Incarceration rates in Berks County remain inflated due to poor policy decisions which come at the expense of taxpayers and public safety. This is the conclusion of “Wasted Resources: The True Cost of Jail Detention in Berks and a Vision for Public Safety”, a report released last month by Building Justice in Berks (BJB), The Real Deal 610, and Vera Institute of Justice.
Data on overextended stays and direct testimony from formerly incarcerated people at the Berks County prison underscores the urgent need for reform.
In 2019, based on a needs assessment from an architecture firm with a “vested interest in the construction contract”, Berks County Commissioners began considering a new project that would call for a 1,277 bed facility. In 2022, after residents called to reduce the proposed jail size, the number of beds was capped at 974. Still, the project would have cost $340 million, making it the most expensive infrastructure project for taxpayers in Berks county history.
In 2023, county commissioners paused the project and proposed a 700-person cap on the number of beds, despite its average population already being 781 people in 2023.
“When the county took the right step to pause its consideration of how to build a bigger jail in order to listen to the community and identify alternatives, our organizations decided not to wait around and put the onus on the county to come up with all the solutions,” Crystal Kowalski, lead organizer of Building Justice in Berks, said upon the report’s release. “This report is a symbol of us coming to the table with data and next steps. It’s a commitment to be part of the solution and to bring other voices along with us.”
In November 2023, BJB and The Real Deal 610 began their “Walk With Us” tour, talking directly with formerly incarcerated people to hear their opinions on the Berks County Prison System. The organizations heard from 121 people in various places, such as halfway houses, EDI, ADAPT, and shelters. The interviews were mostly conducted by staffers from The Real Deal 610, who are all formerly incarcerated people. The tour and report were funded with a grant awarded by the Vera Institute of Justice, who also helped analyze the quantitative data from the prison.
The median stay for people admitted into the Berks County Jail was 19 days, even though the median length of stays in other county jails ranges from a few days to a week, and sometimes two weeks. The report found that the county “overuses jail” by detaining a significant number of people on low level charges for extended periods of time.
For being charged with nonpayment of child support, people could face fines up to $1,000, driver’s license suspension, and property seizure, which the report calls “counterproductive.” On the other hand, neighboring counties such as Delaware, Lancaster, and Dauphin have implemented New Employment Opportunities for Noncustodial Parents, which provides counseling and education to address the problem upfront.
According to Jennifer Peirce, the associate director of research for the Beyond Jails Initiative at Vera and co-author of the report, 26 percent of people who stayed more than 90 days only had minor charges such as theft, drug possession, or trespassing.
“That’s something to flag that’s worth further review to see if any of these cases could be handled differently, because the county is spending money and resources housing people for weeks or months at a time,” Peirce said. “One of our recommendations is to review longer stay cases that do not have clear and documented safety or flight risks and find ways to release people sooner.”
On the financial side, it costs $54,000 annually for the Berks county prison to hold a prisoner. In contrast, one standard period of outpatient drug rehabilitation treatments costs on average $8,000 annually, and residential drug treatment programs cost on average $50,000 annually.
Another issue with excessive incarceration is homelessness. Homelessness in Berks County (13 out of 10,000) is slightly higher than the average in Pennsylvania (10 out of 10,000). Many listening tour interviewees who were given places to live said it ended their cycle of incarceration.
Nationally, incarcerated people’s income prior to detention is 41 percent lower than the general population. Most of the listening tour interviewees had been born from 1970 to 1990, meaning they experienced the effects of Reading’s declining economy due to deindustrialization and capital flight. Still, in 2023, about one-third of Reading’s population still lives below the poverty line. And prison fees, including a $50 processing fee, a $10 daily fee for intermittent/weekend sentences, and others cause many people to choose a required work instead of a necessary treatment program.
Dr. Seleda Simmons, founder and executive director of The Real Deal 610, said that generational poverty and subsequent issues of accessibility were major experiences of participants in the listening tour.
“It’s not about them not knowing that they shouldn’t steal. It’s about what’s easier, what’s more accessible. Selling drugs is more accessible. Getting a job is not more accessible because of the education, and everything else that follows,” Simmons said. “It was: I need to eat, I need to feed, I’m selling drugs, I’m robbing, I’m stealing, because I also wasn’t taught anything other than that.”
Most participants on the listening tour spoke about their experiences with the prison system, poverty, and crime beginning as a juvenile. Because of this, Simmons also focused on asking about the services and opportunities, but many did not have them or were not aware of them when young. This makes it easier, as Simmons said, to “continue the cycle of recidivism.”
Some of the recommendations the report includes are developing civilian-led response programs for behavioral health crises staffed by unarmed teams of clinicians, adopting declination policies for charges like drug possession, trespassing, and vagrancy, expanding cite-and-release policies that give people notice to appear in court in lieu of immediate arrest, allocating funding to diversion programs, requiring the “coaching model” training of probation officers, expanding affordable housing to address homelessness, and removing barriers for employment of formerly incarcerated people.
Before and after the report was published, Simmons and Kowalski met with all three county commissioners, the district attorney, the jail’s warden, and the head of adult probation and parole to discuss these solutions.
However, Simmons stressed that including system-affected people in solutions would be, in itself, a major solution. People who have been incarcerated would have a greater understanding of what they need to properly reenter society.
READ: It’s Time to Change the Way Pennsylvania Deals With Probation and Parole
“If I come home and I have all these recommendations from a parole probation that stagnate me, but you’re also telling me to get a job, how is that possible?” Simmons asked. “If you arrest me for child support, my child support is still not going to get that funding if I’m incarcerated. And then when I come home now, because I have a record, it’s going to be more difficult for me to get a job to pay my child support.”
A popular solution discussed among listening tour participants was even more simple: “treat me like a human being.” For example, many listening tour participants said they ate their meals next to their toilet because they had been kept in their cells for all but one to two hours of the day. From the listening tour, Kowalski learned that many people simply wanted someone to talk to and discuss their situation, which could be provided through volunteers.
“I thought, that is what you would want, right? You want to know what’s going on. You just want to process what’s happening,” Kowalski said.
In speaking with the warden, Kowalski learned that the prison is open to volunteering and introducing more programming to facilitate a less oppressive atmosphere. Recently, Kowalski held a mural painting program where about40 prisoners and prison employees painted together and talked with each other.
“The people who worked at the jail even said ‘I haven’t heard people have as free a conversation as they had when they were doing this,’” Kowalski said. “I think just bringing people in from the outside changes culture a bit.”
