Three ways Cherelle L. Parker can fix Philadelphia’s jails

Mayor Cherelle L. Parker has put public safety at the top of her agenda as Philadelphia’s new mayor, declaring a public safety emergency and vowing “to restore a sense of lawfulness in the city” in her 100-day action plan. But we are still waiting to hear her proposals for the part of the city with arguably the highest concentration of lawlessness: the sprawling jail complex on State Road.

The public safety emergency that exists for both incarcerated people and staff in Philadelphia’s jails should be clear from the brutal litany of headlines in the first month of Parker’s term. Most recently, 59-year-old Mike Osborne was murdered after a much younger man, who prison officials knew to be violent, was placed in his cell.

Hours earlier, a 70-year-old man who had been locked in a cell with a 32-year-old was taken to the hospital after a fight. And just days before those attacks, two incarcerated men were stabbed in a fight, with one being hospitalized for wounds to his head and neck. Those incidents fit into a grim pattern in city jails: During a one-year period ending in September, people in the custody of the Philadelphia Department of Prisons took about 100 trips to the emergency room per month.

Since 2020, at least seven people have been murdered in Philadelphia’s jails. To put that number in context, before that, there had been no homicides in the jails for about three years. If we are to bring back respect for the rule of law, can we allow this barbaric reality to be the status quo in what is supposed to be our most heavily supervised and secure environment?

What is less obvious, but no less real, is how the safety crisis behind bars affects those of us on the outside. It’s not only threats like those posed by the four people who escaped from confinement on State Road last year, including a man charged with four homicides whose flight with a fellow incarcerated person went undetected for 19 hours.

Far more significant are the potential long-term consequences of the trauma endured by incarcerated people when they eventually return home, as nearly every one of them will. On any given day, more than 40 people are discharged from the jails back into the community. Some will leave with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder that make it difficult to readjust to society.

As a court-appointed monitor put it in her latest report on efforts to address unconstitutional conditions in the jails, “the trauma experienced by [incarcerated people] is profound and clearly observable to all who work in, enter, or reside in PDP facilities. Exposure to extended periods of isolation, institutional violence, squalor, and neglect breach all standards for humane confinement and is certain to have lifelong effects for many.”

Parker has yet to say how she will address the systemic issues underlying the public safety emergency in jails, from the growing shortage of corrections officers to the stubbornly high jail population. By Prisons Commissioner Blanche Carney’s own admission, at current staffing levels, the jail population would need to be reduced from 4,500 to 3,500 to adequately ensure the safety of incarcerated people and staff.

Instead, the mayor’s rhetoric and policies lean heavily on “tough-on-crime” strategies that threaten to swell the overcrowded jails further. At the same time, the jails are admitting people from other counties, including the man the authorities said killed Osborne.

Parker’s first order of business should be to hire a new prisons commissioner with a bold, actionable plan to address the crisis in the city’s jails. Such a plan should include urgent measures to recruit and retain more corrections officers while using existing resources to ensure people in custody are kept safe — as well as working with the courts, and other agencies, to reduce the jail population.

Increased oversight of the jails is also needed to hold our leaders accountable for change. Instead of relying on the failed policies of the past, Parker should offer her full-throated support to legislation in City Council for an amendment to the City Charter to create a new jail oversight board with real teeth.

The mayor should also task justice system stakeholders with decreasing the jail population by at least 500 people, which would permit the jail to reduce its use of the Detention Center and reassign staff to the jails experiencing the most severe personnel shortages, easing many safety concerns. The Detention Center is an old, decrepit facility without air-conditioning and has the smallest population among the city’s four jails.

Parker’s vision for a safer Philadelphia must take a more holistic view of criminal justice, one in which arresting people who commit crimes is only the beginning, and not the end, of the city’s responsibilities to its citizens.

Claire Shubik-Richards is the executive director of the Pennsylvania Prison Society. Thomas J. Innes III is the director of prison advocacy for the Defender Association of Philadelphia.