Raquel Scott sighed with relief when Philadelphia prosecutors withdrew charges against her stemming from a domestic dispute this past summer with her older son’s father. She had slapped him during an argument, and a neighbor called the police; uninjured, he declared the whole thing had been blown out of proportion, and refused to testify.

Then, in October, after she’d already beaten the charges, she received a notice to turn herself in at the Montgomery County jail.

The problem was, Scott was still on probation in Montgomery County for a 2015 retail theft. So her Philadelphia charges were flagged as a possible probation violation. That, in turn, had triggered a “detainer” — an order to keep her incarcerated until a judge decided to let her go.

Parole Release to community supervision after incarceration.

Probation A sentence to community supervision imposed in lieu of incarceration.

Scott was caught in a system of incarceration that ensnares thousands of Pennsylvanians who are on parole or probation , trapping them in indefinite detention — sometimes for a week or two, sometimes for longer than a year — with few rights and often without even an allegation that they’ve committed a crime.

JESSICA GRIFFIN / Staff Photographer Victoria Scott comforts her grandson Jaquan Bennett, 4, at her home in North Philadelphia on Dec. 16, 2019. Raquel Scott, Jaquan's mother, was in Montgomery County Correctional Facility on a probation violation at the time, so Bennett and his older siblings were staying with Victoria Scott.

Detainer An order to keep a person incarcerated pending some further action in his or her case.

Rate of correctional control The proportion of the population sentenced to jail, prison, probation, or parole.

Detainers are one way that probation, designed to keep people out of jail, often ends up doing the opposite in Pennsylvania, where the overall rate of correctional control is the second-highest in the nation. It’s a system that’s largely unchecked by law or state court rules, allowing probation officers and judges to impose their own versions of justice, and leaving those under supervision in a state of constant fear and uncertainty.

Scott had turned herself in Nov. 4, not knowing what to expect. It was a month after that before a hearing was even scheduled. “I didn’t know how long I’d be sitting, waiting for a court date. I’d keep going to the counselor saying, ‘There’s nothing in the computer about me?’ ”

After she was jailed for seven weeks, Scott finally saw a judge — and, in a hearing that lasted just a few minutes, the case was withdrawn. That night, Scott was released to repair the relationship with her three traumatized young children and to salvage her job as a manager at Dunkin’ Donuts, with just a few days to scrape together a decent Christmas, plus January rent.

Judge Gail Weilheimer ordered Scott’s detainer lifted with a word of warning: “If you are having any type of conflict with your husband or anyone else, remember: You’re the one on probation.”

Probation violation A failure to abide by conditions of probation, from moving without permission to failing to report to using drugs or committing a new crime, punishable by more probation or even incarceration.

Compared with those awaiting trial, people locked up for alleged probation violations enjoy few constitutional protections: They have no right to bail. And while they theoretically have a right to a speedy hearing, there are many permissible reasons for delay and no specified deadline.

JESSICA GRIFFIN / Staff Photographer Released from Montgomery County jail after seven weeks on an alleged probation violation, Raquel Scott arrived home on Dec. 19, 2019, to hugs from her daughter, Camara Brown, 8, (left), and her son Ra'Kair Spearman, 9. The children's grandmother had taken them in while Scott was incarcerated.

Most will remain incarcerated for weeks or months before they have the chance to see a judge and argue their cases, which often involve minor, nonviolent infractions such as positive drug tests or failure to complete required programs. And by the time they get that chance, many won’t bother to argue — instead accepting any new sentence, often time already served, as long as it means quickly getting out of jail.

“Any time you have someone held in custody, they’re going to be far, far more likely to plead guilty to an open matter,” said Nyssa Taylor, a lawyer with the ACLU of Pennsylvania. “They’re going to be more likely to sign an agreement to waive counsel. Incarceration is by its very nature coercive.”

In Pennsylvania, where 250,000 people are serving sentences of county probation or parole — sentences designed to help them remain lawfully in the community — the number incarcerated on violations has risen rapidly in recent years.

