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The Incarceration Trends project found that over the last four decades, small counties have driven jail population growth nationwide. One reason is that many small jails now serve as overflow for overcrowded state prisons and federal immigration detention centers—while others are kept full by an oversized local justice system jailing people for unpaid financial obligations. In this talk, Vera researcher Jacob Kang-Brown explores why small counties build large jails, who is incarcerated in them, and how these trends drive the overuse of jail in the United States.
Jacob Kang-Brown is a senior research associate in the Center on Sentencing and Corrections at the Vera Institute of Justice. He is the lead researcher on the Incarceration Trends project exploring the use of jail across the United States, and is conducting a National Institute of Justice funded project on improving responses to hate crime by researching current practices in Los Angeles County and New Jersey. At Vera, Jacob has conducted research on school discipline, status offense reform, policing and language access, jail populations, and solitary confinement in prisons. Jacob has also helped develop and evaluate re-entry services for people leaving prison and juvenile facilities, such as the Youth Futures program and the NYCHA Family Re-entry Pilot program.
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