Prisoners in Delaware County make up just a small percentage of the over 1.8 million people behind bars in the US. But, according to the Vera Institute of Justice, mass incarceration is a local problem driven by more than 3,000 county-run jails including George W. Hill Correctional Facility here in our backyard. Vera shared statistics about incarceration in Delaware County to help illustrate the scope of the problem, including:
1,360 people were detained pretrial on a typical day in 2018. Many are sitting in county prison simply because they cannot pay bail.
The number of people sent to state prison from Delaware County has risen 268 percent since 1990.
Black people are 23% of the county population but 57% of the county prison population.