He would eventually learn that he had overdosed while using heroin, possibly laced with fentanyl, with a couple of guys who he met during his recent stint in jail. A few days later, Derbyshire woke up withdrawing and confused again. This time, he was in the bathroom of a Wal-Mart, and he had been revived by paramedics — which meant he had to run, because if the police took down his information, he would probably go right back to jail for violating the terms of his release.

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The two overdoses took place within days of each other in early April 2018, both less than two weeks after his release from Atlantic County Jail in New Jersey. Derbyshire, a 40-year-old tile setter with a history of opioid addiction, had been picked up for a bench warrant and a probation violation related to drug use.

He spent two months inside, during which he was involuntarily detoxed from opioids. He described the jail’s withdrawal protocol as two daily cups of a sports drink while being held on 23-hour lock down in a cell with two other men. Every other day or so, someone would check his vitals, and that was it. No methadone, no follow-up care after his release. And Derbyshire isn’t unique. In his case, he was not able to get methadone because he had not been incarcerated enough — one of many requirements at his facility’s program.

David Kelsey, the Atlantic County Jail warden, commented that “since its inception [the methadone treatment program] has provided services and referred to treatment eight hundred individuals.” In most other facilities, evidence-based treatment is not offered to anyone. But unlike Derbyshire, many of those who overdose after release don’t get up again.

As the nation struggles to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, jails and prisons are beginning to release groups of people who are deemed safe for community return. Detention facilities in the United States are notoriously overcrowded, making them transmission hotbeds should the virus find a way in. Already, staff and inmates have tested positive in facilities in Florida, New York, and other places around the nation. California recently announced plans to release 3,500 people from state prisons, and New York City has already released 900. Montgomery County, Alabama, released over 300 people. The majority of people being identified for early release are those who have been accused or charged with non-violent offenses, many of which involve drugs.

A study out of Washington State found that in the first two weeks post-release, the relative risk of fatal overdose among former inmates was 129 times higher than the general population. A longitudinal study out of North Carolina found the risk of fatal overdose was 40 times higher than the general population in the first two weeks after release; for heroin users specifically, the risk was 74 times higher. And a 2019 article published in the journal of Addiction Science and Clinical Practice named post-release opioid-related overdose the “leading cause of death among people released from jails or prisons.”

The reasons behind this dramatic rise in risk are complex. The most obvious factor is that when people are forcibly detoxed from opioids but not provided adequate treatment for the underlying addiction, they return to their communities with significantly decreased tolerance but no more tools to help them deal with cravings than they had when they went in.

“They’re not cured, they’re not treated, they’re not in recovery, they just haven’t been able to use,” said Lipi Roy, a clinical assistant professor at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and an internal medicine physician who specializes in addiction. “Whether [the period of incarceration] be three months or three years, it doesn’t matter … The brain doesn’t forget.”

But new research suggests it’s not just a matter of simple tolerance. The unique social, environmental, and psychological factors faced by people who were recently released from incarceration also contribute to the enormous elevation in overdose risk. Now more than ever, as community supports shutter or limit their services in response to the pandemic and people are urged to stay home, those being released from incarceration are entering a new world filled with more stress and less stability and support than ever before.

“Decarceration without re-entry support systems is only going to be a halfway measure,” said Sheila Vakharia, the deputy director of research and academic engagement at the Drug Policy Alliance. “You can’t let people walk out the doors and assume they will be safer outside than inside.”

“If you think of a person in this situation, they may not have a place to live or the same social networks as when they went in. They might be more worried than usual of being arrested so they may be more likely to inject in hidden places and alone and to rush the shot,” said Megan Reed, a PhD candidate at Drexel University’s school of public health and the principal investigator in an NIH funded study on overdose risk after release. “Very few of the harms we associate with drug use have to do with the drug itself or the actual drug impact on the body; it’s the conditions in which somebody is using.”

Incarceration is a highly destabilizing experience that carries a host of other potential negative outcomes. While incarcerated, people are at risk of losing employment, housing, and even custody of their children, especially during long periods of detainment. Furthermore, the stigma associated with arrest and incarceration, or simply the difficulty and expense of communicating with the outside world while behind bars, can disrupt important familial and social relationships, leaving people with a smaller and weakened support system upon release.

Reed also pointed out that many people who have criminal justice involvement enter the system at heightened risk of fatal overdose. For example, people experiencing homelessness are at both heightened risk of overdose and incarceration. Rates of HIV and mental illness — both independent risk factors for fatal overdose — are also high in detention facilities. Many of these are also thought to be risk factors for severe cases of COVID-19, adding an extra source of anxiety for vulnerable people during the outbreak.

