by Jody DiPerna

Melanie Newport is an historian who teaches urban history and criminal justice history at the University of Connecticut at Hartford. Her book, “This Is My Jail:  Local Politics and the Rise of Mass Incarceration” has just been released by the University of Pennsylvania Press. 

Melanie Newport wanted to understand the history of jails, she wanted to know what went on behind the walls, what life was like, and what purposes they serve in society. And while the details of life behind prison walls is siloed, knowledge and information are even more hidden when one attempts to research jails. 

Even though there have been some really rigorously researched books about prisons, “we still don’t know that much about prisons,” Newton said. But the lack of knowledge about jails is even more acute and digging in on jails is the vital work that Newton’s book undertakes. 

By expanding our understanding of the history of jails, how they have functioned and continue to function, Newton illuminates the way that they are, as she terms them, “fundamentally political institutions.”

One of the biggest hurdles to investigating jails is that they are locally autonomous.

“You’re up against the kind of whims of whatever the county’s record policy is and how politically transparent they want to be,” according to Newport. 

There are 67 counties in Pennsylvania, so there are 67 discrete governments, each responsible for running their respective jail. Any researcher looking to get information on jail conditions will have to navigate those local governments, some of which may be more transparent than others. 

Although most of Newport’s research revolves around the Cook County Jail in Chicago, there are lessons for Pittsburgh. The city of Chicago sits within Cook County, which includes the surrounding suburbs, much like the relationship between Pittsburgh and Allegheny County.  

There are more than 400,000 people incarcerated in jails across the nation, according to Prison Policy Institute, a national nonprofit nonpartisan organization that produces research on mass incarceration. Some of those people have been convicted in state courts and are serving their sentences at a jail, rather than a state prison. However, Prison Policy’s data shows that more than 67 percent of the people inside jails are pretrial detainees, not convicted of a crime.

Jails, Newport said, have always been a place to house the poor and this has been the case for as long as there are records. She writes that there are references to “the rabble” in earlier eras and that now, fully one-third of the people held in jails are indigent. 

“It’s just openly regarded as a defining feature of the institution,” Newport said. “It tells us  so much about ourselves, in terms of politics–we know that these jails are for poor people, and we would like to keep them that way. We have not changed this element of jailing in 200 years.” 

In Pennsylvania, the plight of the indigent might be more difficult than in other states, as it is the only state wherein public defenders offices are funded by each individual county, rather than the state, according to the special report published by the Pennsylvania Auditor General’s office in June, 2020, titled, “Criminal Justice:  Reforms to Improve Lives & Save Money,” Counties simply have smaller budgets than the state and increasing the budgets for public defenders offices can be a hard political sell on the local level. 

“It’s just openly regarded as a defining feature of the institution,” Newport said. “It tells us  so much about ourselves, in terms of politics–we know that these jails are for poor people, and we would like to keep them that way. We have not changed this element of jailing in 200 years.” 

In Pennsylvania, the plight of the indigent might be more difficult than in other states, as it is the only state wherein public defenders offices are funded by each individual county, rather than the state, according to the special report published by the Pennsylvania Auditor General’s office in June, 2020, titled, ‘Criminal Justice:  Reforms to Improve Lives & Save Money.” Counties simply have smaller budgets than the state and increasing the budgets for public defenders offices can be a hard political sell on the local level. 

Newport also writes about the racial makeup of jails. In her own study on Cook County, the population of the jail does not reflect the population of the county in any way, which is also true here. According to Allegheny County’s public database, as of February 16, 2023, 66 percent of the Allegheny County Jail population is Black and 33 percent is white, which flips the actual breakdown of the population into reverse. According to the US Census Bureau, approximately 79 percent of Allegheny County’s population is white, versus 13.5 percent Black.

Because Newport is a trained historian, her book reaches back into the history of the Cook County jail up to the present day. In this way, she gains perspective where patterns and watershed moments of change become apparent. Although jails have always housed a disproportionate number of minorities, Newport writes about a noticeable change in the 1980s.

“It’s not until the 80s that there is a kind of open and explicit conversation about using the jail deliberately to punish and to ‘keep people from committing crimes’ while they’re awaiting trial. It is a function of the kind of 1980s tough on crime, punitive politics that really relies on rejecting certain aspects of the Constitution in some ways,” said Newport. 

“People’s number one concern is getting out [of jail] which is extremely rational. They want to be free, they want to fight their case,” Newport said. And thus, there can sometimes be less advocacy from within those walls. 

Newport’s scholarship into how jails have evolved can help all of us reframe questions about how jails are managed, how they are used, and if they are even needed. She hopes that her book will leave readers with questions about what we can expect from government.  

“One of the sort of political functions of writing this book became trying to figure out how can I help people know what questions to ask?”

This story is part of our coverage of books that examine American mass incarceration in advance of the screening of the documentary “Calls from Home” on March 11th at City of Asylum. You can book your free tickets here.