Sociology Problems In Jail And Political Influence Law Essay Help What special problems and needs do people in jail have? Why? What problems do these needs

Sociology Problems In Jail And Political Influence Law Essay Help What special problems and needs do people in jail have? Why? What problems do these needs pose for jail administrators?

How do local politics affect jail administration? Should political influence be as extensive as it is? Does it help or hinder good correctional practices?Please expand in depth and use APA format and the chapter provided must be used in text as least once.

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Chapter 7 from the book is the uploaded file

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punctuation and/or usage. Chapter 7
Clear, Todd R.; Reisig, Michael D.; Cole, George F.. American Corrections. Cengage
Learning. Kindle Edition.
Maricopa County (Phoenix, Arizona) Sheriff Joe Arpaio calls himself “America’s
toughest sheriff.” First elected in 1992, Arpaio has made his reputation by a string of
visible policies that are designed to galvanize public opinion by taking overtly tough
stances on crime. Among these actions, his management of the jail has received
some of the most publicity. Here he has cut food service down to twice daily,
sometimes serving low-quality—even spoiled—food. Adjacent to the main jail lies
Arpaio’s “tent city,” which keeps some of the jail inmates out in the searing Arizona
desert heat. (To complainers, he says that our troops in the Middle East suffer
similar heat wearing full body armor.) He has even required male jail inmates to
wear pink underwear as a kind of humiliation.1 His approach is certainly popular
among Maricopa County voters—he has been reelected five times. But now Sheriff
Arpaio has to pay for his toughness. In 2007 he arrested and jailed two newspaper
reporters who had been exposing some of Arpaio’s questionable real estate
dealings. A court found that the arrests were a deliberate attempt to muzzle a free
press, and in order to avoid a much larger penalty, on December 20, 2013, the
county agreed to a $3.75 million settlement.2 And there’s no end in sight for Arpaio:
The U.S. Justice Department has begun a case alleging that his jail staff discriminates
against Latinos. Sheriff Arpaio is an example of one of many anomalies about the jail.
It is a correctional facility typically run by an elected law enforcement official, not a
correctional specialist. Jails, then, often become a local political issue. Indeed, jails
are a strange correctional hybrid: part detention center for people awaiting trial,
part penal institution for sentenced misdemeanants, part refuge for social misfits
taken off the streets. Jails hold men, women, and juveniles who have been accused of
violating the law. Jails are the traditional dumping ground not only for criminals but
also for petty hustlers, derelicts, junkies, prostitutes, the mentally ill, and disturbers
of the peace, mainly from the poorer sections of cities. Thus, the jail’s functions
include those of the workhouse of the past. Students interested in improving
corrections during their future careers could find no area that more obviously needs
reform than U.S. jails. Among the institutions and programs of the corrections
system, jail is the one most neglected by scholars and officials and least known to
the public. Uniformly jam-packed and frequently brutalizing, jails almost never
enhance life. Many criminal justice researchers agree that of all correctional
agencies, jails are the oldest, most numerous, most criticized, and most stubbornly
resistant to reform. Jails are in such a state of decline that the estimated cost to
bring them up to acceptable standards far exceeds what the nation can afford, at
least in the foreseeable future. Further, conditions in many jails are getting worse
because sentenced felons are held there while awaiting vacancies in overcrowded
state prisons. Therefore, scholars, administrators, policy makers, and elected
officials agree that using jail for any offender should be avoided whenever possible.
Yet jail represents nearly all Americans’ initial contact with corrections. For many
people, this will be their only time in a correctional institution, and the impression it
leaves will greatly influence their views of the criminal justice system. With an
estimated 11.6 million jail admissions per year, more people directly experience
jails than experience prisons, mental hospitals, and halfway houses combined.3
Even if we consider that some portion of this total is admitted more than once,
probably at least 7–8 million people are detained in a jail at some time during the
year. In this chapter we examine problems of operating jails and how some
individuals avoid pretrial detention. We also raise questions about the role of
corrections in this type of facility, where prisoners generally sit idle without access
to treatment and rehabilitative programs.
