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Comment by indymike | Hacker News Reader

In the US a large number of incarceration facilities are ran by the county police (otherwise known as the Sheriff's department).

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The majority of jails in the US are run by county sheriffs or local law enforcement. The majority of prisons are run by the states.

That's like saying software is written in C vs Java. It's still software.

Jails are for very short sentences and short term pre-trial incarceration. This can lead to some really dumb "X% of people in jail Y" type states that sound outrageous until you realize that X is drawn from a very specific subset of the incarcerated population.

I wish it was as clear as string vs float, but it isn't. People get stuck in jails for 3-Undefined years all the time, all over the US. The only difference is "big state owned" and "many sizes incorporated area owned". Some states have laws that define this clearly, some don't. In many cases, even though it might be against the law, a prison is over-filled, so they outsource to county jails, and in others, the jail is over-filled so they outsource to another incarceration facility. It's a shit show, and I feel really bad for people that are caught in it.

Even worse, in some jurisdictions the incoming pipeline for hires routes through running the jail or prisons.

The mindset behind being a good cop and a good prison guard are totally different. Exposing hires to the corruption and violence inside prisons right before sending them to police the streets creates a very adversarial mindset against the public.

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