May 1, 2025 • 10 mins
Dr. Vanessa Tyler speaks with Wanda Bertram, Communications Strategist for the Prison Policy Initiative, an independent research and advocacy organization that studies criminal justice reform and mass incarceration. Wanda shares data and insights that her organization offers to other advocacy groups and elected officials who are on the front lines fighting over-criminalization and gerrymandering.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
You're under arrest, dude, I got some buddies coming. We're
gonna go to jail today.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
First the arrest. You are under.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Arrest, and you're adding charges every second.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
In this case, a man with a knife wouldn't drop it.
After he is handcuffed, he becomes part of the millions
arrested and until their case is heard. If they can't
make bail, their new temporary home is the Gray Bar Hotel. Okay,
the NonStop clatter of the inside. People locked up? But why?
(00:32):
What crimes are they accused of? Millions are arrested, booked,
and placed in the nation's jails. An analysis just released
by the Prison Policy Initiative tells us who gets locked
up in local jails. We take a look behind bars
in Blackland and now, as a brown person, you just
feel so invisible. Where we're from, brothers and sisters. I'll
(00:58):
welcome you to this joyful and zat we celebrate freedom.
Where we are, I know someone's heard something and where
we're going. We the people means all the people. The
Black Information that Work presents Blackland with your host Vanessa Tyler.
Who are those locked up? What crimes have they committed?
(01:19):
The Prison Policy Initiative just released a comprehensive study. Communications
strategists Wanda Bertram went inside and joins me with more.
So you just you basically did a study on the
local jails. What did you find out about who is
being locked up and picked up and just thrown in
(01:40):
local jails?
Speaker 1 (01:41):
Right right? So, to give a little context, several million
people go to local jails every year and these are
facilities that are run by your local government, local police,
prosecutors and judges. They're the ones that decide who goes
to a local jail. And there are so many different jails.
There's almost three thousand jails in this country, and that
(02:03):
makes it hard to collect comprehensive data on it. We
did this new analysis to find out what types of
charges are responsible for people going to local jails. You
might think that this would already be information that's out there,
but the government hasn't collected data about it since two
thousand and two. We were able to do our analysis
(02:23):
because another organization called the Jail Data Initiative has spent
the last few years scraping public information off of over
one thousand local jail websites, so basically doing the putting
in some serious elbow grease to collect this data that
has not been collected by the federal government in over
two decades. What we found was, in my opinion, pretty shocking.
(02:48):
We found that the distinct majority of people in jails
on any given day are being held there for nonviolent offenses.
Two thirds of people in jail today are being held
for things like drug offenses, property crimes, probation and parole violations,
other misdemeanors, So things that are certainly certainly you know,
(03:11):
notable offenses a lot of the time, but still non
violent issues, right, very very minor things in the grand
scope of things that people could be being sent to
jails for.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
So you're saying that these are low level offenders that
are being thrown in these jails. So what's the takeaway there?
Do you think these people should just be given appearance tickets?
How should society handle even the lowest level offenders?
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Local jails, for those that don't know, local jails are
almost always holding people who are a pre trial so
you can if you've been if you've been convicted of
a misdemeanor, you might still serve your sentence in jail.
If you've been convicted of a felony, you're going to
go to prison. But most people who are in jails
are people who are locked up before their trial. They
(04:03):
haven't been convicted, so we're talking about what we're really
talking about here are millions of people who are stuck
in jails on every single year because they haven't been
convicted of but are charged with these very low level crimes.
The fact is that most people who are stuck in
jail pre trial are there because they can't afford to
(04:26):
pay money bail, which is ironic because the purpose of
money bail is not to keep you in jail. The
purpose of money bail is that you can go free,
but you have a financial incentive to come back to
court for your hearing.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Wander Bertram of the Prison Policy Initiative says bail is
off its mission.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
The way that bail has basically functioned over the last
couple decades or a few decades is that judges have
deliberately imposed amounts of bail that are higher than they
know people can afford as a way of keeping them
lacked that pre trial, because they believe that that is
necessary in order to get people to come to their hearings.
(05:07):
We and other organizations have been working for a long
time to show that this is really not the case.
And what your all that you accomplish when you hold
people in jail on unaffordable bail amounts is you make
it more likely that they're going to plead guilty. They
take a guilty plea just so that they can get
out of jail. Earlier. We have been we have been
(05:29):
pushing on local governments to change how they hold people
pre trial, because even if it's just for a week
or two weeks or four weeks, that's the average amount
of time someone is held in jail. It is really
destabilizing to have to go to jail and to be
away from you your family and your job and not
(05:52):
be able to pay rent and that sort of thing.
And that doesn't actually help public safety at large. It
just destabilizes communities.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Yeah, I've heard stories where people have been, like you said,
in jail pre trial for more than four weeks. Have
you discovered that where people are basically just languishing, they're
in jail almost close to a year.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
I know that recently in Houston there was a scandal
about hundreds of people being held for you know, for
hundreds of days just pre trial, right, just locked up
awaiting trial. And some of those folks are people who,
you know, just like our analysis says, are charged with
very minor things. So you have to imagine thousands of people,
(06:37):
if not tens of thousands of people locked up in
jails every year awaiting trial for a minor offense. That is,
you know, it's not just destabilizing to those individuals and
their families, it's a huge waste of public funds and resources.