This pre-arrest susceptibility combined with decreased tolerance and the stress and uncertainty that people are facing after they have been released from jail or prison creates a perfect storm of dangerous vulnerabilities. “You have concentrations of other overdose risk factors already inside, and the communities that people are returning to are the same communities that are most impacted in the first place,” said Reed.

Exacerbating all of this is a lack of access to the most effective treatments for addiction to opioids, methadone and buprenorphine. Both are opioid-agonist medicines that reduce craving and withdrawal by filling the same receptors as short-acting opioids like heroin, but without delivering a euphoric high in patients who are properly maintained. They are both approved by a slew of licensing bodies, including the World Health Organization, which has included them on the list of essential medicines because of their proven efficacy in treating opioid use disorder and reducing harmful consequences of use, such as fatal overdose. Unfortunately, the majority of detention facilities in the United States do not offer these medications to inmates who are not pregnant.

“Because most correctional facilities still don’t offer standard of care treatment for opioid use disorder with methadone or buprenorphine, people are released not on treatment back to the community. Unsurprisingly, recurrence rates for opioid use are high and because people’s tolerance is reduced their risk of overdose increases dramatically,” said Sarah Wakeman, medical director of the Substance Use Disorders Initiative at Massachusetts General Hospital and an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard University.

The federal government recently loosened regulations around the prescribing of methadone and buprenorphine during the pandemic, but did not address access to people who are currently incarcerated.

Research has shown that maintaining people on medications for opioid use disorder while incarcerated and providing low-barrier referrals upon release will dramatically reduce the post-incarceration overdose rate. Wakeman and other experts also suggest dispensing naloxone, the drug that can reverse an opioid overdose, to people who are being released back into the community.

Spurred by lawsuits and activism, an increasing number of facilities are beginning to offer access to these medicines, but the majority of detention centers remain reticent. This is unlikely to change without a major shift in the way the criminal justice system views and handles drug use and addiction.

“Our justice system is the biggest houser of people with substance use disorders and mental health disorders in this country,” said Vakharia. “[But] they weren’t built for this…they were built to house the ‘bad guys’ in the most simple understanding of how that works and what that means. They were never built or staffed to think of the long term, nuanced needs of people with these multifaceted challenges.”

“I understand the sheer panic of not knowing what to do, and you want to get your kid off the street because you really honestly believe they’re going to die,” said Cochran. “But I had a thought that, you know, if my daughter gets arrested, she’s gonna have a record.”

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The concepts of “enabling,” “rock bottom,” and other punitive approaches toward addiction are mainstays of the 12 step programs that continue to dominate recovery culture despite a lack of scientific evidence backing their efficacy. It’s not uncommon for parents of people in the throes of addiction to feel compelled to call the police on their loved one, pray for their incarceration, or feel relief when their loved one gets locked up. Cochran still encounters the mentality frequently in “Moms for All Paths to Recovery,” an arm of her nonprofit “Heart of a Warrior Woman,” dedicated to disseminating the harm reduction tools and tenets she wished had been more available when she was desperate for ways to help her child.

“In that moment, [parents] say nothing else is working,” explained Cochran. “They need a reprieve and somehow they think no matter what anyone has told them, [their child’s incarceration] gives them a reprieve.”

Parents, however, are not the only people who uphold the myth that incarceration benefits people struggling with addiction. Many people in recovery credit incarceration with their turnaround. It’s not uncommon to hear people say they would never have stopped using if they hadn’t gotten locked up, or that detoxing felt psychologically easier in jail, where they knew they couldn’t get a hit. Amanda Mansur, a restaurant server and mother living in Massachusetts, told TalkPoverty over the phone that, in retrospect, being incarcerated was a “positive experience.”

“It taught me…about gratitude. You don’t realize how good you have it until you lose everything,” said Mansur.

But incarceration is highly traumatic and embedded with both short- and long-term negative consequences. In the long term, convictions, especially felonies, can follow people for years after their release from jail or prison. People with felony drug convictions face difficulties renting homes, gaining employment, and even accessing public benefits.

Most states no longer enforce a lifetime ban on public benefits like food assistance and cash benefits for families with children, but many still impose temporary bans or reinstatement requirements outside of their criminal sentence. That can mean drug testing, which is costly, invasive, and not always accurate; the more common, less expensive urine drug tests, for example, are prone to false positives, which can result from the use of over-the-counter medicines or even edible poppy seeds.

