Pontiff’s visit to Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility, where 80% of inmates still face trial, comes at a time when many people incarcerated in America are held because they cannot afford bail

Behind barbed wire and under guard towers on the edge of north-east Philadelphia, Pope Francis will meet more than 100 men and women from a dangerously overcrowded prison population drawn largely from the poor, civil rights advocates say.

Some 80% of those inmates at that prison, Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility (CFCF), have not yet been convicted of the crime with which they were charged. Most of them are behind bars because they have not paid or cannot afford to pay bail while awaiting trial, prison spokesperson Shawn Hawes told the Guardian.

Francis has visited prisons in multiple countries, and told the Argentinian newspaper La Voz del Pueblo that when he visits a prison, he asks himself: “Why did God allow that I shouldn’t be here?”

Why the pontiff chose to visit this particular prison is unknown even to the jail’s staff, according to Hawes. He will meet inmates chosen from among those who attend services and were recommended by chapel and social service officials, she said.

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But the facility presents an extreme microcosm of two of the most pressing national prison problems: pretrial detention and overcrowding. And advocates such as Phil Telfeyan, a founder of the nonprofit Equal Justice Under Law, argue that the prison system – particularly in holding those who cannot afford to pay bail – targets the very people Pope Francis has shown the most concern for: the poor.

Presumed innocent and jailed

The prisons in Philadelphia were built to accommodate 6,500 people in all, according to Hawes. As of Monday, CFCF held 2,871 inmates - more than a third of the city’s roughly 8,200 prisoners.

The city’s overcrowded system is a symptom of a trend around the US. With 2.2 million people incarcerated mostly in state prisons and jails like Philadelphia’s, the US now imprisons nearly three times the total prison population in 1990. In all, it spends about $80bn on prisons.

At any given time, between 400,000 to 500,000 of those people have not been found guilty of the charges for which they are incarcerated, and are instead held in pretrial or midtrial detention, sometimes for weeks, months and even years, usually because they cannot afford to pay bail. The Justice Department estimates that two-thirds of those inmates are non-dangerous defendants.

But per capita, Philadelphia incarcerates more people than any other of the 10 largest cities in the US. In 2009 alone, the city spent nearly $300m on jail expenditures, as much as its streets and health departments combined, according to a Pew Charitable Trusts study on the prison system.

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At CFCF, the primary intake center for Philadelphia, the vast majority – 80% – of the inmates are awaiting trial or in the midst of a trial, Hawes said, meaning they are presumed innocent but waiting to stand in court. Every year about 30,000 men pass through the prison.

Bail often acts as a tool of coercion, reform advocates say, that convinces innocent people who cannot pay to plead guilty simply to escape the dangers and strains of life in an overcrowded cell.

“Time and time again,” Rudovsky said, “someone in custody on minor charges will be given the option after a week in jail: ‘Plead guilty on time in and we’ll let you out, or wait three months in jail for a trial.’ It’s not surprising then that a lot of people plead guilty.”

Horror stories and near-misses from the system occasionally make headlines. In June, Kalief Browder, held three years on Rikers Island without trial, his mother unable to pay the $3,000 bail, killed himself at his home in the Bronx. In July, Sandra Bland’s inability to pay $500 bail led her to the Texas jail cell where she reportedly hanged herself days later.

A February report by the nonprofit Vera Institute found that arbitrary bail terms often strain families struggling to free a loved one, especially when that person loses his or her income as a result of the pretrial detention. A 2012 New York-based report found that in non-felony cases without bail, only half the defendants were convicted. With pretrial detention, prosecutors convicted 92% of defendants.

“The data suggest that detention itself creates enough pressure to increase guilty pleas,” the authors wrote.

The system can also self-perpetuate. Markos said that sometimes inmates will miss a court date because guards fail to escort them out of pretrial detention. An unwitting judge puts out a bench warrant, and the police promptly rearrest the person after their release – all without the inmate ever knowing about the court date.

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Telfeyan, of Equal Justice Under Law, said that a lack of money to pay for prosecutors and public defenders, knotty rules about how federal and state courts interact, and discrimination against the poor keep the system churning.

“So many arrestees are people without resources, without networks of friends or family,” he said. “There’s a lot of stigma, of false stereotypes that these people are inherently dangerous or bad.

“Constitutionally, they can’t keep penalizing the poor,” he said, citing the supreme court’s 1983 ruling that judges cannot jail people over court fines. Under the federal standard, prosecutors must prove the defendant is a flight risk or a danger to others, but in local systems, judges and magistrates have far more room to act arbitrarily.

Cells that are ‘basically large broom closets’

For those inside the prison, the extreme overcrowding has been identified by advocates as the source of significant health and safety concerns.

“The main problem is overcrowding,” said David Rudovsky, a University of Pennsylvania law professor who has led several lawsuits against the city over its prisons. CFCF has a capacity of about 2,000 people, he said, and for years resorted to “triple celling” inmates in two-person cells.

“There are a couple of bunkbeds and a kind of plastic mattress on the floor, so someone’s sleeping with their head a foot from the toilet,” he said. Chris Markos, an attorney with Williams Cuker and Berezosfsky who has represented hundreds of inmates, said that CFCF has also lodged inmates in windowless rooms “that are basically large broom closets”.

“That kind of crowding can cause a lot of problems,” Rudovsky said, citing “friction between three men in a cell, increased inmate violence, correctional officer violence, inadequate access to medical care, social services, mental healthcare.

“It just has a kind of escalating power over the inmates. It’s not just the dangers of overcrowding per se. It’s a broader, cumulative problem.”

Philadelphia’s prison population has declined from its 2009 peak of almost 10,000 people, but the city’s efforts to reform the system are moving too slowly for attorneys and activists.

Telfeyan and others recommend a host of reform options, and some jurisdictions, including Washington DC and New Jersey, have overhauled the system. The 2010 Pew report concluded that most reform options are already within reach of officials and judges.



“Nobody can claim here that judicial intervention has completely worked,” Rudovsky said. “Whether papal intervention court can, I’m a skeptic.”

Inmates have depicted gruesome and harrowing conditions at CFCF and other Philadelphia prisons.

In a 2014 lawsuit, inmate Calvin Camps alleged that showers at Curran-Fromhold “are covered in black mold and in disrepair, and the cells are infested with insects”. In another suit, inmate Khalil Madison said a third man “sleeping on the ‘boat’ [a plastic shell] positioned next to the cell’s toilet was exposed to urine and fecal matter”. In a 2011 suit, Melvin Dixon complained that he lived “on the floor basically living amongst the rodents that run in and out of cells.”

Markos said that inmates face nearly constant health risks at CFCF, from infections to respiratory illnesses and epidermal diseases: “We see a lot of skin conditions of varying severity because it’s usually transmittable in these close quarters.”

A 2008 class action suit charged the city’s prisons with conditions “so harsh and degrading, and so dangerous to the health and safety of the inmates, as to constitute cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment and a denial of liberty without due process of law under the Fourteenth Amendment”. A federal judge reinstated the suit in 2012, a year after the city negotiated a settlement.