8.4: Incarcerations

As a part of the growth of punishment and society’s desire to remove accused criminals from the community, the “Brick and Mortar” correctional facility was born. These facilities are called by different names, such as jails, detention centers, prisons, penitentiaries, or camps, but their purpose is the same. Correctional facilities are secure buildings that are used to house or incarcerate individuals accused of or convicted of criminal offenses. The individual’s age, gender, status with the courts, the criminal offense, jurisdiction, and length of punishment will determine in which correctional facility they are housed.

Jails

A jail is a place in which individuals accused or convicted of crimes are held. The concept of a jail was brought about in Western Europe when the U.S. criminal justice system was first formed. Influenced by the county-level establishment and management of jails in England, American facilities have largely been run by county sheriffs and have been called various things depending on their function and use, such as bridewells and workhouses.

Jails vary greatly in design, function, and size. Many jails hold less than 50 individuals. The fifty largest jails hold over half of the total number of individuals incarcerated in the U.S., more than 350,000 individuals (Minton, 2021). One example of these larger jails is the Los Angeles County Jail. It is a system of buildings spread across Los Angeles County, including an Inmate Reception Center, Century Regional Detention Facility, Men’s Central Jail, and the Twin Towers Correctional Facility, just to name a few of their facilities.

Jails also vary in physical design. The two main types of facility design models are the older generation, or linear design, and the newer generation, or podular design. The linear-design facilities were built with space efficiency in mind. Made up of long hallways with cells lining the massive corridors, they hold numerous individuals in a small area of space. In larger facilities, multiple floors hold these long corridors, expanding the number of individuals who can be housed there. Although utilizing every square foot of space efficiently for their design, these types of facilities are not as effective in their supervision of the individuals housed within them, as the officers and staff are required to travel down the hallways to each individual cell in order to observe and supervise the occupants of the space.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Department of Youth Services Facility showing the long linear corridor with cells on either side.

The podular-design facilities are built with a more communal living feel. Multiple cells face toward a central living space, allowing an officer to be in the middle of the unit and see the majority of the occupants of the cells around them. It also has common-living areas where socialization and supervision can take place.

Figure \(\PageIndex{2}\): Image of a Podular Designed Pod. In the image, the officer’s operational booth or desk (immediately right) is open, providing access to the day area or common area, and the doors of the cells open to the shared space.

Along with the different physical design models, there are also different types of supervision styles employed within jail facilities. The two main styles of supervision are direct and indirect supervision. The direct supervision style requires an officer to be stationed within the living unit, working with the individuals housed in it without any barriers. Officers’ roles are to interact with the individuals housed in the unit, supervising their daily activities. In the indirect supervision style, officers are stationed in a control room or away from the unit, separate from those housed in the unit. Officers can visually monitor individuals through glass windowed barriers or surveillance cameras, but they must leave their workstations and enter through secured doors to interact with the individuals housed in the unit/cells.

Who Goes to Jail

One of the more fascinating aspects of jails in the United States is who gets placed in them. The short answer is anyone. Whenever someone is arrested, jail starts the process in the criminal justice system. Jails serve as a central collection point for various agencies, including city police, county sheriff’s offices, state police, and federal agencies, which may use local jails as a point of entry for arrests. For example, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) houses many thousands of individuals pending immigration-related charges in jails across the country. While this list is not comprehensive, it does present many of the types of people held in jails:

• Individuals arrested for felony and misdemeanor crimes
• First-time and repeat offenders
• Individuals awaiting arraignment or trial
• Individuals who are accused and convicted
• Parolees leaving prison
• Juveniles pending transfer
• Individuals with mental illness awaiting transfer
• Chronic alcoholics and drug abusers
• Individuals held for the military
• Individuals held for federal agencies
• Protective custody
• Material witnesses
• Individuals in contempt of court
• Persons awaiting transfer to state, federal, or other local authorities
• Temporarily detained persons

At any given point in time, approximately 650,000 to 750,000 individuals are held in jails in the United States. This number has steadily increased since the 1970s. It is estimated that roughly ten million people are processed through America’s jails annually (Sawyer & Wagner, 2022). As shown below, the types of people in jail at a single point in time are varied.

Figure \(\PageIndex{3}\): The chart indicates that over 80% of individuals in jail under local authority have not been convicted of a crime. Does this keep our communities safer?

Probably one of the most notable items in the figure above is the proportions of individuals who are not convicted. Roughly 68 percent of individuals in jails at any given time are not convicted. Other notable groups are individuals held for other agencies. This could be a matter of processing time or allocation of bed space. Still, jails only make up one portion of the brick-and-mortar approach to punishment. Prisons are the other large part.