The negative consequences of incarceration are compounded for people of color. Members of Black and Latinx communities are more likely to be incarcerated for drugs, and one in nine Black children has an incarcerated parent, as opposed to one out of every 57 white children. One study conducted in New York City found that Black men with criminal backgrounds faced harsher employment discrimination than white men with similar convictions. One out of every 13 Black Americans will lose voting rights in their lifetime due to felony disenfranchisement. Over 250,000 immigrants have been deported as the result of drug charges since 2007, according to data compiled by the Drug Policy Alliance.

But all of these consequences hinge on the assumption that a person survives the ordeal of incarceration. For people who are addicted to drugs, survival is not guaranteed.

“Any time someone has to use drugs in a way that’s secret, that’s hidden, that’s rushed, that’s not around people, that’s not in a safe secure network where you can get help, you see increased harms,” said Kim Sue, the medical director of the Harm Reduction Coalition, who also performs clinical work at Rikers Island Correctional Facility and recently published a book titled “Getting Wrecked: Women, Incarceration, and the American Opioid Crisis,” that examines the use of methadone and buprenorphine within jails and prisons. Those harms can include increased rates of infections and diseases like HIV and Hep C that can result from sharing syringes and other equipment.

Those harms can also manifest as death due to withdrawal. Although opioid withdrawal is not conventionally considered fatal among otherwise healthy adults, a number of people have been found dead in cells across the country. In 2017, Mother Jones reported that although nobody is tracking how many of these deaths are taking place, 20 lawsuits were filed against United States correctional facilities between 2014 and 2016 in response to alleged opioid withdrawal-related deaths. Withdrawal-related dehydration is often cited as a primary factor in these deaths. In more than one of these cases, distressed inmates reported concerns for their life to family members over the phone, or begged staff for water and medical care in earshot of their cellmates. Surveillance cameras caught the excruciating withdrawal and death of a 32-year old Michigan man who was in addiction treatment when he was arrested and sentenced to 30 days in jail for failing to pay a driving ticket.

“If you’re doing a lot of vomiting or a lot of diarrhea…[that] can lead to different electrolyte disturbances which can affect cardiac function, leading to cardiac arrest,” explained Sue, who also noted that many times, medically untrained guards are the only people available to assist incarcerated people in withdrawal. She added that even when inmates are transferred to medical units, most facilities do not have doctors on site full time.

There is a growing awareness among criminal justice authorities that medications used to treat opioid use disorder, like methadone and buprenorphine, are essential for people struggling with opioid addiction. Often prompted by lawsuits, several facilities have begun inducting incoming inmates who are addicted to opioids, or allowing people already prescribed the medications to continue taking them. Regardless, the majority of facilities do not allow the use of these medications, except for people who are pregnant (even then, patients are typically tapered off after pregnancy, sometimes while still recovering from childbirth).

This means that most people who are incarcerated while addicted to opioids will undergo forcible detox. In some cases, even when people are given methadone or buprenorphine as a withdrawal aid or for maintenance while inside, they are not given adequate referrals on the outside. In some areas of the country, these medications are difficult to access or too expensive to pay for out of pocket. For people addicted to opioids, being forcibly detoxed without adequate access to evidence-based treatment like methadone or buprenorphine can be dangerous upon release because it leaves them at risk of relapse, but without their former tolerance. Opioid-addicted people who have been released from incarceration are at significantly heightened risk of overdose in their first several weeks back in the community.

Even in facilities where evidence-based treatment is offered, the risk of trauma remains ever-present. “[People who are incarcerated] get killed by staff, they get killed by other inmates…they get raped, they get sodomized,” said Dinah Ortiz, a vocal harm reductionist and parent advocate at a New York defense firm. “You don’t know how many rapes I saw, you don’t know how many women I saw sodomized during my little six months in Rikers.”

“If you’re the kind of person who needs to take a walk when you’re feeling stressed, you cannot do that [while incarcerated]. If you’re anxious around other people who are loud or fighting, you can’t avoid that. The environment is not therapeutic,” said Jonathan Giftos, who worked as the clinical director of substance use treatment for the Division of Correctional Health Services at Rikers Island. “A lot of the health side works hard to mitigate the harms of the environment, but you can only do so much.”

