The people confined in urban county jails currently suffer, and have long suffered, from some of the most brutal conditions of any incarcerated population in the United States.  Two thirds of those inside these jails  are there awaiting trial and have not been convicted of any crime. Almost all of those held in jails awaiting trial are there because they  cannot afford the bail  set for them by prosecutors and courts. America's jailed population is overwhelmingly poor and nonwhite. Many are there because public policy and law enforcement have criminalized their communities through racial profiling and targeted crackdowns. Many have been arrested for minor offenses or for no crimes at all.

Right now, there are 630,000 people locked in local jails across the United States on any given day. Every year, local jails incarcerate more than 10 million people--five times the total prison population. The jail in Wayne County, Michigan, which includes the predominantly African American city of Detroit, is the largest in the state and a leader in these national trends.

The number of people languishing in Michigan's jails has tripled since 1978. In 2019, the  Michigan Joint Task Force on Jail and Pretrial Incarceration  published recommendations for reversing this trend, including reducing the use of cash bail and turning certain misdemeanors into civil infractions. However, as Amanda Alexander, a member of the task force and founder of the  Detroit Justice Center , pointed out, the recommendations do not go far enough. She argues that while these limited reforms would improve conditions for criminalized communities, they fail to respond to the systemic racism that lies at the heart of the jail and its role in the broader carceral state.  According to Alexander :

Reform alone cannot fix an inherently racist and oppressive system. Rather than simply shifting some people away from pre-trial detention based on assessments of how "dangerous" or "violent" they are, we must fundamentally challenge these categories and the law enforcement solutions of criminalization and incarceration. By jailing a poor person and setting free a rich person accused of crime based on their ability to pay bail, we are saying that the poor person is more dangerous than the rich person. The city of Detroit is choosing to perpetuate this racist, classist system by  building a new $533 million jail .

The history of the Wayne County Jail in Detroit is part of the larger story of the exponential growth of incarceration in the United States in the decades-long war on crime and drugs that is simultaneously a divestment from and war on poor and nonwhite communities. By the early 1970s, around 85 percent of the inmates in the Wayne County Jail were African American and more than 90 percent were poor. A large majority had not been convicted of any crime. Throughout the 1960s, the militarization of law enforcement and the increased policing of poor black communities rapidly expanded the population of the Wayne County Jail, creating an overcrowded and inhumane institution (visit the " Detroit Under Fire " website for an in-depth history of target policing and racial criminalization in Detroit in the 1960s and early 1970s). Complaints from Detroiters and a report on jail conditions placed pressure on the county government to remedy conditions, but nothing changed.

The history of Detroit's Wayne County Jail in the late 1960s and 1970s also includes a much less well known story with lessons for today: the response of radical activists who mobilized against mass incarceration and demanded racial and economic justice. As more poor and black Detroiters flowed into the jail, radical attorneys worked with inmates to sue the county government over its conditions, but they did not stop there. They also challenged the widely accepted idea that those in the jail were dangerous criminals, instead arguing that the entire criminal justice system in Detroit deliberately operated to oppress and control poor black residents. The inmates won their case, but the legal victory resulted in only modest reform of the physical conditions of the jail. The Wayne County Circuit Court continued to hold that those in jail represented some unique danger to the community. While some of the jail's worst abuses slowly improved, the city continued to arrest and imprison more people. The foundational injustice of the jail remained: the institutional criminalization of the poor, black, and mentally ill people locked inside. After almost fifty years, the legal battle continues to this day and reveals that a limited reformist approach has failed to address the real injustice of institutionalized abuse in Detroit's jail.

Beginning in the mid-1960s, three parts of the Detroit criminal justice system worked in unison to put poor black Detroiters in the county jail. The white political leadership in Detroit expanded policing in black neighborhoods, including formation of the  Tactical Mobile Unit in 1965  and passage of a  stop-and-frisk ordinance in 1968 . Many arrests involved petty crimes, discretionary charges such as  loitering and disorderly conduct , traffic violations, and other low-level and selectively enforced offenses. Wayne County prosecutors zealously charged African Americans with misdemeanors and felonies, often as a preemptive weapon to coerce plea bargains and ensure confinement of those portrayed as dangerous criminals. Judges set high bail that poor people could not afford, landing them in the Wayne County Jail awaiting trial, often with long delays in an increasingly overwhelmed system. The Wayne County sheriff's deputies who ran the downtown Wayne County Jail brutalized inmates, denied them basic medical care, deprived them of basic hygiene, fed them vermin-infested food, failed to provide them with any recreation, censored their mail, and stole their money. Incarcerated people had to endure these conditions while preparing to defend themselves in court, often while losing their jobs and knowing that their families on the outside were suffering. Because of horrible conditions and indefinite confinement in the jail, many inmates pleaded guilty to crimes they did not commit solely to "escape," even when that "escape" was a state prison.

