On any given day, jails in the U.S. hold more than 730,000 people. These are people arrested but not yet convicted of any crime, and some of these people who are presumed innocent until proven guilty—stay behind bars for months until they appear in court.
"We turn this into a debtor's prison. We have a lot of people incarcerated and it has nothing to do with them posing a risk to the public; it's simply because they are too poor to pay,” Sade Dumas, of the Orleans Parish Prison Reform Coalition, said.
“We have a system that will keep you detained when you're presumed innocent, but will let you go after you've pled guilty,” said Will Snowden, Director at Vera Institute of New Orleans.
A lawsuit filed by The Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center of New Orleans states three inmates were in the custody of the Orleans Parish Sheriff's Office and housed pretrial at the River Bend Detention Center near Lake Charles. The men resolved their criminal charge, completed their sentence time and were entitled to release but instead they spent several more months in jail.
This is one of the reasons Snowden, among others, is fighting for justice reform whether it deals with the jury, sentencing or bail.
“We have this idea that locking people up is a way to keep us safer and when we think about Louisiana being one of the prison capitals of the world, if that were to be true, we'd also be one of the safest states in the world and that's not actually what we have,” said Snowden.