Solution: Allow people to appear on their own for hearings Instead of routinely detaining people accused of probation violations that don’t involve new crimes — known as technical violations — the courts could simply subpoena them to appear. In Philadelphia, most defendants do appear at hearings when notified: In 2018, the appearance rate was 97% in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court, and 87.5% in Municipal Court, where lower-level cases are handled. Typically, anyone who misses a court date receives a bench warrant, which means they could then be detained until a hearing. Who’s doing it? Other states, as well as a number of counties across Pennsylvania, including Bucks County and, in some cases, Philadelphia, do give many individuals the chance to show up on their own in court for technical violations. In Bucks County, probation chief Christine Shenk said jail crowding forces the department to be selective in detaining only the highest-risk individuals. Can it happen here? A requirement to give people the opportunity to appear in court on their own was proposed in House Bill 1555, a comprehensive reform measure in the state House. Under the bill, those who failed to appear could be detained, but would still get a hearing within 72 hours. However, that proposal was gutted in the legislative process, and sponsor Rep. Jordan Harris (D., Phila.) said his efforts toward salvaging the bill are now focused on limiting the length of probation terms, not on addressing detainers. Expand

In Philadelphia, the number of warrants to detain accused violators nearly doubled over the last decade — exceeding 20,000 a year in 2017 — a reality that has hampered officials’ efforts to slash the jail population in half. When the city embarked on that goal in 2015, 51% of people in jail at any stage of the legal process had some type of detainer preventing their release. Today, it’s 61%.

The power of detainers is particularly apparent in Montgomery County, where Raquel Scott was locked up.

Michael Gordon, the county’s chief of probation, said jailing violators is a last resort, after all diversion efforts have failed: “We always try to find the least restrictive environment.”

Yet, public defenders said they could not recall a case where a probation violator was not incarcerated.

“Everyone is detained,” said Dean Beer, the county’s chief public defender. “It can be two weeks before we’re even notified that they’re in custody and what their violation is.”

Pennsylvania has set no rules governing detainers or detainer hearings. So, courts have arrived at starkly divergent answers to questions like: What is “prompt”? And, what’s a “hearing,” really?

People jailed in the Montgomery County Correctional Facility for probation violations remain there an average of three months before they receive a preliminary hearing, an Inquirer analysis of 1,841 violations from the last three years found. It’s no coincidence, then, that 95% of them waived their rights at that hearing, accepting agreements to be released with time served, plus additional probation or parole. Those who did not waive their right to that first hearing ended up incarcerated an additional two months, on average.

Recently, Montgomery County Common Pleas Judge Gary Silow made that proposition clear to a man who was on probation for a 2016 theft, and violated it by using marijuana and skipping a required drug evaluation. The man, already incarcerated nearly six months on a detainer, balked at a deal that would extend his probation through 2022.

“You take it or you don’t,” Silow told him. “I gotta move on. I got a whole courtroom full of people.”

Given that the offer would get him out of jail right away — whereas a court date for a contested hearing could be months away — the man took the deal.

Though Scott spent 20 days in solitary confinement after an altercation with another woman at the jail, on some days without even leaving her cell for a shower, the most painful part of her incarceration was worrying over her three young children — an 8-year-old daughter and two boys, ages 9 and 4. “I cried every day,” she said.

JESSICA GRIFFIN / Staff Photographer Raquel Scott adjusts reindeer antlers on her son Jaquan Bennett, 4. She was incarcerated during Thanksgiving and feared she'd miss Christmas with her kids as well, because it was not clear when the detainer holding her on an alleged probation violation would be lifted.

Her mother, Victoria Scott, took the kids into her house in North Philadelphia, friends helped out, and the school after-care staff stepped up after Scott’s child-care subsidy was cut off due to her indefinite incarceration.

On the evening of her daughter’s release, Victoria, who is disabled, rubbed her face with exhaustion as she prepared chicken and rice, settled the kids with a friend, and got ready to collect Scott from the bus station.

To Victoria, the whole thing seemed deeply unfair. She acknowledged Scott had struggled as a young woman and made poor choices, like stealing clothing for her kids. “It used to be horrible back in the day. I couldn’t take it,” she said. “But she changed around so good.”

On the way home, she ribbed her daughter that her young kids had grown up in her absence, one off to the NBA, another a working architect, the third running college track. Then, more serious, she assured her she’d been saving her food stamps so Scott and her kids would have groceries.

She told Scott she still can’t quite understand why she was incarcerated on a dismissed case, when she was just a couple of months from successfully completing probation. “I never would have thought you would’ve sat [in jail] that long,” she said.