Even when formerly incarcerated people praise their experience behind bars, they also often share stories of trauma and relapse that didn’t end with jail or prison, but with evidence-based care that they accessed in the community. Mansur, for example, admitted that she relapsed shortly after her release, and continued using for three years before achieving sobriety with the help of a self-referred buprenorphine prescription. She detailed that she’s had difficulty renting apartments because of her conviction, which was for theft that she committed in order to pay for drugs. She’s also unable to work in the medical field or with vulnerable populations like children or the elderly, which she finds disappointing because she had studied psychology in college.

“Maybe if I had been introduced to medication-assisted treatment previously from going to jail, maybe that would have prevented [the need to be arrested],” Mansur stated, before acknowledging that her addiction became “much worse” after she was released from jail.

“If your [child] is out of control there are ways to go about [helping them] that do not involve incarceration,” advised Ortiz. “If you have that mentality that I prefer they be in jail, then that’s the mentality that they are going to have, too.”

Like any curious 14-year-old, I asked, “Why they let you go?” She responded with an undertone of cynicism: “They said they need to downsize, so they let me go.”

“Mommy, what does downsize mean?”

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Since my overly expensive degree in Organizational Behavior from NYU, I’ve learned that not all downsizing is as bad as what happened to my mother.

According to the Harvard Business Review, proponents of downsizing argue that it is an effective strategy, with benefits such as increased performance and sales. Stepping out of Business 101 is decarceration, the downsizing of incarceration to reduce the scale and reach of the criminal justice system. It’s time to start now, especially as violent crime is down in most cities and lawmakers weigh the decriminalization of many offenses, such as drug possession/use and sex work.

Downsizing means police should not be mental health first responders. They need mental health treatment. They need help. Police officer suicides in 2018 were the highest ever, with 228 officers dying by suicide. Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, believes the 228 number “is undoubtedly underreported.” Probation and parole officers are not substance abuse counselors or employment specialists.

And all of this is okay because we don’t need them to be. They just need to get themselves healthy, and rightsizing should be an option. We already have proficient social workers, mental health professionals, substance abuse counselors, and employment specialists who are not utilized enough or funded appropriately.

The criminal justice system is a discordant machine of more than 55,000 criminal justice-related agencies nationwide inclusive of police, courts, district attorney offices, jails, prisons, parole and probation boards, and ecarceration. I’m sure I’ve missed a few here, but the point is that America’s criminal justice reform intoxication should include more than reducing the number of people in prisons or the amount of lockups closed: It should mean fewer institutions of incarceration, too.

Downsizing in this context means relieving some institutions of their duties and giving them a severance package that will allow them to take care of their own house.

Our tax dollars pay the bill of more than $270 billion to keep the criminal justice system intact. If the criminal justice system were a country, it would be 41st on the GDP tally of 186 countries. We — and I mean “we,” because “We, the People” allow for this profane, ineffective, and inefficient use of resources — currently have open-air incarceration, where about 4.5 million people live under some form of community supervision, alongside the 2.3 million people in prisons. We spend $29 billion on the federal law enforcement budget (#99 on the GDP tally). We have 70 million people in the U.S., not incarcerated, but living freeish with a criminal conviction.

Amid this display of laissez-faire governance, there is progress to soberly consider. Bail reform in several states is decreasing the debtor’s prison construct. Restorative justice models are sprouting up across the country, effectively decreasing exposure to all points of the criminal punishment system. Progressive judges like Victoria Pratt “sentenced” people who came before her court to write essays, instead of lockup. Law enforcement administrators from across the country have been meeting as Executives Transforming Parole & Probation (EXiT) to operationalize the downsizing of their reach and their caseloads. In their “Statement on the Future of Probation & Parole in the United States,” they assert: “As people who run or have run community supervision throughout the country and others concerned with mass supervision, we call for probation and parole to be substantially downsized, less punitive, and more hopeful, equitable and restorative.”

Several years ago, when I was a violence interrupter for the Cure Violence program in Brooklyn, New York, I spoke at an intimate convening of community residents, police, and elected officials. During my comments, I said my job is to figure out ways to put myself out of work. My work was to reduce shootings in the area of Brooklyn where the violence interrupter program operated. Even then, I understood that any person or institution engaged in intervention work should hope that their interventions are no longer needed. The criminal justice system is an operation of interventions ostensibly created to deal with violations of the societal contract. Because of the disproportionate use of these interventions on Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian Pacific Islander populations, we understand that we have a racialized system of control.

White supremacy aside for a moment (as if it is ever possible to put the ideology of white supremacy in timeout), the 55,000 agencies of the criminal punishment system, e.g., the courts, law enforcement, and community supervision, should keep a humbling view of themselves.  They should be working to put themselves out of business. They need to see downsizing as a means to community efficacy.

