Yesterday on Fresh Air Nancy Fishman, a project director at the Vera Institute, told us about the mess that is the jail system in the US. I knew bits and pieces of what she said but not all of them and not the totality they make.

According to a report by the Vera Institute for Justice, there are more than 3,000 local jails in America, holding more than 730,000 people on any given day. Nancy Fishman, a project director at the Vera Institute, tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross that jails “have impacted a huge number of Americans … many more than are impacted by state prisons.”

The Vera Institute’s report documents that there are almost 12 million admissions to local jails each year, representing about 9 million people. Most of those jailed, she says, are being held for low-level offenses, such as drug misdemeanors, traffic offenses or nonviolent property crimes. And, she adds, the majority are poor.

Because if they’re not poor, they can make bail. The people there are mostly being held pre-trial. Their poverty can end up trapping them there, because they get charged fees – yes, charged fees for being in jail pre-trial – and they can end up with big debts.

FISHMAN: Well, I think that, you know, the one thing that we know about people in jail versus people who get, for example, arrested or stopped by the police who don’t end up in jail is that the people who are in jail don’t have the money to pay bail. So most of the folks passing through jail, most of the admissions to jail, are for low-level offenses. They’re not for serious and violent offenses.

There are people in jail who are being held for more serious crimes. But the vast majority are for nonviolent, property, sometimes drug misdemeanors, local-level violations. People end up in jail, primarily- and stay in jail primarily because they don’t have the money to pay bail.

GROSS: Let’s talk about the function bail is supposed to serve.

FISHMAN: Sure.

GROSS: So yeah, what is that function?

FISHMAN: The irony of bail is that its initial purpose was to make it possible for people to get out of jail – right? – that you couldn’t be held in jail without a finding of guilt or prior to a finding of guilt without having an opportunity to get out. But the irony is that now bail really functions to hold people in. And in places where bail is – in a lot of jurisdictions, it’s mandatory that bail be set. But if they don’t want you to get out, they set, you know, multimillion-dollar bail.

But the challenge is this means that if you have money to pay bail, you can get out no matter how dangerous you are. Whereas, if you’re poor and all you’ve committed is a traffic violation, which is one of the biggest drivers, frankly, of jail admissions in most places, you’re going to sit in jail because $500 is a lot of money to you. And I think that that’s one of the great travesties, frankly, of jail admissions right now, is that we have people sitting in jail for long periods simply because they can’t afford to pay.

GROSS: And does that create a kind of spiral of debt?

FISHMAN: Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of places, particularly in some of the smaller jurisdictions, there’s a huge network or a huge burden, frankly, of fines and fees that are associated with a jail stay or with any passage through the court system. This is something that’s relatively new and has grown and grown in a lot of places.

So people, in addition to having to pay bail, they also – they’re assessed a cost for their housing. So it’s as if they’re in a hotel, so there’s a daily rate that they are responsible for. They will have to pay the cost of any lab tests associated with their case. They will have to pay the cost of drug testing.

If they apply for a public defender, a lot of places actually have a fee. You have to actually pay money to apply for a public defender who you get because you can’t afford to be represented. There are other costs. People get referred into programs – drug treatment programs – or they’re required to be drug tested when they’re out. They have to pay for those.

They will often have to pay for the cost of probation supervision. And so you’re talking about people who often come in in fragile economic situations and end up that much worse by the time they get out.

GROSS: Well, while you’re paying your room and board at the jail, you’re also having to pay your mortgage or your rent.

FISHMAN: Right.

GROSS: So your expenses have just gone up because you’re being incarcerated. You said a lot of these fees are fairly new. How new and what is the rationale behind charging people basically for room and board while they’re being incarcerated?

FISHMAN: There’s been tremendous growth over the past 40-45 years in the size of our criminal justice system – particular growth in the number of jails and the size of the jails. We’ve seen a fourfold increase in the jail population for the past 45 years, and along with that have been the construction of new and bigger jails.

And the reality is a lot of the communities that have built these jails don’t have the funds to support them. They’re not supported by state tax revenue, by federal tax revenue. They’re supported by local community budgets, and a lot of these places are not wealthy. They don’t have a lot of money to cover it. And so the solution has been to try to get that money from the people who pass through the system. But the challenge is most of the people who are passing through that system don’t have the money either.

And so what we see is that people get assessed fines and fees – all of these fines and fees – they can’t pay them. And that can end up driving them back into jail, which only increases the pressure on the jail system and the justice system overall and makes it more costly. So it’s ultimately kind of a vicious circle.

And even if they get out, they still have that debt.

The US punishes people harshly for being poor.