It's obvious that jail isn’t good for the jailed. It may be particularly bad for people accused of minor crimes, who are confined not because they are likely to be dangerous but because, under our cash-bail system, they can’t afford to get out. Think of the appalling case of Kalief Browder, the Bronx teenager who was profiled by my colleague Jennifer Gonnerman, in 2014. He was charged with stealing a backpack and spent three years at Rikers Island awaiting trial. Two years after the trial was dismissed and he was released, Browder killed himself.
Now, there’s a study that quantifies some of the harm of keeping low-risk offenders in jail. Three criminal-justice researchers—Christopher Lowenkamp, Marie VanNostrand, and Alexander Holsinger—with backing from the Arnold Foundation, were able to track more than a hundred and fifty-three thousand arrests and bookings into Kentucky jails, between 2009 and 2010. Theypublished their results in November, 2013, but the study hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. The researchers found that the longer low-risk defendants were held in jail the more likely they were to engage in criminal activity. “When held 2–3 days, low-risk defendants are almost 40% more likely to commit new crimes before trial than equivalent defendants held no more than 24 hours,” they wrote. Low-risk defendants were even more likely to be re-arrested when they were held eight to fourteen days, and this remained true two years after the conclusion of the original case. Defendants who had been held in jail for eight to fourteen days were fifty-one per cent more likely to commit a crime two years later than demographically similar defendants charged with equivalent crimes who were held no more than twenty-four hours.
[For more of this story, written by Margaret Talbot, go to http://www.newyorker.com/news/...se-against-cash-bail]
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