Big feature in The Atlantic on rural criminal justice

The headline for Jessica Pishko's big feature in The Atlantic is, "The Shocking Lack of Lawyers in Rural America," and the dateline is one familiar to criminal justice advocates:   Jena, Louisiana, population 3,398, in LaSalle Parish.  (The reason for this familiarity is the Jena 6, a 2007 case involving six African American high school students).  An alternative headline for Pishko's piece is, "When the Legal System Leaves Rural Americans Behind."

Of course, rural justice systems and the rural lawyer shortage have been the topics of several of my recent publications, including here, here and here.  The Atlantic headlines (excepting the subhead) for Pishko's piece don't reveal that the story is really about criminal justice, but a subhead does:  While cities are trying to reform their criminal-justice systems, smaller, more far-flung locales are struggling to provide basic services."  

An excerpt follows:  

The state of rural criminal justice rarely gets reported. In these areas, prosecutors tend not to run on reform platforms. Activists demanding accountability, or asking for the release of people imprisoned for drug possession so they can get treatment in lieu of jail time, are fewer in number.

This reveals the heart of Pishko's story:  the impact of the rural lawyer shortage on rural criminal justice.  At this point, Pishko pivots to the work of the Vera Institute (read more here), which reveals that since 2008, "urban jail populations have shrunk dramatically, while rural ones continue to rise; the highest incarceration rates are now in rural counties."  She includes a quote from Christian Henrichson, research director for the Vera Institute’s Center on Sentencing and Corrections.

This dynamic has profound national implications because it means that people in an enormous swath of the country are being left behind.

One reason for the expansion of rural jails is that local governments (typically counties) contract with state prison systems and ICE to house their inmates.  Another is the rural lawyer shortage:

But many of these rural jails house a large number of local defendants who are awaiting trial.... According to Vera, while urban pretrial populations began to level off and then decline in the early 2000s, those populations kept growing in rural counties, eventually eclipsing urban ones. In 2013, rural counties had 265 pretrial detainees per 100,000 people, almost one-third higher than the urban rate.

As for the story Pishko tells about Jena and LaSalle Parish, here's a key excerpt:

Everyone charged with a crime was appointed a public defender by the judge, as promised by the Constitution. But only three public defenders served the entire parish, working for the 28th Judicial District Court, and they each had more than three times the state’s recommended caseload; all held second or even third jobs to make their own ends meet.

Not surprisingly, conflicts of interest were/are also part of the story of criminal defense representation.  (Here's a 2016 post that gives a flavor of state of public defense in rural Louisiana)

Pishko's entire piece is well worth a read.  And so is my 2010 article, co-authored with Beth Colgan, on local funding of indigent defense (strapped local government budgets are part of the problem with respect to indigent defense, as well as jail finance and operation).  I've also written quite a lot about rural jails here on Legal Ruralism.