(Co-authored with Jack Norton for the Vera Institute of Justice)

The federal government has been fueling a quiet jail boom since the 1980s.

The Iowa caucus, which traditionally begins the presidential primaries, will be held next month, and candidates have been traversing the state for more than a year. In contrast to the last election, criminal justice reform has been a major subject of debate. Among the Democratic candidates, ending the use of private prisons is an oft-repeated talking point, and nearly all are quick to note that the federal government has only a small role in the various and massive state prison systems. What they don’t mention, however, is that the federal government is playing a large and overlooked role in the incarceration of people in jails in rural counties and small cities in Iowa and across the country.

Although the federal government operates prisons, there is no nationwide system of federal jails—apart from a handful in large cities such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. An increasing number of people detained by the federal government, however, are held in a dispersed and shifting network of locally run county jails. The federal government funded the expansion of this network in the years following the 1984 Comprehensive Crime Control Act in order to hold pretrial detainees as federal prosecutors more aggressively pursued drug charges. More recently, the network has been expanded to hold increasing numbers of immigrant detainees. Many counties, such as Marshall County, Iowa, are not home to federal or state prisons but are still part of the expanding network of contracted county jails organized over the last 30 years.

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