Every year in the United States, nearly 700,000 people cycle through local jails and prisons. People are most often held for an average of three days, which is often long enough to risk losing income, housing, access to healthcare, custody of one’s children, as well as the impact it has on families and communities.
To put that impact into perspective, there are 1.5 million people in prison, 4.6 million on probation and parole, and 12 million more spending time in county jail each year, along with 20 million with a felony conviction. Even more, over 100 million people have some kind of criminal record—leading to systemic discrimination in housing, employment, and education—that’s one-third of the U.S. population (see “Abolishing State Violence” by Ray Acheson). In Dauphin County, there are around 800-900 people in DCP at any given time and another 8,000 under carceral supervision, along with thousands more with a criminal record. People are most often held for an average of three days, which is long enough to risk losing income, housing, access to healthcare, custody of one’s children, and to experience the broader impact on families and communities.
Furthermore, people who are detained pre-trial are more likely to experience a mental health crisis, have their healthcare access interrupted, and for those who are disabled, jails can be deadly environments as they are often unable to provide the level of care needed for their well-being. Consider the case of Guy Stevenson, who suffered from serious health conditions and died after a year in pre-trial detention at Dauphin County Prison, or Ishmail Thompson, who was shortly pepper-sprayed, covered with a spit hood, restrained, and found unresponsive after 20 minutes on July 29, 2021. Unfortunately, jail deaths at Dauphin County Prison are all too common and often result from brutality or medical neglect. Jails in Pennsylvania fail to report deaths, deny public records, and keep deaths hidden through procedural loopholes. PennLive, which launched Pennsylvania’s first jail death database,, found that Allegheny and Dauphin counties both ranked above the statewide and national average jail death rates.
Cash bail represents an off-ramp within our justice system that helps provide the privileged with pathways out of its most brutal aspects. People of color are more likely to be assigned cash bail than their white counterparts. Dauphin County Bail Fund conducted an analysis of the wide disparity in bail assessments in the county throughout 2024.
Despite Black citizens comprising 18% of the county population, they make up 53% of DCP’s population. This study examines the judges with the highest and lowest average bail assessment amounts. MDJ Matthew Pianka presides over various wards in Harrisburg city (pop. 12,077), including wards 11, 12, and 14, which comprise a large percentage of Harrisburg’s Black population, with Black citizens making up 34% of MDJ Pianka’s district. MDJ Rebecca Margerum, who presides over a significantly larger area in Upper Dauphin County (pop. 27,160), has a 94% white population. While both judges have heard around the same number of cases (387 and 352 respectively), MDJ Pianka has assigned over $17 million in bail, whereas MDJ Margerum assigned just under $3 million. In other words, in an area one-third the size of MDJ Margerum’s district, MDJ Pianka has assigned six times the amount of cash bail. Over the course of one year, MDJ Pianka has extracted over $17 million from the county’s predominantly Black community—six times the amount in his larger, whiter district. It is difficult to deny that there is a reason behind this drastic difference, and even more so that race is a deciding factor. When assigning cash bail, MDJs are supposed to consider a person’s financial status and refrain from setting bail that the defendant would not reasonably be able to pay. Bail was not designed to impose an unbearable burden or act as punishment for the defendant. Unfortunately, in practice, this is often what it has become.
Paying cash bail requires collective efforts from one’s support network, straining their community’s stability and leading many people to turn to predatory bail bondsmen. This is not to mention the burden of prison fees, from commissary items to phone calls, with communication rate increases at DCP making it the costliest in the region at 19 cents a minute. Because of this, many people who cannot afford cash bail take plea deals to avoid staying in pretrial detention, regardless of their guilt or the strength of their case. Furthermore, courtwatchers regularly found that defendants had little time to speak with an attorney, with many people moving directly to a plea agreement without any judicial interaction. In one example, a courtwatcher reported that a defendant argued (over video conference) that she did not qualify for felony charges because the prosecution had wrongly taken into account her juvenile criminal record, eventually leading the prosecution to modify the charge.
In this way, the cash bail system prevents justice from taking its course, burdens the public with advocating for themselves, and misplaces public safety resources on strategies that would effectively reduce harm and support victims. Ultimately, reforming bail asks us not only to eliminate cash bail but to replace it with alternative systems of accountability. The Dauphin County Bail Fund works to end cash bail and support all criminalized people.
