Two persistent myths that hinder #cjreform

After talking to hundreds of GOP delegates at Just Liberty's table at their state convention in San Antonio last month, Grits noticed two incredibly common misconceptions demonstrating the public is unaware of some very basic facts about the justice system.

1. People think crime rates are high and increasing when in fact they're low and getting lower.
2. People do not know and in some cases refuse to believe that most inmates in county jails are pretrial defendants who've not yet been convicted, as the Texas Oberver recently reported. Rather, most people imagine jails are used to punish people after they're convicted.

The Observer headline said 3 out of 4 county-jail inmates is being held pretrial. As of July 1, the percentage of pretrial defendants out of local jail populations was actually 71.4 percent, according to the Commission on Jail Standards, so that's in the ballpark.

The same data show that, contrary to popular belief, county jails aren't really used much at all for formal punishment: Only about six percent of county jail inmates on July 1st were serving out punishments for crimes in the jail (i.e., people convicted of misdemeanors and/or felonies and sentenced to county jail time). Another 10 percent or so were convicted felons waiting for transfer to the state prison system.

Grits has theories about why the public has failed to understand the amazing crime decline witnessed over the last quarter century. I believe the media barrage about violent crimes from all over the country in the modern social-media era gives an impression that terrible murders and rapes are becoming more common, when in fact, for any given person, they're less likely than ever to be victimized by crime. They're just more likely to read about crimes from somewhere else. (MORE: A commenter pointed to this story about problems with and limits of MSM crime reporting.)

I'm not sure what explains the misunderstanding about what jails are used for - maybe it's a function of how the justice system is taught in school, or of law-enforcement rhetoric (and/or lazy reporting) that conflates arrest with punishment and accusations with guilt. Or maybe it's just that facts on the ground changed. A quarter century ago, pretrial defendants made up just a third of county jail populations.

Regardless, what we found tabling at the GOP convention was that, when people understood who is actually in county jails - people accused but not convicted who are still "presumed innocent" in the eyes of the law - they were more likely to support bail reform and a host of other decarceration measures. But these persistent myths are serious obstacles to reform; people who believe them are a lot less sympathetic.