Probation & Pre-trial Detention

A huge percentage of people in Pennsylvania’s jails have not been convicted of the offenses for which they’re being held. They’re languishing behind bars while waiting — often for weeks or months — for trials or hearings about their alleged offenses, simply because they’re unable to afford bail, or because they’re not being granted the opportunity to be bailed out.

Discretionary judicial decisions on the questions of whether to set bail for defendants (and if so, at what amount) and whether to incarcerate people who are alleged to have violated their probationary terms vary widely and are often racially biased or otherwise problematic.

Incarceration of even a few days can have enormous negative effects on the individuals who are detained as well as their loved ones and communities. Even a short stay in jail can impact people’s mental and physical health, employment, housing, custody of their children, and overall stability of their own lives and those of their family members. Longer stays compound all of these problems.

ALC uses many tactics to address the harms of pre-trial and probation-related detention, including litigation, strategic communications, community organizing, and our Court Watch program:

To learn more, search for these Topics on our homepage.

Probation Detention in Allegheny County

The data we’ve collected (especially through our Court Watch program) and detailed in an extensive report we released in July 2023, has helped us to understand the full picture of how probation functions in Allegheny County.

Key findings include:

    • Alleged probation violations are the biggest driver of incarceration at Allegheny County Jail in Pittsburgh, which on average cages about 1,600-1,800 people per day. People who are alleged to have violated some term(s) of their probation, but are awaiting a hearing to determine the facts of their situations, account for up to 40% of the ACJ population.
    • The probation system in Allegheny County is racially biased. Black people are more likely than White people to be sentenced to incarceration instead of probation, be sentenced to longer probation sentences for the same offense, and receive more severe punishments for violations of probation.

After unsuccessful attempts to encourage officials to address the problems we’ve documented with probation in Allegheny County, ALC filed major class action litigation in October 2022, seeking relief for the many people affected by probation-related incarceration in the county.

Bail

ALC has used data from our Court Watch program and other sources to illuminate the biased and harmful bail system in Allegheny County, including publishing a detailed report in 2020 that demonstrated that Black people are more likely than White people to have bail set, and to have higher amounts of bail set, for the same crimes.

We have also given expert testimony at legislative committee hearings about proposed and existing legislation related to bail and presented alternative policies that could reduce needless and harmful pretrial detention.