The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/tag/rural-justice/)
Mental health courts offer troubled individuals a treatment alternative to jail. They’ve begun to take hold in rural Minnesota’s “Iron Range,” where the fourth such court in the state recently began hearing its first cases.
“We see the transformation in front of our eyes,” says a member of the team operating out of the rural courtroom where Judge Michelle Anderson offers substance abusers the chance to drop charges if they participate in a rigorous 13-month treatment program.
In Wisconsin’s Washburn County, local authorities are developing diversion and counseling programs to cope with a 60 percent increase in jail inmates in the past eight years. But they admit it’s an uphill struggle.
The decline parallels the drop in state and federal prison populations between 2007 and 2017, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. But about two-thirds of those confined to jail cells in 2017—roughly 425,000 people—hadn’t been convicted of any crime.
The Hampton Roads Regional Jail in historic coastal Virginia has been struggling with inmate deaths, staff shortages, and funding issues for more than a decade. But getting help from local and state politicians has been an uphill battle.
More than 30 research and advocacy organizations around the country will participate in a National Partnership for Pretrial Justice aimed at developing alternatives to money bail and pretrial detention, Arnold Ventures announced Tuesday.
Faced with declining tax revenues, towns and counties in the economically depressed Appalachian coal region rely on state subsidies for jails and prisons to maintain services, says a Vera Institute study.
Jail authorities in one western Pennsylvania county saw a 54 percent increase in the number of females, many of them single mothers, compared to 3.5 percent for men. It’s part of a national trend that some ascribe to the opioid crisis and others to the inequities created by money bail.
Jail authorities in Iowa’s rural Wayne County have earned nearly $1 million by housing inmates from nearby counties. That’s helped fund some long-needed improvements in health care for inmates.
Butler County, Pa., jail authorities have set aside special cells, some of them padded, for inmates whose behavior renders them unfit for the general population. But they concede this doesn’t address the real needs of individuals who find scant help in the outside world.