The Bare Minimum: Effects of Legal Deserts on Pretrial Jail Detention

Legal deserts literature, often applied to the civil realm, is also important to understanding inequalities in criminal legal system outcomes. One issue garnering recent attention is the lack of lawyers, especially criminal defense lawyers and other legal resources, particularly in rural jurisdictions. This place-based gap in access to justice intersects with broader concerns among criminologists and rural legal scholars about increasing rural jail populations, which contrast with declining urban jail and overall prison populations. Most of those detained in local jails in the US are pretrial. Our previous research in rural Washington State found that many were jailed for court nonappearance and other minor offenses, which greater access to legal, pretrial, and social services could help mitigate.

We take a mixed methods approach to study whether and how limited legal resources contribute to frequent jail admissions and lengthy pretrial jail stays. First, we examine the quantitative relationship between availability of criminal-legal resources and jail admissions, as well as length of pretrial detainment, across rural and urban counties in Washington State. Specifically, we assess whether fewer lawyers per capita, lesser spending on public defense, lack of an office of public defense, and criminal court backlogs are related to county jail admissions and lengthier pretrial jail stays, net controls. Next, we draw on qualitative interviews with 71 individuals who spent time in one or more of the six rural jails in our study. Their experiences further illustrate the ways in which the lack of legal resources worsened and prolonged jail stays and undermined individuals’ abilities to recover quickly from arrests. Our findings suggest that broadening access to legal resources in rural areas might reduce incarceration, yet legal resources alone would be insufficient. Our results highlight the need for additional social services that are responsive to the rural context.