Perhaps when you read the title of this article, it puzzled you, but you read it correctly. There are many benefits of having an enemy. I know that’s counter-intuitive, and kind of messes with our brains a little bit. When most of us think of enemies, we .
Chairman Lathrop, Vice-Chair Pansing-Brooks, and members of the Judiciary Committee, my name is Alan Smith, and I am a senior fellow and Midwest director at the R Street Institute, which is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, public policy research organization. Our mission is to engage in policy research and outreach to promote free markets and limited, effective government in many areas.
R Street has a robust criminal justice portfolio and staff who have extensively researched the utility, efficacy, expense and innovation around practices of cash bail.[1] [1] We see room for improving the circumstances of pretrial detention for not only the accused, but also the government and the taxpayer in all of those areas as multiple jurisdictions around the nation modernize the system, which has been essentially unchanged for decades and has existed in some form for about 1,500 years.[2] [2]
Seagull flying over fence with barbwire mesh at sunset
Lisa Valder
Overview
Historically, the roughly 3,000 local jails operating in the United States have received less public and policymaker attention than prisons.
1 But now, the COVID-19 pandemic has put jails secure correctional facilities, generally operated by county or municipal governments, where people are detained before trial or confined post-conviction for periods usually lasting less than a year under additional scrutiny.
2 Jails rely on close confinement and so are high risk for disease transmission.
3 Local governments are also confronting the budget implications of the pandemic and looking for potential savings, especially in costly areas such as corrections.