By Chris Palmer
The Philadelphia Inquirer
PHILADELPHIA — Philadelphia’s jail population has reached its lowest level in recent memory — the result of a behind-the-scenes effort that has quietly reduced the number of people incarcerated in city-run facilities by more than 20% over the past six months.
Fewer than 3,700 people were in city custody as of this week, according to data from the Philadelphia Department of Prisons — the lowest tally in at least a decade, and more than 50% lower than the 8,000 people who were jailed in 2015.
Just as notable, the reduction comes after the jail population had remained steady for nearly four years. Between January 2021 and September 2024 , city figures show, the number of people in custody had consistently been between 4,300 and 4,800.
The recent drop is among the most significant short-term fluctuations over the past 10 years. One similar downturn was in 2020, at the onset of COVID — a dip that was short-lived. Others were in 2018, after District Attorney Larry Krasner was sworn in on a promise to curb incarceration, and in 2016, when the city received a $3.5 million grant to reduce the number of people behind bars.
In contrast to some of those changes, however, this reduction comes as gun violence in the city continues to plunge. Homicides and shootings are both rivaling their lowest paces in Philadelphia history, police statistics show — meaning that if the trends hold, the city in 2025 could see record-low levels of both violence and incarceration.
The reduction resulted in part from an ongoing class-action lawsuit filed in 2020 over what prisoners called inhumane and dangerous conditions in the jails. After a federal judge overseeing the suit said last year that the city was not sufficiently addressing a longstanding lack of staff in its facilities, officials came to believe that an alternative way to address the issue was to reduce the number of prisoners for staff to oversee.
“We realized what the problem is and we’re trying to work on it and fix it — federal lawsuit or not,” said Michael Resnick, commissioner of the Philadelphia Department of Prisons.
As a result, the city’s courts, jails, District Attorney’s Office, and Defender Association went on to collaborate on initiatives that were specifically designed to lower the jails’ head count.
One of them, overseen by Municipal Court Judge Karen Simmons, is a monthly program in which she holds emergency bail hearings to determine whether people recently placed in custody can or should be released to await trial.
“A lot of these people are very poor,” said Kenny Young, the supervisor of the District Attorney’s emergency bail review program. “It’s a poverty tax. They’re just sitting in jail. Who’s helping them? So we said, ‘Well, what can we do?’”
Simmons has also been seeking to resolve trials for low-level misdemeanors more quickly. Many cases used to linger for months, with defendants sitting in jail as their hearings were delayed multiple times. Simmons has tried to stop that, telling prosecutors they either need to move the cases forward or withdraw the charges, said Elisa Downey-Zayas , director of the Alternative Sentencing Unit at the Defender Association.
And in Common Pleas Court, Judge Rose Marie DeFino-Nastasi has taken steps to expedite reviews of cases in which people are held for probation-related issues.
David Rudovsky, an attorney involved in the class-action suit, credited the federal judge overseeing it, U.S. District Judge Gerald McHugh, and the local officials who went on to develop new initiatives that have fueled the jails’ rapid population decrease. Defendants in city jails are typically housed on bail before trial or due to violations of probation or parole.
And although there are still significant safety issues to resolve in the jails, Rudovsky said, almost none of them could have been addressed without first confronting the imbalance between staffers and prisoners.
“I’m hoping we’re getting to a point where it’s going to be a more permanent situation,” he said.
Past reductions
Philadelphia has worked to reduce its jail population before.
In 2016, the city received a $3.5 million grant from the MacArthur Foundation to trim the number of people in custody by 34%. At the time, it had the highest per-capita incarceration rate of any big city in the country — fueled by a system-wide penchant for holding large numbers of pretrial detainees.
Krasner’s election two years later led to further reductions, as he instructed his prosecutors to stop charging certain low-level offenses and stop requesting cash bail for others.
And at the onset of the COVID pandemic in 2020, officials began working to curb transmission of the virus behind bars by identifying prisoners who might qualify for early release.
Each of those instances led the city’s jail population to fall from a height of about 8,000 people in 2015 to around 4,500 by 2021.
But beginning in 2020, the jails began experiencing a significant staffing crisis, with hundreds of corrections officers retiring, quitting, or simply not showing up for work. At times, units were completely unstaffed, and those who did report for their shifts reported harsh working conditions, including unpredictable and mandatory overtime.
Chaos in the jails soared. In one 22-month stretch, more than 25 people died behind bars, an Inquirer investigation found — a combination of homicides, suicides, and drug overdoses. The jails’ mortality rate was at one point 77% higher than the national average.
In an attempt to retain some sense of order, prisoners were often locked in their cells for 23 hours per day. But locks were often easily hacked, and violent episodes continued.
Against that backdrop, lawsuits were filed targeting what plaintiffs called inhumane and dangerous conditions.
And although the city committed to address problems including staffing shortages and prolonged lockdowns in an April 2022 settlement agreement, McHugh, the federal judge, found the city in contempt last year, saying its efforts to honor the agreement were insufficient.
He ordered the city to pay $25 million into a fund dedicated to improving the jails, rapidly ramp up staff recruiting and retention efforts, and explore options for reducing the number of people in custody.
While the jails are still understaffed, with 850 sworn staff positions sitting vacant, the agency has hired about 170 people since last year and retention among correctional officers has improved, Resnick said.
Quicker screenings
Some of the solutions to the head count reduction have been fairly straightforward. The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, for example, previously ran only one bus per month from the city jails to a state prison. Now, the state is making twice as many trips.
The number of people waiting to be transferred to begin their sentences has since dropped from about 120 people to 20, said Resnick.
The Defender Association has been at the forefront of the work, particularly in getting people with substance abuse issues into treatment programs more quickly.
Traditionally, incarcerated people in addiction had to go through a detailed screening for certain services and diversion programs before they could be transferred out of the jails. And there was often a six-to-10-week wait to receive the evaluation, known as a Forensic Intensive Recovery, or FIR, screening, said Andrew Pappas, pretrial managing director for the defenders.
Sometimes, he said, people would finally get an appointment, but wouldn’t be taken to the facility because of the jail guard shortage, and they’d go back to the bottom of the wait list.
The city’s FIR program also has not had a Spanish-speaker on staff, prolonging those defendants’ wait times, he said.
Now, Pappas said, staff at the Defender Association are doing the evaluations themselves and have identified alternative programs that don’t require a FIR — allowing people to move into treatment more quickly.
No quick fix
Keeping the jail population low requires constant work from all agencies, officials say. For Pappas and Downey-Zayas, that has meant taking the lists of incarcerated people home at the end of a workday and reviewing them late into the night.
“It’s not sustainable long-term, but I think we’re all here because we care about our clients being in jail, and none of us wants anyone else to die or be hurt in jail,” said Downey-Zayas.
They said the city needs to hire a full-time attorney to review the cases and petitions long-term. They’d like to have the emergency bail hearings weekly, but there’s not enough staff, Pappas said.
The defendants who are candidates for those hearings are typically people held on bail at or below $100,000 and without any outstanding issues requiring them to be held. But that population is constantly in flux because new people are arrested and added to the system every week.
Other stubborn challenges complicate the issue, said Resnick, the jails’ commissioner. The average stay in the jails is 260 days, which he called “far too long for a county jail.” About 60% of those in custody require maximum security, and about 600 people there are charged with murder.
On the flip side, he said, about 45% of people coming to the jails are gone within two weeks. He wants to look more closely at this population to see if there’s a way to divert them from ever arriving, or expedite their release.
“It begs the question,” he said, “why they are here in the first place.”
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