Folsom Jail Blues: Understanding the Practice of Jail Leasing and its Effects

Abstract

Jail leasing is the practice by which states enter into contractual agreements with local governments to house individuals under the state’s jurisdiction in local jails. This dissertation is an attempt to understand this practice and its effects on individuals and communities. In the introductory chapter, I briefly explain the history of the jail as a carceral space and then explain jail leasing in the context of mass incarceration in the US. The focus of the second chapter is the location of the jail-leased population across and within states. I show the by-state distribution of the leasing population in 1999 and 2019, as well as the 2019 within-state (i.e., by county) distribution for the nine states for which data are publicly available. In chapter three, I test the effects of jail leasing on recidivism outcomes. I do so using data from six US states over a period of 20 years, 2000-2019. Using matching techniques, I display Kaplan-Meier curves to compare the survival rates of release cohorts leaving prison or jail and Cox Proportional Hazard model results to show estimates of the effects of facility type on recidivism risk. I find that overall, the recidivism risk is higher for those individuals released from jails, but that the difference in risk varies greatly across states. I also show the results of a cost-benefit analysis meant to determine whether differences in recidivism further support or undermine efforts by the state to reduce spending on incarceration. Chapter four explores what, if any, differences in mortality risk exist for the jail-leased population compared to the general jail and prison populations. Using data on deaths that occurred to individuals while they were experiencing incarceration in the US between 2013 and 2019, and data on the composition of the US corrections population over the same time period, I employ traditional demographic methods in order to be able to make the best possible comparisons of these mortality risks. The results suggest that the mortality risk for the jail-leased population is the lowest of the three populations compared in the analyses. In the conclusion chapter, I describe the ways in which jail leasing should and should not be considered a potential tool for decarceration.