That's part of what we're trying to draw attention to here.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
And it's Black people held the most.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
We know that if you look at prisons and jails,
the total you know, the rates of incarceration for Latino
people and Black people are considerably higher than the rates
for white people and other racial groups. You know, specifically,
if you if you total up the Black and Latino
populations in prisons in jails, it's almost it's actually a
(07:20):
little over sixty percent. So this is this is hugely,
hugely impactful on black communities in particular.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
Then there are the number of those who, for a
variety of reasons, lose their lives in jail, turning their
time into a depth sentence.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
One of the things that we try to stress is
that these are facilities that are not built to hold
people for more than a week or two. They're temporary facilities,
kind of like an emergency room, and yet they're holding
people often for a month or several months, and over
that time it's very easy for health issues to build up,
(07:58):
to go unnoticed, and then to leave and to someone's death.
So when when you're not on health insurance, when your
poor health issues really build up, so you see more
higher rates of mental illness, higher rates of substance use problems.
Also other chronic conditions, heart conditions, hypertension, diabetes, all those
(08:19):
things are more present in jails and prisons.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
And again, jails do not have the capacity like a
prison with the health facilities that could help people who
are locked up.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
That's exactly right, Yes, prisons, you know, no one, you know,
no one is, no one is begging to go to
prison to receive the prison healthcare. Prison healthcare is pretty bad,
but jail healthcare in comparison is even worse.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
What should we do and how can we learn more?
Speaker 1 (08:48):
Well, you're always you know, people are always welcome to
come to our website prison policy dot org. That's where
we publish all of our research, but I think what
you're getting at more is, you know, what, what can
the average person do to change this? I think that
really it's a matter of being aware of what the
local criminal justice system is doing. Police, prosecutors, judges, what
(09:13):
are they, you know, read the news and notice what
are they prioritizing. Who are they prioritizing locking up? Because
I think what a lot of people don't recognize is
that a huge portion of folks who are locked up
in this country they're not in state prisons, They're not
in federal prisons. They're in these local facilities run by
people that you elect, you know, so we can choose
(09:34):
to vote in sheriffs, prosecutors, das, judges who have criminal
justice reform in mind. And that's something that I think
that if more people paid attention to that, and we're
more engaged in that respect, we would probably see a
shift to the better.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
Wander Bertram Prison Policy initiative. Thank you so much, thanks
for having me. I'm Vanessa Tyler. Join me next time
on black Land. A new episode drops every week.
You're under arrest, dude, I got some buddies coming. We're
gonna go to jail today.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
First the arrest. You are under.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Arrest, and you're adding charges every second.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
In this case, a man with a knife wouldn't drop it.
After he is handcuffed, he becomes part of the millions
arrested and until their case is heard. If they can't
make bail, their new temporary home is the Gray Bar Hotel. Okay,
the NonStop clatter of the inside. People locked up? But why?
(00:32):
What crimes are they accused of? Millions are arrested, booked,
and placed in the nation's jails. An analysis just released
by the Prison Policy Initiative tells us who gets locked
up in local jails. We take a look behind bars
in Blackland and now, as a brown person, you just
feel so invisible. Where we're from, brothers and sisters. I'll
(00:58):
welcome you to this joyful and zat we celebrate freedom.
Where we are, I know someone's heard something and where
we're going. We the people means all the people. The
Black Information that Work presents Blackland with your host Vanessa Tyler.
Who are those locked up? What crimes have they committed?
(01:19):
The Prison Policy Initiative just released a comprehensive study. Communications
strategists Wanda Bertram went inside and joins me with more.
So you just you basically did a study on the
local jails. What did you find out about who is
being locked up and picked up and just thrown in
(01:40):
local jails?
Speaker 1 (01:41):
Right right? So, to give a little context, several million
people go to local jails every year and these are
facilities that are run by your local government, local police,
prosecutors and judges. They're the ones that decide who goes
to a local jail. And there are so many different jails.
There's almost three thousand jails in this country, and that
(02:03):
makes it hard to collect comprehensive data on it. We
did this new analysis to find out what types of
charges are responsible for people going to local jails. You
might think that this would already be information that's out there,
but the government hasn't collected data about it since two
thousand and two. We were able to do our analysis
(02:23):
because another organization called the Jail Data Initiative has spent
the last few years scraping public information off of over
one thousand local jail websites, so basically doing the putting
in some serious elbow grease to collect this data that
has not been collected by the federal government in over
two decades. What we found was, in my opinion, pretty shocking.
(02:48):
We found that the distinct majority of people in jails
on any given day are being held there for nonviolent offenses.
Two thirds of people in jail today are being held
for things like drug offenses, property crimes, probation and parole violations,
other misdemeanors, So things that are certainly certainly you know,
(03:11):
notable offenses a lot of the time, but still non
violent issues, right, very very minor things in the grand
scope of things that people could be being sent to
jails for.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
So you're saying that these are low level offenders that
are being thrown in these jails. So what's the takeaway there?