Since my mother’s untimely dismissal from her job, our family figured it out, like most working-class families. We pooled our resources together. My mother still has a few choice four-letter words in her Trinidadian accent to describe the process of being laid off. I assume the 55,000 criminal justice agencies will also have a vulgar reaction to real downsizing. But I am sure those of us in communities that are involuntarily cuffed to the criminal punishment system will also find a way to pool our resources together to create safe neighborhoods we all deserve.

One year later, in 2017, de Blasio had a change of heart, and decided that he would propose a plan to close Rikers within 10 years and build four new jails across the city in its place. Members of the #CloseRikers campaign, many of whom are formerly incarcerated, have supported the building of four new jails to replace Rikers, too.

Close one jail to build four new ones was the limit of their imagination. But it should not be the limit of imagination for people of color and especially people who spent as much as one day in jail.

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The move towards opening more humane jails and state of the art “jail centers” is happening all around the country, from Sioux City, Iowa, to Spokane, Washington, to Oahu, Hawai’i. But that’s just the latest euphemism in the history of prison reform. From plantations to convict lease gangs to penitentiaries to correctional facilities, we have a collective conditioning to center confinement, even when the numbers provide a different narrative.

Reductions in the New York City jail population because of bail reform and other policy changes has made the once unrealistic idea of closing Rikers one of political pragmatism. According to statistics provided by the New York Police Department, New York City’s overall crime rate is continuing a downward trend. In fact, the homicide rate is at the lowest since the 1950s.

There is no Batman with a neverending utility-belt of crime-fighting tools intimidating the city’s underworld. Community-based programs aimed at prevention and intervention are the Caped Crusader. Crime in New York City declined at the same time that policy shifts forced the NYPD to stop using stop and frisk as its main policing tool.

The imaginations of activists, most of whom spent time on Rikers, is now being actualized.

This next step should not include the construction of another cage. If you build it, you will fill it, and according to scholar, Angela Davis, “jails and prisons always become overcrowded.” America’s prisons are already running at 103.9 percent capacity. The ACLU has been suing the state of Hawai’i since 1984 for its prison overcrowding; prisons there are now at an average of 167 percent capacity.

Prisons and jails, especially in America, are direct descendants of slave plantations. Laureates such as Ava DuVernay and Michelle Alexander have plainly made the case for this nexus.  Convict-leasing gangs were created after formerly enslaved Africans fought for their freedom in the Civil War, which were the precursors to the modern-day penitentiaries and jails.

Speaking at the Smart on Crime Conference at John Jay College earlier this month, Darren Mack, a formerly incarcerated leader and member of #CloseRikers, said that a part of the plan to close Rikers and open four new jails is to have social service providers run the new facilities instead of the Department of Corrections. But replacing correctional staff with any other kind of a professional is a jail with lipstick. Los Angeles residents fought against similar cosmetic changes by winning the battle to halt the construction of $2.2 billion jail-like mental facility.

If advocates, especially those who have lived in jails, don’t use this moment to close jails, 20 or 30 years from now prison reformers will be thinking of ways to improve these same jail centers.  In 1979, the French philosopher, Michel Foucault, wrote on the subject of prison reform: “One should recall that the movement for reforming the prisons, for controlling their functioning is not a recent phenomenon. It does not even seem to have originated in a recognition of failure. Prison ‘reform’ is virtually contemporary with the prison itself: it constitutes, as it were, its program.”

Now, I appreciate that the voices of formerly incarcerated are loud and numerous on both sides of this debate. Homogeneity in any movement is a myth at worse and unrealistic at best.

So here we are. We are at a moment when we can push, prod, and perform the dreams of the abolitionists of old: freedom. The upcoming biopic of Harriet Tubman, already getting Oscar buzz, will hopefully remind us that her first goal and hurdle was to convince caged human-beings that they were not free; that a plantation with better amenities was still a plantation committed to the peculiar institution of trampling Black souls to build a greater America. Dr. Tubman, as I like to call her, left us a vital lesson to remember.

Better conditions of confinement, though a necessary touchpoint of our humanity, is not freedom. Building new jails in a moment when it is becoming vogue to reduce the prison population is a cognitive dissonance that will likely result in creative ways to suggest Black and Brown people belong in them. America always finds a way to imagine confinement for people of color. Look at how kids are caged at the Mexican-American border.

We, especially those of us committed to implementing solutions that eradicate the need for jails and prisons, should not limit our expertise and our imaginations to soluble solutions that create more cages to be filled.