In the 1960s, the Traffic Court and Recorder's Court in Detroit played key roles in jailing more and more Detroiters for longer periods of time. In 1967, the Detroit Free Press published an expose on the overcrowded Wayne County Jail and the backed-up Detroit Recorder's Court that sent city residents there. From 1965 to 1966, the number of cases awaiting action in the Recorder's Court increased 300 percent, from 1,177 to 3,021. Gerald and William Hunt, two brothers accused of murder, had been stuck in the jail awaiting trial for twenty months. In 1966, the Michigan state legislature passed a bail reform law that was supposed to allow defendants accused of misdemeanors and traffic offenses to post only 10 percent of their bond to avoid jail while awaiting trial. The Detroit Traffic Court evaded this law, requiring a surety from defendants to continue to maintain a high financial barrier for Detroiters arrested and charged with crimes. In 1971, in  Pressley v. Wayne County Sheriff , the Michigan Circuit Court ruled that the traffic court could not require sureties and could only charge defendants 10 percent of their bond. The traffic court responded by exponentially raising bond costs. Michigan's 1966 attempt at bail reform had no effect in the city of Detroit.

As the 1960s continued, the political leadership in Detroit faced increasing pressure from the press and from advocacy groups over jail overcrowding. In 1968, the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, a liberal reform organization, published a study of the conditions in the Wayne County Jail. Its findings were harrowing:

The Detroit newspapers heavily covered the National Council on Crime and Delinquency investigation. Political leaders in Wayne County and the state of Michigan, including Sheriff Roman Gribbs and Governor William Milliken (above), promised to remedy the awful conditions. Despite these pledges, the law enforcement system in Detroit and Wayne County kept jailing people unnecessarily. The story of Fred Jackson exemplifies how the legal system punished poor city residents. On March 18, 1968, Fred Jackson, a 27-year-old African American man, was arrested by the Detroit Police Department for stealing $2.50 worth of cookies. The Detroit Recorder’s Court gave Jackson a $10,000 bond for this alleged crime. Because the judge and prosecutor deemed a cookie thief too dangerous to remain a free man awaiting trial, and because an individual’s freedom awaiting trial depended on financial status, Jackson remained confined in the Wayne County Jail. He languished in the overcrowded, decrepit facility for 18 months. Finally, on April 14, 1969, Jackson got a trial. He testified in his own defense, arguing to the Recorder’s Court jury that he was just walking by the store when police arrested him. It took a Detroit jury 35 minutes to find Jackson guilty. For breaking and entering and stealing cookies, Recorder’s Court Judge Samuel E. Olsen sentenced Jackson to a minimum of 2.5 years in the Jackson State Prison.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, political leaders in Detroit and Wayne County faced increasing criticism for conditions in the jail. The inmates in the jail, and the community activists who advocated for them, realized that direct actions were the only way that change would come. The Inner-City Voice, published by the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, denounced the jail as a racist "torture chamber where people are judged guilty until proven innocent." Kenneth Cockrel and Justin Ravitz, two radical attorneys famous for their defense of poor black Detroiters in high-profile cases, created the Labor Defense Coalition (LDC) in 1971 to "promote the rights of oppressed minorities and poor persons and to combat acts of institutionalized oppression throughout all arms of the administration of criminal justice.” The LDC was critical in mobilizing Wayne County Jail inmates and other activist attorneys to sue the county government in January 1971. They argued that the conditions in the jail constituted cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eight Amendment. They also believed that those in jail should not be there at all. The attorneys charged that more than 90 percent of the inmates, around 1,300 people, were there “simply because they cannot afford the ransom price of bail.” Almost all of these inmates were poor and African American.

On January 25, 1971, the Wayne County Jail inmates and their attorneys filed suit against the Wayne County government. The inmates named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit signed this press statement:

Testimony in the class-action lawsuit revealed the horror and injustice of the Wayne County Jail. Nora Ware was one of the named plaintiffs. Her testimony shows the abuse women suffered in the jail. Nora was confined because she was charged with cashing a bad check. She was jailed from December 9, 1970, until late January, 1971. When she came to the jail she was pregnant and had shotgun wounds on her stomach, arm, and back that were stitched up. She was assigned a top bunk, despite asking deputies for a bottom bunk since she could not climb with her wounds, and even though there were nine open bottom bunks in the ward. She fell out of her bunk and busted open her stitches. She asked to see a doctor, but deputies just bandaged her and gave her an injection. By mid-December, Ware's bleeding and pain was so severe that deputies took her to Detroit General Hospital. She was given prescriptions and told to come back in a week. When she returned to jail, she was never given her medication and never taken back to the hospital. She testified, “The deputies said there wasn’t enough time to take me. The sutures were pulling and drawing and the pellets [from the shotgun wound] were falling out.” At one point, a deputy used a needle that he had just used on another woman to drain an infection on Ware’s arm. With no other options, she started a fire in her cell for medical attention, a common strategy of Wayne County Jail inmates. Then, as she testified, for punishment she was “thrown into the hole and mishandled and this busted more of the sutures.” Ware details her experience in "the hole" in the testimony below.

