A Report On Race, Poverty, and Pretrial Detention in Hamilton County, TN
Within the United States’ criminal legal system, the bias against Black and impoverished people is far-reaching, pervasive, and widely documented in research. Hamilton County, Tennessee, is a blatant example of a racially stratified, wealth-based municipal criminal system that leverages pretrial detention in order to obtain plea deals from desperate defendants who can’t afford bail.
This situation has been obscured from public view by the lack of transparency from the local Sheriff’s Department and other county officials, who release no public data on county-wide crime statistics, arrest numbers, or conviction rates. CALEB has obtained two years of Hamilton County arrest, court, and jail data in order to provide a first-time look into the inner workings of the local judicial system.
This situation has been obscured from public view by the lack of transparency from the local Sheriff’s Department and other county officials, who release no public data on county-wide crime statistics, arrest numbers, or conviction rates. CALEB has obtained two years of Hamilton County arrest, court, and jail data in order to provide a first-time look into the inner workings of the local judicial system.
OUR KEY FINDINGS
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Pervasive Bias Against Black Defendants The criminal system in Hamilton County treats Black defendants more harshly at critical points in the pretrial process which influences their eventual case outcomes. Disadvantages for Black defendants exist across every metric we examined and are most pronounced in the data regarding arrests and cash bail. While white residents of Hamilton County are arrested at a rate roughly consistent with the national average, Black residents are arrested at a rate over 3 times higher, and once arrested, they are given bail amounts 4 to 6 times higher than white defendants despite being more likely to be low income.
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Poverty As A Driver of Pretrial Detention Those who are low income face a bleak outlook regarding pretrial freedom. 63.24% of those arrested are jailed for their entire case and are never released pretrial. Nearly 1 in 3 are given a bond but cannot afford to pay it, and 1 in 4 are held without bond until their case is closed. When defendants are able to pay bail, those in areas with an average household income of under $50k effectively pay 3 times more in bail than those living in areas with an average household income over $100k. The poorest residents of Hamilton County face an even starker disparity, paying 6 times more in bail when accounting for income than the wealthiest residents. In Hamilton County, pretrial release is highly dependent on a person’s financial circumstances, not their risk to the community, and as a result, more than half of those arrested will not be released pretrial at all.
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Uniformity of Case Outcomes and Sentencing Those who can’t afford bail face a case resolution process heavily weighted against them. With each added week of detention, a defendant’s likelihood of paying bail and being released decreases by 36.82%. Every step of the way, they are discouraged by court officials from seeking a trial by a jury of their peers, and are fast-tracked via judicial pressure into accepting guilty pleas with harsh sentences attached. 96% of all arrests are resolved off the record by a General Sessions Court judge, with less than 3% of cases being escalated to a potential trial in Criminal Court.In the two years analyzed, only 14 arrests (0.06%) led to a trial where a jury found a verdict of guilty. Although plea agreements are widely thought to carry lighter sentences, 95% of all charges where defendants plead guilty receive one of the three maximum sentence terms allowable by law, demonstrating no distinction in punishment based on charge severity or other case factors.
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