Holding Jails Accountable?

By Jordan Wilkie

Despite holding about 17,000 of the roughly 54,000 people behind bars on any given day in North Carolina, the state’s jails collectively report a small fraction of information compared to what is shared by the state’s prison system. Almost every county keeps digital records, coordinates with other government agencies, and reports certain records to the state, yet a centralized database for jails across the state’s 100 counties does not exist.

The lack of reported data severely limits efforts to improve the justice system, to provide care to ill people, to keep people out of jail for poverty, and to hold jails accountable to a consistent standard.

Without uniform collection of the right data across counties, it is impossible to know:

•  The number of people in jail for an inability to pay child support or post low bail amounts.
• The number of people taking guilty pleas as a way of getting out of jail on time served, or admitting guilt in order to be freed.
•  How often court-appointed attorneys visit their clients and how that impacts their quality of representation.
•  How much money counties are paid for holding inmates for other counties or for state or federal governments.
•  The number of people in jail who have serious health issues, including drug addiction, mental disorders or communicable diseases such as HIV.

Providing data is a function of government accountability. North Carolina’s decentralized system is the effect of how county governments are set up in relation to the state, according to James Markham, professor in the UNC-CH School of Government.

“It is a long standing historical issue in North Carolina that the jails are independent,” Markham said. “They’re not tied into a state structure in the same way that the prison system is. Aside from certain regulatory minimums imposed through health and human services, they’re not connected together technologically.”

Oversight comes mostly from the Department of Health and Human Services, which collects monthly population counts from the jails, inspects each jail twice a year and requires reports of inmate deaths. Records from the DHHS show that 94 counties operate jails. Tens of thousands of people – it’s impossible to know how many, exactly – move in and out of jail every year in North Carolina on offenses ranging from failure to pay child support to murder.

Some tantalizing details emerge when examining the data from just Durham and Sampson counties. Durham held 81 juveniles in the jail for a total of more than 1,000 days. Juveniles are at disproportionately high risk for physical and sexual assault when held with adults.

In Sampson County, the jail was paid more than $1 million in 2016 for holding inmates from other jails or for the state, earning back just less than a third of what it cost to run the jail for a fiscal year. If centralized statewide information existed, it would be possible to know which counties were holding minors and for how long, and how much counties were making for holding inmates from other governmental jurisdictions.

The state is aware that not having a centralized database for county criminal justice information is needed. The North Carolina Committee on the Administration of Law and Justice has worked on a similar problem for two years – calling for a uniform judicial system in its final report released in March.

The report shows the judicial system has the same problem as many of the jails, with “much of the information pertaining to a case that would be valuable for the purpose of analysis is maintained only on paper. As a result, it is difficult, if not impossible as a practical matter, to access simple data.”

The Department of Public Safety is in the beginning stages of looking into how the judicial system could be updated, though the implementation could take close to a decade and cost as much as $91 million. This judicial information would overlap heavily with information that is collected by jails and would provide valuable context.

Several other organizations are acting independently to fill parts of the void on their own. The state’s Indigent Defense Services has launched a project to collect data on the effectiveness of court-appointed lawyers. Researchers at UNC-CH studying treatment for HIV-infected people in jail are creating a patchwork of data from jail logs and the state Administrative Office of the Courts database. The state’s Sentencing Commission has collected and reviewed jail data to offer improvements to the state’s criminal laws.

There’s even a New York-based non-profit, Measures for Justice, dedicated to collecting data from every stage of the criminal justice system and presenting it in a way that can be understood by general audiences. Because North Carolina counties do not consistently collect or report much data, what

Measures for Justice has been able to show in this state has been limited, especially compared to states like Florida or Wisconsin.

Kristen Powers, advocacy coordinator for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, a non-profit that works on criminal justice reform, said that the state owes accountability to its residents.

“If a group of professionals is having trouble accessing this from the government, that’s problematic,” Powers said. “It should not be burdensome for our residents to get this data.”

Without a centralized database, public awareness of how jails operate is minimal. In order to know how jails are performing, it is necessary to compare them to other jails, just as prison systems are compared across states.

“You can’t begin to address a problem effectively unless you understand the scope of it, of what’s causing it,” said Thomas Maher, executive director of North Carolina’s Indigent Defense Services.

There are many issues that, at this point, simply cannot be answered with available data, Maher said. For example, Maher, Powers and others have struggled to show how many people are in jail with low bond amounts simply because they cannot afford to pay for their release.

Maher also points to the large number of “time-served” pleas, or deals where a person will admit guilt in exchange for being released from jail.

“The notion that people are giving up constitutional rights and accepting a criminal conviction as a way of ending their punishment kind of turns the system on its head,” Maher said. “It suggests that it’s not working the way it should work.”

Maher may know from his work that there is a large number of such deals, but he cannot say how many, which counties use them the most, on what charges, or for which people. The data may exist for each county, but it is in 100 separate databases, and may be recorded a dozen different ways.

A patchwork already exists for the collection and sharing of jail information. Most jails use the same software for recording their booking information, though contracts are still made on a county-by-county basis. The Statewide Misdemeanant Confinement Program, which monitors jail populations around the state in order to know which jails have space for inmates, is run by the Sheriffs’ Association and is designed to keep people convicted of misdemeanors out of prison.

Thirty-four counties post the names, charges and identifying information for people in the jails online every day, but that information cannot be downloaded. Counties also report out to the North Carolina Statewide Automated Victim Assistance and Notification system, which can notify anyone who has signed up when certain people are released, and is run through private contract by Appriss Inc.

None of these tools are run by the state, but show that it is possible to establish statewide reporting systems. The demand for this information is coming from North Carolina’s own criminal and judicial commissions, from researchers and advocacy organizations.

“I know from the experience of our lawyers that it would be much easier for them to do their jobs if we had this updated technology,” Powers said.