Waiting For Your Trial? First, Try Jail

The phrase 'pre-trial detention' has a fairly bland, innocuous ring to it. But for prisoners around the world awaiting trial — some of whom are forced to wait for literally decades — it's a terrifying phenomenon. Just ask Jagjivan Ram Yadav, a man accused in India of a 1968 murder, who spent 38 years in jail before finally securing release on bail at age 70. (The average murder sentence in India is 14 years.)

And he isn't alone. This week, allAfrica.com reports that in Nigeria, fully 65% of all prisoners have never been convicted or tried. As the result of missing files, absent witnesses and mismanagement (no kidding), says allAfrica.com, out of 46,000 people imprisoned in Nigeria, fully 30,000 of them are still waiting for their day in court.

The trend is true from hemisphere to hemisphere. In Guinea, up to 80% of men, women and children in prison have been locked away for prolonged periods (read: months on end) while waiting for a dysfunctional system to dictate their guilt or innocence. Likewise at one point in Haiti's prison annals, nearly four out of five detainees were awaiting resolution of their cases, with some of them held for years before their cases were heard. (This wasn't exactly what MLK Jr. had in mind when he talked about "justice delayed, justice denied," but if the shoe fits, may as well put it on.)

Neither is the U.S. immune. The country's as experienced in the art of keeping yet-to-be-tried people locked up as any other. In fact, every night, as Matt has previously written, over half a million people sit in American jails — not because they're dangerous or even because they're guilty, but simply because they can't afford bail. Some of them are forced to wait in prison for months on end before ever getting the chance to air their case.

Of course, fixing the problem doesn't necessarily require a gambit as radical as that India undertook this past January, when it decided to free nearly 200,000 prisoners that had been stuck in jail waiting for trial (some of them accused of crimes with sentences shorter than the time they'd already served). Here in the U.S., for example, greater use of pre-trial release and monitoring is one good option on the table.

But when you have literally thousands of people who've been languishing in prison for years without trial — as is the case in places from Nigeria to Guinea — a Hail Mary pass like India's starts to look quite reasonable.

Photo Credit: Erika Hall