From Inquest:
When I first joined the Bronx Defenders as a young lawyer in 2000, I quickly realized that the most critical part of my job wasn’t trying cases or negotiating pleas; it was keeping the people I represented off of Rikers Island. At the time, the jail complex, which sits on a spit of land in the middle of the East River, held 15,000 people who had been accused but not convicted of a crime and were awaiting their day in court. The people confined there were subjected to extreme separation, isolation, trauma, and violence. Some would never be convicted or sentenced to incarceration, their charges eventually dismissed or reduced. And many more would never recover from the experience.
Despite the harms and horrors that I bore witness to. I accepted pretrial incarceration as an inextricable part of our criminal legal system. After all, the practice had existed for as long as I could remember. And in the 1980s, the Supreme Court had found that incarcerating presumptively innocent people was constitutional because there were rationally related, nonpunitive purposes for it—ensuring return to court and protecting public safety. Propped up by these twin purposes, pretrial incarceration seemed invincible and impervious to systemic challenge.
But over the course of my twenty-five-year career, my perspective has fundamentally shifted. I now understand that the purpose of pretrial detention is not, in fact, to ensure return to court and protect public safety. Its purpose is to punish. The harm that I witnessed is not just some unfortunate by-product of our pretrial system. The harm is the point. Continue reading >>>
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