Negligence and abuse by deputies killed inmates in the jail. In the  testimony below , Michael Lewis recalls an inmate in his ward who suffered from epilepsy. This inmate, James Grubbs, had a seizure his second day in jail on April 26, 1970. Deputies transferred Grubbs to Detroit General Hospital, where he suffered another seizure the same day. Despite these two seizures, deputies promptly transferred Grubbs back to the county jail. On April 28, 1970, he had another seizure, as Michael Lewis describes. Inmates had to bang on the bars and create a ruckus just for Grubbs to get medical attention. Deputies transferred Grubbs to a mental ward, where he died that same night.

The lack of mental health care and the horrific conditions of the county jail drove inmates to attempt suicide, as David Ambrose describes in his  testimony below .

The lack of mental health care and the horrific conditions of the county jail drove inmates to attempt suicide, as David Ambrose describes in his testimony above.

The Wayne County jail inmates won their case in the spring of 1971. A three-judge circuit court panel wrote that "the conscience of the court is not merely chocked, it is outraged." The decision found extensive constitutional violations of the "cruel and unusual punishment" standard and ordered the county government to ameliorate many of the issues in the jail that the inmates identified, including better sanitation, clean drinking water, and improved bedding. The court also ordered the jail to transfer "dangerous mentally disturbed inmates" to a mental health hospital.

However, the court ignored a key issue that the lawsuit brought, which was that poor and black inmates convicted of no crime did not belong in the jail in the first place. The judges rejected the most radical legal concept advanced by the plaintiffs, that the differential treatment of incarcerated people too poor to afford bail, compared to people charged with the same crimes who could afford pre-trial freedom, represented a violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

The circuit court decision obligated Wayne County to address jail crisis to address overcrowding and deplorable conditions without mandating releases, which ultimately meant creating more physical space for more inmates by building more facilities. Improvements in the facilities of the Wayne County Jail were limited and came only through lengthy legal battles between the plaintiffs, the county government, and the courts. The fundamental inequality of jailing people because they were poor and black remained.

Since 1971, the Wayne County Circuit Court has issued dozens of opinions and orders to remedy jail conditions. The  Michigan Supreme Court weighed in  on the case in 1974, when the county government appealed the circuit court's ongoing supervision on the basis of "separation of powers." The Michigan Supreme Court rejected this argument entirely, but the county government continued to resist complying with court orders. The letters below show that conditions remained awful in the jail, despite the court victory in 1971.

 In this letter below , Richard Johnson discussed his attempt to remedy the abuse he suffered in the Wayne County Jail, but the prosecutor denied him.

Throughout the 1970s, inmates in the jail continued to suffer, and the county continually violated court orders.  In 1976, in response to another filing by the plaintiffs and their activist lawyers, the circuit court found William Lucas, the Wayne County sheriff, legally responsible for the preventable suicide of David Fregin .

 In 1976, the Wayne County Circuit Court found William Lucas guilty of contempt of court  for overcrowding the jail, failing to provide adequate medical care, failing to provide inmates with sheets, towels, and linens, failing to provide care for inmates suffering from drug withdrawal, and failing to prevent assaults. Five years after the initial victory in Wayne County Jail Inmates v. Wayne County Sheriff, this legal finding demonstrated the continued centrality of the jail in the larger system of criminalization and oppression of poor black communities in Detroit, and also the limits of the law in the pursuit of justice.

In 1984, the county government opened a new jail in Detroit, expanding capacity as the local, state, and federal governments escalated the war on crime and drugs through racial profiling and targeted enforcement in poor black communities. By 1991, Detroit had around 1,800 inmates confined in its jails on any given day, as many as in 1971 when the lawsuit began, despite 500,000 fewer people living in the city. The county's solution to the legal finding of unconstitutional conditions was not to jail fewer people but rather to jail the same amount of people in multiple facilities.