We can Harriet this moment.

The conditions that led to the riot were nothing new. MCCC was designed to hold 301 people, but at the time was packed with over 400. The jail has a history of chronic overcrowding; in 2016 the American Civil Liberties Union of Hawaii filed a complaint that named MCCC as the most “egregiously overcrowded” on the islands, to the point that it was unsafe. Among other issues, the report notes that it was common for three, four, or sometimes five people to be placed into cells designed for two, forcing them to sleep on the floor among roaches and rats, sometimes with their heads beneath the toilet.

Tempers were strained by other issues, as well. Anonymous whistleblowers told The Maui News about undersized, nutritionally insufficient meals, and last year, the facility was fined more than $16,000 for failing to maintain a functioning fire alarm system. The phones — which often serve as the sole connection to incarcerated people’s children, partners, and other family — were chronically broken. “And mail,” Sam said, “we’d get [letters] that were weeks and weeks and weeks postdated, or never, ever get them; they’d just get sent back.”

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On March 11, 2019, some of the people detained at MCCC began complaining to the guards. It started as a typical, minor confrontation, but this time they’d had enough of being ignored. When a guard ordered everybody back to their cells, several detainees refused. And then they did more than refuse. They began by throwing chairs at windows, smashing computers, and stacking together toilet paper rolls and other flammable items. Overbooked and understaffed, the situation quickly became more than the guards could control. Soon, there was a fire. Detainees report being locked in cells while the module burned, their guards nowhere to be seen. Fire sprinklers worked only sporadically. Smoke filled the cells, blindingly thick. Sam said he was able to escape to an outdoor recreational area, but when he and several others arrived, police negotiators yelled at them to go back inside and leave through the emergency exit, or face escape charges. But according to Sam, those emergency exit doors were jammed.

Eventually the fire was doused, but detainees then had to contend with police in riot gear, who were beating people, sometimes after zip-tying them, according to the reports given to The Maui News. Once the riot was settled, people jailed in the facility were sent back to the same cells that had just been trashed. Many had no access to working toilets. Sam’s mattress was gone. Eventually he passed out on the concrete floor, succumbing to sheer exhaustion.

In the month after the riot, two inmates escaped from the facility through a broken door. MCCC has not stopped housing people, not even for repairs, which include fixes for smoke-stained walls and replacement beds, chairs, tables, and kitchen equipment. One module had to be decommissioned due to the damage; the people housed inside were relocated to other areas of the facility, which are now even more crowded than they were prior to the riot.

When asked for comment, a prison official told TalkPoverty “The disturbance at the Maui Community Correctional Center (MCCC) is under investigation and internal review by the Department of Public Safety. There is nothing further we will be discussing about the on-going investigation at this time.”

The damages are expected to cost 5.3 million dollars, much more than it would have cost to fix the phones or provide sufficient meals to the people housed in the facility. National estimates place the cost of feeding incarcerated people at around $2.62 per person per day; raising that figure by a full dollar would not bring MCCC’s food budget, at capacity, to even half a million dollars. And phone calls, which cost money to detainees and their families, are a highly profitable industry in the corrections world, which means those phones essentially pay for their own repairs. What happened at MCCC is an extreme, dramatic example of the deleterious effects of overcrowding within correctional facilities, but the core issue is one that quietly affects pretrial jails and prison facilities across the nation.

Last April, guards were so overwhelmed by a riot in a South Carolina maximum-security prison that they waited more than four hours to enter the building, leading to the deaths of seven inmates. A 2017 riot in Delaware that led to the death of a corrections officer has also been attributed to overcrowding and understaffing. And earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Justice deemed Alabama state prisons for men were in violation of the Constitution due to severe overcrowding that led to physically and emotionally dangerous conditions. Some evidence suggests overcrowding may even be linked to a rise in the use of solitary confinement.

Overcrowding can manifest in everyday deprivations, like the denial of visitation, vocational and rehabilitation programs, and appropriate medical care. And it stems from laws and policies that target vulnerable populations. There are laws targeting transient and low-income people, such as panhandling, loitering, and public camping ordinances. Then there are those which could theoretically affect anyone, but somehow tend to target the poor anyway. Drug laws, for example, disproportionately affect people like Sam; addicted, cash strapped and in need of medical treatment. Sometimes people can be incarcerated for months simply for carrying a used syringe or a baggie with stray powder.