Do you think these people should just be given appearance tickets?
How should society handle even the lowest level offenders?
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Local jails, for those that don't know, local jails are
almost always holding people who are a pre trial so
you can if you've been if you've been convicted of
a misdemeanor, you might still serve your sentence in jail.
If you've been convicted of a felony, you're going to
go to prison. But most people who are in jails
are people who are locked up before their trial. They
(04:03):
haven't been convicted, so we're talking about what we're really
talking about here are millions of people who are stuck
in jails on every single year because they haven't been
convicted of but are charged with these very low level crimes.
The fact is that most people who are stuck in
jail pre trial are there because they can't afford to
(04:26):
pay money bail, which is ironic because the purpose of
money bail is not to keep you in jail. The
purpose of money bail is that you can go free,
but you have a financial incentive to come back to
court for your hearing.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Wander Bertram of the Prison Policy Initiative says bail is
off its mission.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
The way that bail has basically functioned over the last
couple decades or a few decades is that judges have
deliberately imposed amounts of bail that are higher than they
know people can afford as a way of keeping them
lacked that pre trial, because they believe that that is
necessary in order to get people to come to their hearings.
(05:07):
We and other organizations have been working for a long
time to show that this is really not the case.
And what your all that you accomplish when you hold
people in jail on unaffordable bail amounts is you make
it more likely that they're going to plead guilty. They
take a guilty plea just so that they can get
out of jail. Earlier. We have been we have been
(05:29):
pushing on local governments to change how they hold people
pre trial, because even if it's just for a week
or two weeks or four weeks, that's the average amount
of time someone is held in jail. It is really
destabilizing to have to go to jail and to be
away from you your family and your job and not
(05:52):
be able to pay rent and that sort of thing.
And that doesn't actually help public safety at large. It
just destabilizes communities.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Yeah, I've heard stories where people have been, like you said,
in jail pre trial for more than four weeks. Have
you discovered that where people are basically just languishing, they're
in jail almost close to a year.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
I know that recently in Houston there was a scandal
about hundreds of people being held for you know, for
hundreds of days just pre trial, right, just locked up
awaiting trial. And some of those folks are people who,
you know, just like our analysis says, are charged with
very minor things. So you have to imagine thousands of people,
(06:37):
if not tens of thousands of people locked up in
jails every year awaiting trial for a minor offense. That is,
you know, it's not just destabilizing to those individuals and
their families, it's a huge waste of public funds and resources.
That's part of what we're trying to draw attention to here.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
And it's Black people held the most.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
We know that if you look at prisons and jails,
the total you know, the rates of incarceration for Latino
people and Black people are considerably higher than the rates
for white people and other racial groups. You know, specifically,
if you if you total up the Black and Latino
populations in prisons in jails, it's almost it's actually a
(07:20):
little over sixty percent. So this is this is hugely,
hugely impactful on black communities in particular.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
Then there are the number of those who, for a
variety of reasons, lose their lives in jail, turning their
time into a depth sentence.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
One of the things that we try to stress is
that these are facilities that are not built to hold
people for more than a week or two. They're temporary facilities,
kind of like an emergency room, and yet they're holding
people often for a month or several months, and over
that time it's very easy for health issues to build up,
(07:58):
to go unnoticed, and then to leave and to someone's death.
So when when you're not on health insurance, when your
poor health issues really build up, so you see more
higher rates of mental illness, higher rates of substance use problems.
Also other chronic conditions, heart conditions, hypertension, diabetes, all those
(08:19):
things are more present in jails and prisons.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
And again, jails do not have the capacity like a
prison with the health facilities that could help people who
are locked up.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
That's exactly right, Yes, prisons, you know, no one, you know,
no one is, no one is begging to go to
prison to receive the prison healthcare. Prison healthcare is pretty bad,
but jail healthcare in comparison is even worse.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
What should we do and how can we learn more?
Speaker 1 (08:48):
Well, you're always you know, people are always welcome to
come to our website prison policy dot org. That's where
we publish all of our research, but I think what
you're getting at more is, you know, what, what can
the average person do to change this? I think that
really it's a matter of being aware of what the
local criminal justice system is doing. Police, prosecutors, judges, what
(09:13):
are they, you know, read the news and notice what
are they prioritizing. Who are they prioritizing locking up? Because
I think what a lot of people don't recognize is
that a huge portion of folks who are locked up
in this country they're not in state prisons, They're not
in federal prisons. They're in these local facilities run by
people that you elect, you know, so we can choose
(09:34):
to vote in sheriffs, prosecutors, das, judges who have criminal
justice reform in mind. And that's something that I think
that if more people paid attention to that, and we're
more engaged in that respect, we would probably see a
shift to the better.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
Wander Bertram Prison Policy initiative. Thank you so much, thanks
for having me. I'm Vanessa Tyler. Join me next time
on black Land. A new episode drops every week.
Host
Vanessa Tyler
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