Cell windows along the side of the Allegheny County Jail, Friday, April 19, 2024, in Pittsburgh’s Uptown. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg/Pittsburgh’s Public Source)
The jail’s population has increased since 2022 after county leaders commissioned design plans for a far smaller facility following decades of decline.
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The Allegheny County Jail’s population has risen since 2022, defying a decade-long trend and the goals of county leaders.
It’s been three years since Allegheny County agreed to pay a design firm $700,000 to create plans for a major overhaul — and reduction in size — of its jail. Since then, the county has not publicly discussed any of the firm’s recommendations, and the jail’s population has trended in the opposite direction.
The jail’s population has steadily risen since hitting a historic low in 2022, reversing a long downward trend. The jail’s headcount has increased from 1,517 on Jan. 1, 2023 to 2,106 on July 28 of this year.
The growth runs counter to the county’s longtime goal of shrinking its jail population and Executive Sara Innamorato’s focus on diversion programs aimed at keeping people out of the lockup.
Attorneys and advocates who observe the county’s justice system say the increase is driven by people staying in jail for longer. They pointed to various causes, including court backups and the possibility that judges are more hesitant to let people out on low- or no-cash bail.
“Violent crime and property crimes are going down, and the population of the jail is going up,” said Chalon Young Pfeifer, a University of Pittsburgh law professor and former public defender. “That has to mean we’ve got more holds for petty [and nonviolent] offenses.”
A representative for the court system declined to comment or grant an interview with President Judge Susan Evashavik DiLucente.
A representative from the district attorney’s office said reducing the jail population is a “laudable goal,” though a population increase could be due to an increase in “crimes endangering the community.”
Violent crime has been on the decline nationally in recent years, a trend visible in local shooting and homicide data.
A spokesperson for Innamorato, who campaigned in part on reforming the jail, said the administration has invested in several programs providing alternatives to jail, promoting alternative emergency response and reducing recidivism.
“And even despite all these efforts, the administration cannot control when judges allow individuals to stay in alternative housing options, if a judge allows for someone to be in the community while they await case resolution, or the length of time it takes to resolve cases in court,” county Communications Director Abigail Gardner said, “which are all factors that could increase the jail population.”
Jail Warden Trevor Wingard, who Innamorato appointed in January, noted the jail’s upward population trend during a Jail Oversight Board meeting last week. He said the jail is hiring a population manager to work with the courts and other stakeholders to train a “critical eye” on the jail’s headcount.
“We’re hoping that we will be able to report back to you all with what he’s finding and why maybe the population is going in the direction it’s going,” Wingard said.
Long decline halted
The jail’s population trended downward throughout the 2010s and plummeted at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the courts released hundreds of nonviolent detainees to reduce the spread of the virus. The downward trend continued until reaching a historic low of 1,497 in December 2022 — less than half the highest daily headcount reported in September 2013.
After 2022, though, steady increases in the population have led to a headcount today that is about 40% higher than that low point in 2022.
People can be held in the county jail for a number of reasons. The two most common, accounting for 80% of the jail’s population are:
- Pretrial detention. When someone is charged with a crime, a judge can release them into the community to await the resolution of their case, set bail for their release or deny bail. In the latter two circumstances, the person could remain in jail until their case is resolved.
- Probation detainer. If a person violates a term of their probation — such as missing a meeting with a probation officer or being arrested for another alleged crime — they are held in the jail until a violation hearing, at which time they may or may not be released.
Data published by the county indicates the jail’s post-2022 population growth is mostly driven by an increase in pretrial detainees.
The number of people detained awaiting trial with no other reason for detention more than doubled from January 2023 to this week while the number of people held for probation violations grew by 28%.
Young Pfiefer said recent controversies around a local magistrate judge’s use of cashless bail may be causing other judges to think twice about letting people accused of crimes out.
A media firestorm and talk of impeachment erupted after a local magistrate, Xander Orenstein, released a man on cashless bail for simple assault and robbery, who was later charged with the murder an off-duty police officer on a park trail. The man awaits a preliminary hearing on the homicide charge.
“If the magistrate does not want to make the decision, and they say, ‘… I don’t want to be the next person who catches the fallout in the news and is responsible for letting these individuals out’,” Young Pfiefer said, “They often say, ‘Take it up with Common Pleas.’”
Most people accused of crimes first go before a magistrate judge, but can appeal to the higher Court of Common Pleas for a more favorable bail decision. But magistrates deferring more often to the higher court means people sit in jail for longer as they await that extra step.
There was political momentum behind a move to granting more people cashless bail, Young Pfiefer said, but that momentum has reversed in the past few years. Interest in bail reform helped carry a group of progressive judges into office after 2020, though their impact on the judicial system overall is hard to quantify.
“The rising political pressure and public opinion pressure is, ‘Not in my back yard, I don’t want these guys out,’” she said. “It’s hard to push back and say, ‘You’re innocent until proven guilty, look at these people’s entitlement to have a bond they can afford.’”
Tanisha Long, an activist with the Abolitionist Law Center, said some judges have “lost their commitment” to depopulating the jail and “it went back to business as usual.”
Aaron Sontz, another former public defender who is now in private practice as a criminal defense attorney, said he thinks backlash from the Orenstein case is likely affecting bail decisions.
“Judges tend to only get bad press when those types of things happen,” Sontz said. “The media never reports on how a person was unfairly denied bail. We never hear that article about how a mother of four is denied bail and she shouldn’t be.”
Sontz also said aside from bail decisions, court proceedings are taking a long time to be scheduled.
“Once they’re in, once these people get arrested, it seems like they stay in [jail] forever,” Sontz said. “… Sometimes you schedule cases like six months away. That’s a problem.”
Expensive design produced
The jail’s population was still trending downward in 2022 when the county, then under Executive Rich Fitzgerald, signed a contract with CDI Architects to plan the future of the jail.
The $700,000 outlay was funded partly by a grant from the MacArthur Foundation and partly by federal pandemic relief money.
The county’s request for proposals indicated it was “committed to reducing reliance on incarceration,” and sought a jail design that would hold between 500 and 1,100 people, significantly lower than its 2022 population, let alone its higher 2025 population.
The county acknowledged then that shrinking the jail would require collaboration with the courts, which decide who to send to jail and when to release them, and the district attorney, whose prosecutors decide whether or not to object to bail motions.
The county, under the direction of Innamorato since January 2024, has not released the consultants’ final recommendations to the public. Gardner provided a summary of them in an email to Public Source, outlining a move to single-occupancy cells, improving health services and ‘improving the living environment.”
The consultants estimated the cost of their recommendations at $616 million over 10 to 12 years, Gardner said. That price tag could make it hard for the county to implement any time soon as it deals with budget challenges and a 2024 tax hike fresh in residents’ minds.
Gardner said that figure compares to an estimated cost of up to $1.3 billion to construct a new jail from scratch.
Gardner said the recommendations are “under consideration” and declined to comment on the cost or the likelihood of implementation.
Charlie Wolfson is the local government reporter for Pittsburgh’s Public Source. He can be reached at charlie@publicsource.org.
This story was fact-checked by Femi Horrall.
This article first appeared on Pittsburgh’s Public Source and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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