Lancaster County Jail & The Cash Bail Problem
These comments were written by Michelle Batt, local attorney and President of the Lancaster Bail Fund for Music for Everyone’s forthcoming Songs for Justice, Volume 5.
The main purpose of bail is to ensure the accused person returns to court for their hearing or trial; cash bail is meant to be posted. Innocent until proven guilty, right?
In reality, most times cash bail operates to keep people behind bars. In 2022, 62% of the people incarcerated at the Lancaster County Prison were not serving sentences – they were being detained pretrial. In real numbers, this is about 485 legally innocent people per day, many of whom are there because they lack access to cash.
Lancaster County Prison Data
In 2016-2017, cash bail (as opposed to other, lesser restrictive alternatives) was set 45.1% of the time; the average amount of cash bail was $56,862.00, and; in 64.7% of the cases where cash bail was set, it was not posted.
These numbers are all higher than Pennsylvania state averages. This might be part of why, in April of 2022, the ACLU of PA filed a federal lawsuit against us, alleging unconstitutional bail practices.
While our bail practices here might be exceptionally egregious, Lancaster County is not unique. What is happening here is a microcosm of what is happening across the United States. The “pretrial population” has grown significantly in US jails: increasing by 433 percent between 1970 and 2015. Cash bail greatly contributes to this ballooning population and mass incarceration in general.
As you might imagine, this reality is extremely expensive. In Lancaster, taxpayers spend approximately $20 million yearly on pretrial detention. But this says nothing of the human and societal cost. Research shows that pretrial detention has adverse effects on public safety. There is a correlation between the imposition of monetary bail and an increase in housing insecurity, unemployment, loss of child custody, increased conviction rates and an increased risk of future criminal behavior.
So why are we doing this? Now—as Lancaster County is in the process of building a bigger jail—is a very good time to be asking ourselves this question.
Jail Size and Community Need
Believe it or not, jail sizes are not a function of population or crime rates. They are a function of policy choices.
Look at NYC, for instance. In 2019, the city council voted to reduce the number of jails from 11 to 4, reducing the city’s jail capacity from nearly 14,000 beds to a projected 3,300. Under the current plan, Manhattan (with a population of 1.63 million) would have a jail with a capacity of 825. The equivalent would be if Lancaster (with our population of 543,050) had a jail sized for 275 – about a quarter of our current jail’s capacity.
You may be surprised to learn that we’ve decarcerated Lancaster before. In May 2012, Lancaster County Prison had an all-time high population of 1,309. Then-County leadership took actions to reduce the population to where it now sits, in the high 700s. Our work is proving that there is still room for improvement.
Lancaster Bail Fund’s Impact
Since we posted our first bail in August of 2021 to mid-April 2023 (the time of original publication for this piece), we posted bail for thirty people, preventing 339 days of unnecessary jail time and saving taxpayers an estimated $41,154.60. Of those thirty people, thirteen still have their cases pending at publication. Of the seventeen cases that were resolved: Five resulted in dismissals and one in another non-conviction disposition (yes – over a third of the people we bailed out of jail whose cases are now closed were not convicted of the offense(s) against them); one person sadly passed before his court date, and; the other ten people pled guilty to some or all of the offenses charged, but none of them were sentenced to jail time. So what were they doing in our jail to begin with?
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