The Contemporary Jail: Entrance to the System Jails are the entryway to corrections.
They house both accused individuals awaiting trial and sentenced offenders, usually
serving one-year terms or less. People appealing sentences are often held in jail as
well, as are those awaiting transfer to other jurisdictions. Nationally, about 740,000
people are under jail authority on any given day; more than nine-tenths of them are
behind bars, with the remainder under some form of community release.4 Some
people argue that jails lie outside corrections. For one thing, they claim that most of
the nation’s 3,283 jails (operated in 2,860 jurisdictions)5 are really a part of law
enforcement because sheriffs administer them. For another, they note that
sentenced offenders make up only about half of the jail population and that pretrial
detainees, who compose most of the other half, should not fall within the scope of
correctional responsibility. Finally, they suggest that because most jails have neither
treatment nor rehabilitative programs, they should be excluded from corrections.
We believe that jails are an important part of corrections and demonstrate many
complexities of the system. Administered by locally elected officials, jails are
buffeted by the local politics of taxation, party patronage, and law enforcement. Jail
practices also affect probation, parole, and prison policies. Jails are perhaps the
most frustrating component of corrections for people who want to apply treatment
efforts to help offenders. Of the enormous numbers of people in jail, many need a
helping hand. But the unceasing human flow usually does not allow time for such
help—nor are the resources available in most instances. Origins and Evolution Jails
in the United States descend directly from feudal practices in twelfth-century
England. At that time, an officer of the crown, the reeve, was appointed in each shire
(what we call a county) to collect taxes, keep the peace, and operate the gaol (jail).
The shire reeve (from which the word sheriff evolved), among other duties, caught
and held in custody people accused of breaking the king’s law until a formal court
hearing determined guilt or innocence. With the development of the workhouse in
the sixteenth century, the sheriff took on added responsibilities for vagrants and the
unemployed who were sent there. The sheriff made a living by collecting fees from
inmates and by hiring out prison labor. English settlers brought these traditions and
institutions with them to the American colonies. After the American Revolution, the
local community elected law enforcement officials— particularly sheriffs and
constables—but the functions of the jail remained unchanged. Jails were used to
detain accused persons awaiting trial, as well as to shelter misfits who could not be
taken care of by their families, churches, or other groups. The jails were often in the
sheriffs’ homes and run like the sheriffs’ households. Detainees were free to dress as
they wished and to contribute their own food and necessities: “So long as they did
not cost the town money, inmates could make living arrangements as pleasant and
homelike as they wished.”6 Local revenues paid room and board for detainees who
could not make independent contributions. In the 1800s the jail began to change in
response to the penitentiary movement. Jails retained their pretrial detention
function but also became facilities for offenders serving short terms, as well as
housing vagrants, debtors, beggars, prostitutes, and the mentally ill. Although the
fee system survived, other changes took place. The juvenile reformatory movement
and the creation of hospitals for the criminally insane during the latter part of the
nineteenth century siphoned off some former jail inhabitants. The development of
probation also removed some offenders, as did adult reformatories and state farms,
and inmates were now segregated by sex. However, even with these innovations the
overwhelming majority of accused and convicted misdemeanants were held in jail.
This pattern has continued to modern times. Population Characteristics Not until
1978 did the Bureau of the Census conduct a complete nationwide census of jails for
the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Repeated every five years by local officials, this
census contains information on inmates in jails that hold people beyond
arraignment (that is, usually more than 48 hours). Excluded from the count are
people in federal and state facilities. An annual survey of the top one-third largest
jails, which hold about 75 percent of the inmate population, supplements these fiveyear nationwide counts. The most recent National Jail Census shows that about 86
percent of inmates are men, nearly two-thirds are under 35 years old, almost half
are white, and most have little education and a very low income.7 The demographic
characteristics of the jail population differ from those of the national population in
many ways: People in jail are younger and disproportionately African American, and
most are unmarried (see Figure 7.1). As with prisons, jail populations vary from
region to region and from state to state. The proportion of a state’s population in
jail, known as the jail rate, is high in the West and South (see Figure 7.2). In many
states where prisons are filled to capacity, sentenced felons awaiting transfer sit in
jails. One of the most troubling trends in jails is the rate of incarceration for African
Americans. Figure 7.3 shows the changes in these rates from 1990 to 2010; much of
the growth in jail population over the past decade has been because of the huge
increase in the number of African Americans in jails. In 1990 the jail incarceration
rate for African Americans was 560 per 100,000. By 2010, the rate had gone up
almost 35 percent, to 751 per 100,000. The incarceration rate for white Americans
has gone from 89 per 100,000 in 1990 to 169 per 100,000 in 2010. As we discuss in
Chapter 19, the rate of incarceration for African Americans is now dropping relative
to the white rate; this trend applies to all of corrections, not just jails.
