Stop-and-frisk, too, plagues the city. An ACLU report found that the Philadelphia Police Department engaged in over 200,000 stop-and-frisk encounters in 2014, 37 percent of which it alleged lacked reasonable suspicion. Already, Kenney is being accused of abandoning campaign promises to abolish the practice. With almost seven out of every thousand citizens behind bars, Philadelphia has the highest per capita incarceration rate of the 10 largest U.S. cities. Three-quarters of the jail population, over 7,000 detainees at last count, waits six months before trial.

Before even being sworn into office, Kenney promised to reduce the city’s jail population by one third in the next three years. The jails have been at over-capacity for decades, causing many inmates to be housed three to a two-person cell, a practice known as triple-celling, “which means there are two bunkbeds, and at night they put down a piece of foam on the floor for the third person, whose head is about a foot from the toilet,” said David Rudovsky, a civil-rights attorney.

As of mid-January, there were approximately 1,380 people in triple cells, according to Rudovsky. He has been a head litigator for four out of the five class-action lawsuits brought against the city for jail overcrowding. The suits date back to 1969. The lead plaintiff in a 2006–2007 class action suit, Lee Bowers, gave vivid testimony about the crowded conditions he endured in a holding cell during his relatively brief but, by his own account, traumatic detainment. He was arrested on a court non-appearance warrant related to payment for his children’s health insurance. For three days he was held in a series of 9-by-13–foot cells—about the size of a small single bedroom—packed with 30 men. Those who got a spot on a bench were lucky, Bowers said.

“People were sitting on the floor, standing up, standing over by the toilets, sitting up on the wall that separated the toilets,” Bowers told the court. The heat, he said, was unbearable. He estimated 90 to 100 degrees. One fellow inmate passed out; he was dragged away by guards to be revived. After three days of this he saw a judge and was sent home, his bench warrant lifted. Several days after he was released from jail, Bowers entered the local hospital for treatment of his leg which was still swollen after he spent a night without drinking anything and curled under a jail bench, cramped by other inmates. He was treated for a severe blood clot.

The most recent overcrowding class-action case, Williams et. al. v. City of Philadelphia, was temporarily resolved in 2008 with a settlement which allowed lawyers for the plaintiffs to monitor the jail-system conditions. But conditions worsened and the jail population again grew; the case was reopened in 2012 at the request of Rudovsky and his colleagues. One response from the city has been to simply build more cells. “When I started this litigation, in '69, there was a capacity in the prison system of about 2,700,” Rudovsky says. Today the capacity is 6,500. “So they've added a lot of beds, but that is both expensive and I say it just invites more people to be in the prison system.” (The city-jail system—where people are held pretrial or for short sentences—is officially called the Philadelphia Prison System.) The problem is, he said, “over-reliance on pretrial incarceration for a lot of people who are not a danger to the community, but are locked up anyway.”