Those laws are paired with the cash bail system allows wealthier people to pay their way out of jail pending trial, and leaves those with less economic means — about 460,000 people, or one-quarter of all incarcerated people —  behind bars. People who face pretrial detention are more likely to be convicted, usually through a guilty plea.

When people are picked up on allegations that are essentially the result of deprivation — whether of food, housing, or appropriate medical care — and can’t make bail, they languish in correctional facilities until those facilities become stretched beyond capacity. Because these laws essentially target people for activities of necessity — for example, sitting on a sidewalk — they lead to overzealous arrests of people who don’t have the money to bond out. Too often, the crimes that land people in jail stem from an acute need for mental health or substance use services —the exact type of care that these facilities are unable to adequately provide.

What took place in Maui is only one example of a nationwide issue. Across the country, cash bail practices along with anti-drug user and anti-loitering laws continue to funnel people through an already overloaded system, increasing the cost demand on facilities to provide for the basic needs of the people housed inside. The result is hundreds of thousands of people crammed into jails and prisons that are unsafe, unhealthy, and, quite possibly, unconstitutional.

Editor’s note: When requested, names have been changed to allow people to talk more freely about their experiences behind bars.

Google credited an odd arrangement of organizations for helping them with the decision, including the Essie Justice Group, a collective of women seeking to end mass incarceration, and Koch Industries, a multinational conglomerate run by the richest oil tycoons in the country.

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Facebook announced later that day that it would also ban bail bond ads, but that the details were “still being worked out.”

Aside from predictable backlash from bail bond providers, the joint decision has been relatively uncontroversial. The bail bond industry is, truthfully, about as scummy as it gets. Bail bondsmen require clients who can’t afford bail to pay a non-refundable portion of the bail they owe (usually about 10 percent), and even after they meet all their court appearances and the money is returned, the clients get nothing back—and they’re often charged loan fees that accrue after their case is resolved, pushing them further into debt. The practice is so despised that the United States and the Philippines are the only two countries in the world that even allow for-profit bail businesses to exist.

It’s not yet clear how effective blocking these ads will be. However, Google and Facebook’s decision is significant not for the effect it’ll have, but for what it represents: The movement to end cash bail has built enough momentum to get two of the largest companies in the world on its side. Behind the tech giants’ decision is an army of grassroots groups leading local movements to end bail—and their weird, cutting-edge, creative methods of gaining popular support.

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One of the most persistent myths about America’s justice system is that defendants are innocent until proven guilty. In practice, the opposite is true: Defendants are assumed guilty, jailed, and only released before trial if they can afford to pay their bail.

Around 70 percent of the more than 700,000 prisoners in America’s jails have not been convicted of a crime. Most are in jail because they can’t afford to pay for their freedom, and they weren’t lucky enough to be released on “recognizance,” or without bail. In New York, only 1 in 10 defendants can afford to pay bail at arraignment. The rest are forced to await their trial behind bars, which can sometimes last years.

Even just one or two days in jail can have life-altering consequences. Ezra Ritchin, director of operations at The Bail Project and the former director of the Bronx Freedom Fund, an organization that pays bail for New Yorkers who can’t afford it, says, “A lot of the things you see in our justice system happen in those first few days.” If people don’t show up for work the next day, they could lose their job. If they’re homeless and don’t sign in for a shelter, they could lose their housing—and if just one family member doesn’t sign in because they’re in jail, their whole family could be living on the street. The first few days are also when people are most likely to die in jail, including by suicide, and it’s when inmates are most likely to be the victim of physical and sexual abuse.

Prosecutors use the threat of jail to force people into accepting plea deals, even if they’re innocent. More than 90 percent of New Yorkers who can’t afford bail will end up pleading guilty, even if they didn’t commit a crime, simply because they want to go home.

“You’re sitting in jail, and you’re told that if you maintain your innocence, then you have to stay in jail and wait it out,” explains Ritchin. “But if you plead guilty, you get to go home to your family and your community.”

Like all instruments of mass incarceration, bail takes the heaviest toll on black and brown communities. Black people are already much more likely to be arrested than their white counterparts for the same crime—up to 15 times more likely for certain low-level offenses like marijuana possession. They’re also less likely to be able to afford to pay for their freedom. The median bail for felony convictions is around $10,000, which is more than what most black women who can’t pay their bail made in the entire year before they were incarcerated. But even smaller bonds for misdemeanors are out of reach for most defendants: A 2012 report found that even when bail was set below $500, a majority of New York City defendants—almost 90 percent of whom are black or Hispanic—couldn’t afford it.