Administration Of the 2,860 jails in the United States, 80 percent have a county-level
jurisdiction, and most are administered by an elected sheriff. An additional 600 or
so municipal jails are in operation. Only in six states—Alaska, Connecticut,
Delaware, Hawaii, Rhode Island, and Vermont—are jails for adults administered by
state government.8 There are also an estimated 13,500 police lockups (or drunk
tanks) and similar holding facilities authorized to detain people for up to 48 hours.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons operates 11 jails for detained prisoners only, holding
11,000 inmates. There are 47 privately operated jails, under contract to state or
local governments, and they house 5.3 percent of the total jail population.9 The
capacity of jails varies greatly. The 50 largest jurisdictions hold almost one-third of
the nation’s jailed inmates. The two jurisdictions with the most inmates, Los Angeles
County and New York City, together hold about 30,000 inmates in multiple jails, or 4
percent of the national total.10 The Los Angeles County Men’s Central Jail alone
holds almost 17,000 people, but most jails are much smaller, with well more than
half holding fewer than 50 people each.11 However, the number of these small
facilities is dwindling because of new jail construction and the creation of regional,
multicounty facilities. As facilities to detain accused people awaiting trial, jails
customarily have been run by law enforcement agencies. We might reasonably
expect that the agency that arrests and transports defendants to court should also
administer the facility that holds them. Typically, however, neither sheriffs nor
deputies have much interest in corrections. They often think of themselves as police
officers and of the jail as merely an extension of their law enforcement activities. In
some major cities, municipal departments of correction, rather than the police,
manage the jails. Many experts argue that jails have outgrown police administration.
Jails no longer serve simply as holding places but now represent one of the primary
correctional facilities in the criminal justice system. In fact, much correctional work
is directed toward jail inmates. Probation officers conduct presentence
investigations in jails, alcohol and drug abusers receive treatment in many facilities,
and inmates perform community service or work toward reintegration out of some
facilities. Therefore, the effective administration of jails requires skills in offender
management and rehabilitation that are not generally included in law enforcement
training. This point was well made over 40 years ago by the U.S. President’s
Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice: “The basic
police mission of apprehending offenders usually leaves little time, commitment, or
expertise for the development of rehabilitative programs, although notable
exceptions demonstrate that jails can indeed be settings for correctional
treatment.”12 Jail administrators face problems that good management practices
cannot always overcome. One problem is that some jails cannot send their prisoners
to state facilities after they are sentenced. Many state prisons are so crowded that
they refuse to accept sentenced offenders until space becomes available. In recent
years, up to 1 in 20 of those in jail had been sentenced to prison but were awaiting
prison space to open up. In Louisiana, 45 percent of the state’s prisoners are held in
local jails; in Kentucky, one-third; and in Tennessee, over one-fourth. Indeed, in the
South, 1 of every 10 state prisoners is being held in a local jail. In 2012 jails held
690,300 inmates, of whom 22,870 were being held on immigration and customs
violations.13 Such special populations have further complicated the problem of jail
management. Another problem is that many jails still receive funds through a fee
system, whereby the costs of housing, food, and services are averaged, and a
standard amount (say, $10 per day per prisoner) is remitted to the sheriff ’s
department. This creates an incentive for poor jails to skimp on food, services, and
prisoner support. Often the sheriff uses money saved on housing prisoners to
augment the kinds of law enforcement services that attract public support and are
therefore helpful at the polls.
