Jail Justice Initiative

We are a collective of scholars studying the role of jails in the broader context of the US criminal-legal system. While there has been substantial qualitative and quantitative research on the causes and consequences of mass incarceration, to date the vast majority of this research focuses on prisons–large-scale institutions capable of housing persons convicted of crimes for years at a time. Much less is known about the causes and consequences of jailing, especially for those held in pre-trial detention or on behalf of other arms of the criminal-legal system.

The JJI was established in 2023 by Drs. Gabreella Friday and Kaitlyn M. Sims, both junior scholars. Dr. Erin Eife joined the initiative in 2024. 

Scholars and students interested in collaborating may contact any of the three PIs directly. For media and press inquiries, contact Dr. Kaitlyn M. Sims at kaitlyn.sims@du.edu.

Co-Founders and Principal Investigators 

Academic Works

Sims, K.M. (2025). Policymaking and pretrial fairness: Evaluating Illinois' ban on cash bail beyond Chicago. The Journal of Criminal Justice. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2025.102354

Abstract: Over 400,000 people are incarcerated awaiting trial each day in the United States. Many of these individuals are held because they are unable to post cash bail, generating substantial economic inequality between those who are able to be released and those who must wait. Illinois's Pretrial Fairness Act (PFA) banned cash bail in 2023 to reduce economic inequity and remove judicial discretion in pretrial decisions. I use daily roster data from multiple suburban and rural Illinois jails and a regression-discontinuity-in-time (RDiT) approach to test for changes to jail composition after the law went into effect. Jail population sizes decreased, though less than might be expected relative to the total size of the jail. Individuals held in jail post-PFA are more likely to be held on violent offenses and less likely to be women. I find no change in the percentage of the jail roster comprised of people of color, suggesting that while fewer people of color were held pre-trial, the law did not accomplish its goal of reducing racial inequity in pretrial detention. These findings indicate that while banning cash bail did reduce jail populations, it was not a panacea for addressing inequity in the criminal-legal system.

Friday, E., Sims, K.M., and E. Eife. (2024) Jailization: Entering the Lobby to the US Criminal-Legal System. Under review (draft available upon request). 

Abstract: While mass incarceration in the United States has been the subject of much attention by researchers, policymakers, and the media, the majority of work to date has focused on the expansion of state and federal prisons. Few have addressed how mass incarceration has occurred across the system of over 3,000 city and county jails. We investigate the pattern of jail construction over the last 50 years, identifying how and where new jails were built and closed. From our data, we bolster previous claims that jails serve as the front door of mass incarceration. We further ask whether these changes to jail infrastructure represent an expansion of carceral capacity or simply a restructuring of it, whereby jails were consolidated and renovated rather than multiplied. Our analysis shows that while the number of jails has largely remained consistent over time (if anything decreasing), the jail population has increased exponentially, suggesting that mass incarceration has functioned differently in jails than in prisons. Building on this work, we posit jails have permeated the membranes of different arms of the criminal-legal system in new ways, serving as a catchment center for the first step in mass incarceration. We argue that more attention needs to be paid to what we call jailization as both an arm of and a catchment tool of the system of mass incarceration. 

University Affiliations

© Jail Justice Initiative 2024