The Human Cost Is Unaffordable
By: Carson White
I first met Mark (not his real name) in the basement infirmary of Santa Clara County’s Main Jail. I was working as a public defender in San Jose, California at the time, advocating for the release of presumptively innocent community members who were awaiting trial. Mark was 92 years old, in the final stages of dementia, and had just been booked into custody for alleged domestic violence. I would find out later that Mark was arrested after he attacked his caregiver, whom he no longer recognized and mistook for an intruder. An ambulance rushed Mark to the hospital, but when hospital staff learned that Mark’s insurance didn’t cover in-patient dementia care, they’d handed him over to the police.
I remember thinking Mark was the most fragile person I’d ever seen in my life. He didn’t know his own name. He struggled to sit up straight against the weight of a chain wrapped around his tiny waist. Blood pooled beneath the translucent skin of his forearms, thin as butterfly wings, where IV needles had been hastily inserted and removed. Urine dripped out the bottom of his pant leg and puddled beneath the metal stool on which he sat. A guard handcuffed him to the table.
The next day, multiple generations of Mark’s family — including the spouse of his caregiver — crowded into a courtroom to watch a judge formally arraign their beloved elder on charges that they had begged the District Attorney not to file. Citing the seriousness of the charges, the judge ruled that Mark should stay in custody unless his family could pay thousands of dollars in cash bail or find a place for him at a facility with jail-like security. No such public facility existed. When Mark’s family learned that the jail was also treating COVID-19 patients in the infirmary, Mark’s wife emptied her retirement account to pay for just his first month’s stay at a private facility.
Mark died within weeks of being released from pretrial custody. I will not attempt to describe his family’s pain and rage.
This tragedy, and countless others like it, was the direct consequence of Santa Clara County’s decision to invest in incarceration — funding jails, police and prosecutors — rather than meeting the most basic needs of our community. Mark’s family needed access to medical care, financial support and the dignity of allowing their grandfather to die in peace, surrounded by loved ones. The only thing Santa Clara could give them was a cage.
Investing in pretrial incarceration is often done in the name of public safety, but defined so narrowly as to exclude the systemic violence that comes with it. This version of “public safety” ignores the dire costs of pretrial detention, which tears apart families, leads to unemployment and housing loss, destabilizes people experiencing mental health or substance abuse disorders, and coerces innocent people into pleading guilty. It does not account for the racism and ableism inherent in the criminal punishment system, which disproportionately cages Black, brown and disabled people — many only because they cannot afford financial conditions of release. Ironically, this version of public safety also does not reduce crime: researchers have found that being incarcerated pretrial makes someone more likely to be rearrested for a new law violation in the future.
Those of us advocating for the divestment from carceral systems have a different vision of public safety: one that reduces violence while respecting our rights to fairness, justice, and freedom. We want to instead invest in non-carceral programs that can produce dramatic improvements in community safety while avoiding the devastating consequences of pretrial detention. For example, years of research has shown that basic investments in built design — in streetlights, parks, road design, public transportation, and vacant lots — can impact public safety. Increasing funding for community-led organizations, particularly those that directly work to prevent or interrupt violence, can also reduce harm. At its core, safety requires that a person is able to meet their basic needs, which is why investing in economic security, basic healthcare, and housing has consistently been shown to reduce crime and violence. Finally, few things correlate as strongly with violent and property crime as income inequality. One study found that even small decreases in American inequality would reduce homicides by 20% and cause a 23% long-term reduction in robberies.
If we want to ensure our communities are truly safe, we simply cannot afford to continue investing in spaces designed to strip people of their humanity and connection to their loved ones. The financial cost of pretrial incarceration is better spent elsewhere. The human cost is unaffordable.