The Influence of Local Politics Because of the close links between jail administration
and local politics, fiscal pressures and political conservatism greatly affect jails (see
“For Critical Thinking”). Fiscally sound measures are often ignored because of
political pressures. For example, pretrial release programs are cost-efficient and a
proven means of reducing institutional crowding, yet the public’s fear of crime often
makes the programs politically infeasible. Conversely, political pressures may
support expanded use of jail confinement for misdemeanant offenders or probation
violators (particularly when crime is a potent electoral issue), but the funds to
expand or upgrade the jail’s capacity to handle these additional offenders are often
lacking. The jail is a crime control service but also a drain on revenues. The tension
between these two public interests is often expressed in local debates over capital
expenditures for jail construction. Because revenues are often insufficient, many
jails are overcrowded and cannot house all the inmates assigned to their
supervision, and some inmates are released or placed in other facilities. It is very
hard to wrest control of local facilities away from a politically sensitive office such as
that of sheriff or police chief. Jail employees constitute a large block of political
patronage for elected officials to distribute to political supporters. Political
appointees spend most of their time administering the jail, but during political
campaigns they hustle votes and money for their bosses. Even when jail employees
are civil servants, political considerations can affect hiring and promotion. Because
few politicians willingly surrender control over such a potential political force as the
jail, change is slow. See “Careers in Corrections” for more about what it means to
work in a local jail. Regional Jails Most local jails are located away from major
population centers, and many hold as few as 30 people. Although the state may
provide a portion of their operating funds, the smallest jails lack essential services,
such as medical care, that must be provided no matter how few people may need
them. One recent trend designed to remedy these problems is regionalization: the
creation of combined municipal–county or multicounty jails. This multijurisdictional
or regional jail, fiscally sound though it may be, has been slow to catch on because it
negatively affects several interest groups. Local political and correctional leaders do
not want to give up their autonomy or their control over patronage jobs, and
reformers often object to moving inmates away from their communities. Citizens
who oppose having regional jails “in their backyard” make finding locations to build
these jails difficult. Nevertheless, the number of jail jurisdictions in the United States
actually dropped by 5 percent between 1999 and 2006,14 as outmoded facilities
were closed in favor of building new, larger—and often regional—replacement
facilities. In 1993, for example, only 17 percent of all jail inmates were housed in
facilities holding 2,000 or more prisoners, but today that figure is over 30 percent,
largely as a result of new facilities such as regional jails. A new trend is for regional
jails to be privately run.
Pretrial Detention Imagine that you have been arrested by the police and accused of
a crime. They have handcuffed you, read you your rights, and taken you to the
station for booking. Frightened, you have a hundred questions, but the police treat
you as if your fears were irrelevant to their work. You may be angry with yourself
for what you have done. You may be frustrated that you cannot seem to control the
flow of procedure: fingerprints, mug shots, long waits while detectives and
prosecutors discuss you without acknowledging your presence. Slowly you begin to
understand that you have acquired a new status: accused offender. Then you are
taken to the detention section of the jail. If it is an advanced facility, you are placed
in a holding room for an intake interview. There your situation is explained to you,
you are asked questions about your background that will help determine how best
to manage you while you are in jail, and you are told what you can expect next. If,
however, you are in one of many jails with no formal intake procedure, you are
simply put in the holding tank. If you are a man, several strangers likely will be in
the cell with you, men whose stories you do not know and whose behavior you
cannot predict. If you are a woman, you probably will be by yourself. In either case,
once the guard leaves, you are on your own behind bars, and the full extent of your
situation begins to sink in. This can be an especially trying period for those
detainees who are thrust into a hostile and threatening environment. In such
circumstances, many people panic. In fact, the hours immediately following arrest
are often a time of crisis, stemming from the arrested person’s sense of vulnerability
and hopelessness, fear of lost freedom, and sheer terror. Over one-third of the
deaths that occur in jails are suicides. Not surprisingly, most of these suicides
happen within the first 6–10 hours after lockup, and most psychotic episodes oc…
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