The Wayne County Jail Inmates lawsuit remains active to this day, because conditions in the jails remain so horrible. In January 2015, Wayne County Sheriff Benny Napoleon revealed that  the county stopped performing any maintenance on its jails in 2011, when construction of a new jail began before being abandoned (for a time).  In another ruling, Judge Timothy Kenny highlighted issues that could have come right out of the 1960s and early 1970s:  the kitchen floor was infested with rodents and vermin; twenty inmates shared showers the size of a phone booth that were infested with mold and fly larvae; the jail reached sweltering temperatures in the summer . And in a thirteen-month period between 2016 and 2017,  eight inmates completed suicide in Wayne County’s Detroit jails .

About the author: Dominic Coschino graduated from the University of Michigan in 2019 with majors in history and political science and wrote his honors thesis about the Wayne County Jail. He was a core member of the Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab research team that created the " Detroit Under Fire " exhibit, documenting police violence and misconduct in the city from the late 1950s through the early 1970s. Dominic created this report for the U-M Carceral State Project's  Documenting Criminalization and Confinement  research initiative and the  Michigan-Mellon Project on Egalitarianism and the Metropolis . He aspires to work in the law to help and empower communities that are oppressed by the legal system.

Additional editing by Matt Lassiter, the director of the Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab at the University of Michigan and the coordinator of the "Detroit as a Carceral Space" research initiative, a partnership between  Documenting Criminalization and Confinement  and the  Michigan-Mellon Project on Egalitarianism and the Metropolis .

Cover image from Inner-City Voice, April 1971.

Many of these sources came from the collections of Kenneth Cockrel and Ronald Glotta, two attorneys who worked on the case, and Pun Plamondon, a plaintiff locked up in the jail for left-wing activism. All of the testimony, letters, and petitions from incarcerated people come from the  Records Division of the Wayne County Circuit Court . Finding this information is incredibly difficult and laborious, requiring hours of slogging through unorganized microfilm reels and expensive reproduction fees. The stories of the incarcerated people who filed lawsuits and testified about the conditions of the jail, and similar accounts from other circuit court cases, are too often silenced by the sheer difficulty of accessing them.

Full citation for documents from archival collections and the circuit court records listed in this bibliography can be through the in-text links.

Dominic Coschino, "Because they cannot afford the ransom price of bail”: The Struggle for Humane Conditions in the Wayne County Jail, Detroit, and the Limits of Legal Activism, 1967-1991," Undergraduate Thesis, (University of Michigan Department of History, 2019).

Pun Plamondon Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

William Lucas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

Kenneth and Sheila Cockrel Collection, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.

Ronald D. Glotta Papers, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.

National Council on Crime and Delinquency. “Adult Detention Needs in Wayne County, Michigan: A Survey of the Wayne County Jail / National Council on Crime and Delinquency.” National Council on Crime and Delinquency, 1968. Bentley Historical Library. University of Michigan.

Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner, "Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2020," March 24, 2020, Accessed May 10, 2020,  https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html .

Prison Policy Initiative, "Michigan Profile," Accessed May 10, 2020,  https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/MI.html .

Ram Subramanian, Ruth Delaney, Stephen Roberts, and Nancy Fishman, "Incarceration's Front Door: The Misuse of Jails in America," Vera Institute of Justice, February 2015, Accessed May 10, 2020,  https://www.vera.org/publications/incarcerations-front-door-the-misuse-of-jails-in-america .

Amanda Alexander, Justice System Needs Transformation, not Quick Fixes, Detroit Free Press, February 9, 2020, Accessed May 10, 2020  https://www.freep.com/story/opinion/contributors/2020/02/09/michigan-criminal-justice-reform-must-tranform-system/4655819002/ .

Eric D. Lawrence, “Judge: Wayne County Jail Shabby, Must be Repaired,” Detroit Free Press, February 16, 2015, Accessed May 10, 2020  https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2015/02/16/judge-says-wayne-county-ended-jail-maintenance/23531281/ .

Ross Jones, “Suicide Surge at Wayne County Jail ‘should be ringing alarm bells all over,’” WXYZ Detroit, July 20, 2017. Accessed May 11, 2020.  https://www.wxyz.com/news/local-news/investigations/suicide-surge-at-wayne-county-jail-should-be-ringing-alarm-bells-all-over .

Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab, "Detroit Under Fire: Police Violence, Crime Politics, and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Civil Rights Era,"  https://policing.umhistorylabs.lsa.umich.edu/s/detroitunderfire/page/home .

Pressley v. Wayne County Sheriff, 1971,  https://casetext.com/case/pressley-v-wayne-sheriff .

Wayne County Jail Inmates v. Wayne County Sheriff; Wayne County Jail Inmates v. Wayne County Board of Commissioners, 391 Mich. 359 (1974).  https://www.clearinghouse.net/chDocs/public/JC-MI-0005-0002.pdf .