with no predictable release date, since they have as yet only been charged with a crime and are awaiting a trial that may or may not occur and whose duration is unknown. Even before their trials begin, they may make bail at any moment and be released. Planning for pretrial detainees is therefore no easy task. “The ones who stay less than 36 hours drive you out of your mind,” says Michael Jacobson, a former corrections commissioner in New York City. “You think: ‘Couldn’t you have made bail ten hours ago rather than coming into my facility?’ ” Prisons, by contrast, hold only post-conviction defendants who have been found guilty or pleaded guilty and have been sentenced to a known term of more than a year. (Prisons and jails differ as well in their government overseers: the former are run by states and the federal government, the latter by cities and counties.)”