That local jail authorities have been farming out beds to wardens of the state and federal prison systems is particularly troubling, given that this system turns jailing into a side-hustle of sorts. Sheriffs and county jail directors can justify expanding these local detention centers, even if crime is dropping, by accounting for inmate traffic from state and federal partners. When looking at how Louisiana became the incarceration capital of the world, one would think it’s because crime is just out of control there. But that’s not the case. According to the report:

This phenomenon is most visible in Louisiana, where the state has largely outsourced the construction and operation of state prisons to individual parish sheriffs. Just over half (52 percent) of the state’s prison population is housed under contract with local jails; and as a result two-thirds (67 percent) of the people held in Louisiana jails are not “traditional jail inmates.” Unlike other states, Louisiana’s jail building boom appears to have been entirely fueled by the pursuit of contracts with the state’s prison system.

Sessions’s call to aggressively ramp up prosecutions of drug and immigration law violations will most certainly help drive that growth. The report notes that Immigration and Customs Enforcement rents out roughly 15,700 jail cells annually to detain people who may be facing deportation—again, people who’ve not yet been convicted of crimes, only suspected. The U.S. Marshals Service rents another 26,200 cells from local jails.

Even many of those jailed for actual criminal convictions have likely landed there because of failures in the health-care system or because other safety nets have given out. The report finds that 65 percent of those incarcerated in jails have diagnosable substance-abuse disorders, while another 15.3 percent of those jailed report being homeless.

To empty those jails, PPI recommends that states create treatment-based diversion programs for low-level drug offenders, so that they can truly get rehabilitation rather than punishment. But states will have a difficult time funding that, given how President Trump has called for hundreds of millions in budget cuts for drug prevention and substance-abuse treatment grants for states.

Another recommendation: Cities and states can set up programs to help people navigate laborious justice-system rules and schedules once they’re arrested and detained for a crime. The reports also calls for judges to move away from cash bail and court-fine-based sanctions that keep people in jail before they’ve been found guilty of anything. Pre-trial detention is often exacerbated and stretched longer than needed because people can’t make bail, post bonds, or because they’ve missed court dates, summonses, or have misread court instructions. The city of St. Louis has tried to address these problems by launching a new web application, YourStLouisCourts, which helps people keep track of tickets, court documents, and sends text reminders about upcoming court dates.

As for the cash-bail system, which has historically kept otherwise poor people in jail for little other reason than being poor, cities and states just might be forced to transition away from this process. On May 18, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the ACLU filed a lawsuit against Randolph County, Alabama, on behalf of a pregnant woman who was locked up because she couldn’t make the $7,500 bail imposed after she was accused of forging a $75 check. The aim of the lawsuit is to have the county stop wealth-based detention practices altogether.