By mid-2020, jail populations were at the lowest level they’d been in over TWENTY years. This shift happened after some states implemented population reductions with hopes of slowing the spread of COVID-19. Too many people sitting in pretrial detention without a conviction were dying of the virus!
Unfortunately, those empty cells are filling back up again.
Between the pandemic low and spring 2021, jail populations skyrocketed by 13%. The big question: why? “Nothing catastrophic happened while people were not jailed,” reports the Marshall Project. “So why bother now?”
Georgia District Attorney Jeff Langley says it’s not that they were “putting people in jail that didn’t need to be there” before COVID-19. But how isn’t that true?
Because of the pandemic, people arrested or already incarcerated for traffic offenses, accidental parole violations, or petty theft were simply given a fine and/or sent home.
And, after arriving home, there’s no evidence that those people started committing new crimes. In fact, at the height of these releases, crime rates were decreasing significantly!
We have to pay attention when the system shows us how it actually operates – the pandemic created this "loophole,” which forced states to see what happens when fewer people get locked up. So, we have to ask: why not keep it that way?