America’s Rural Counties Have The Highest Incarceration Rate, Study Finds

We associate high crime with big cities such as Chicago, Baltimore, and Dallas in Texas. However, research suggests the highest incarceration rates occur in America’s rural counties.

A recent report by Safety & Justice Challenge noted jail populations have been growing steadily in rural counties at a time of decline in big cities.

The trend is occurring in the face of lower crime rates in rural America than in urban areas.

The new report was released in June 2017 by the Vera Institute of Justice and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge.

The report noted rural counties have the highest rates of pretrial incarceration in the country.

Increasingly, they are renting out beds in jail to people for other government agencies. Rural counties also have scarcer resources than their urban counterparts.

These factors mean agencies are using incarceration more and more in country areas.

While reforms were made in many big cities to divert defendants away from jails, the same cannot be said for the 1,936 rural counties that comprise two-thirds of all counties in the United States.

Vera President Nicholas Turner said rural counties and their jails tended to be out of sight and out of mind in terms of the national criminal justice debate. He said:

“Their growing jails are a glimpse into the pain that many people in these counties know intimately. We hope that this report sheds light on an important trend, and brings rural America into the criminal justice conversation. We can’t end mass incarceration in America without paying attention to rural jails.”

Some key finds of the study included the following:

• While the rate at which people are held in jails before their trial has increased 223 percent across the nation since 1970, it rose a staggering 436 percent in rural counties. The South and West accounted for the bulk of the increase.
• Despite having higher lockup rates, rural counties have lower crime rates. The rate of property crime is three-quarters that of urban counties. The rate of violent crime is two-thirds that of cities. Although the opioid crisis is unfolding in mainly rural areas, the rate of rural jail incarceration was rising before the drug epidemic.
• Jails in more remote, rural areas have a smaller tax base than urban areas and experience resource challenges that lead to them to rely more on incarceration. Other factors in rural areas like Texas contribute to fewer public defender services as well as a lack of diversion and pretrial services programs.
• The practice of jails renting out extra beds to other jails, federal authorities or state prisons has pushed up the rural incarceration rate. Rural jurisdictions now use jail beds for other purposes at a rate 888 percent higher than they did in 1978, while rates in urban areas increased only 134 percent.

If you are seeking jail release, it’s important to hire an experienced Tarrant County criminal defense lawyer.

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