The Bronx Freedom Fund started out of the Bronx Defender’s Office in 2007, where public defenders witnessed firsthand the devastating effects of a system that incarcerates people for not having enough money. The Freedom Fund pays bail for people accused of misdemeanors so they can stay in their communities while they stand trial. In 2017, the fund bailed out almost 1,000 people, and more than 50 percent of them had their cases dismissed entirely.

Now, a growing number of people are recognizing the power of bail funds to directly fight against systemic racism. Ritchin says that a large part of the Freedom Fund’s donations come from people who “read some articles, see the website, and are looking to make a direct contribution to the fight against mass incarceration.”

“One really beautiful thing about a bail fund,” says Ritchin, “is that you get to say, ‘I’m interested in pushing back against mass incarceration, and now there’s one less person who’s sitting in jail.’” And bail fund money is revolving, so once someone meets all their court dates—as 96 percent of the Freedom Fund’s clients do—the money is returned and can be used to bail out someone else.

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Aside from Koch Industries and the Essie Justice Group, Google also credited another organization for influencing its decision to block bail bond ads: Color of Change. Color of Change is the country’s largest online racial justice organization, and a major partner of National Bail Out, a collective of black organizers working to end pretrial detention and mass incarceration. Last year, Color of Change worked with National Bail Out to raise money for Black Mama’s Bail Out Day, a campaign to bail out incarcerated mothers on Mother’s Day.

“Our ultimate goal is to end money bail,” said Clarice McCants, Color of Change’s criminal justice campaign director.

Last year, National Bail Out bailed out more than 120 mothers for Mother’s Day. This year, they bailed out mothers in 16 cities, saying “We will bail out mama’s in all of our varieties. Queer, trans, young, elder, and immigrant.”

National Bail Out has paid more than $600,000 in bail to a network of dozens of community bail funds that includes the Bronx Freedom Fund. As this network has grown in recent years, so, too has its methods of collecting donations. One of National Bail Out’s largest sources of funding is Appolition, an app that allows people to donate spare change from credit card purchases to help end mass incarceration. In its first five months, Appolition raised $130,000.

Another funding source that has sprung out of this movement is Bail Bloc, an app that runs in the background of your computer, mines cryptocurrency, sells it, and donates the funds to Bronx Freedom Fund.

“Bail is a form of currency mining,” explains Maya Binyam, editor at The New Inquiry and one of Bail Bloc’s co-leaders. She says that cryptocurrency mining bears a “rhetorical relation” to bail. “The state incarcerates people before they’ve been convicted of anything and then forces them to pay for their own release. Bail Bloc allows you to offer your computer as the target for that mining in their stead.”

The app uses about as much energy as running a YouTube video. If you have it open during business hours from Monday to Friday, it’ll up your electricity bill a few dollars per month, and generate roughly an equivalent amount of the cryptocurrency Monero—essentially shifting the burden of the donation from you to whoever pays for the electricity that you’re using.

On Christmas day, after three months of mining from roughly 1,000 daily users, Bail Bloc donated $3,333.77 to the Freedom Fund.

“We want this technology to be available to people who don’t have $100 to donate to a bail fund, but nevertheless use electricity at the institutions they move through—schools or gentrifying coffee shops,” explains Binyam. This is one of her favorite parts of the project. “I worked at a day job where I was one of the only people of color, and there were a bunch of racist people in the office. And I just downloaded it on a bunch of work computers, and it felt kind of like a good ‘fuck you.’”

The most common critique they’ve heard is that there are more efficient ways to donate toward ending mass incarceration than mining Monero—which Binyam sees as positive.  “Instead of saying, ‘Why are we donating money toward bail?’ people are saying, ‘There’s way more efficient ways to donate money toward bail,’” she says. “Which is kind of amazing.”

Binyam says that Bail Bloc was designed to court public opinion and lift up the work of activists leading the fight against cash bail, like National Bail Out and the Bronx Freedom Fund. Grayson Earl, one of the creators of Bail Bloc, says he was also inspired by Black Mama’s Bail Out—a common refrain in these types of movements. One campaign will inspire another, which inspires would-be organizers to start their own community group, then artists and techno-utopians add their own ironic twist, and pretty soon the movement has become so massive and culturally relevant that Google, Facebook, and Koch Industries are trying to get a piece of it.

“The system is unjust enough that it requires organizations to be attacking it from every angle,” says Ritchin. There may be plenty of groups that have joined the fight against mass incarceration, he says, “but there’s even more groups jailing people.”