Jail (American)

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A county jail or city jail in the United States is a place of detention for people awaiting trial, or for those who have been convicted of a misdemeanor and are serving a sentence of less than one year.^[1] These jails are, in a sense, small prisons run by individual counties and cities^[1], though some jails in larger communities may be as large and hold as many inmates as regular prisons. Some jails have different wings for certain types of offenders, and have work programs for inmates who demonstrate good behavior.

Jails no longer carry out executions, although the Cook County Jail (and Many others) in Chicago did at one time have an electric chair and a gallows.^[2] Unlike most state prisons, a jail usually houses both men and women in separate portions of the same facility. Some jails lease space to house inmates from the federal government, state prisons or from other counties for profit.

As of mid-year 2005, local jails held or supervised 819,434 offenders. Nine percent of these offenders were in programs such as community service, work release, weekend reporting, electronic monitoring, and other alternative programs.^[1]

In the United States, as compared to regular 'mainline' state and federal prisons, in which prisoners have already been investigated and classified by corrections personnel before being assigned to a level of security and in which many of the prisoners are committed for longer periods of time, jails usually house many prisoners with varying or unknown histories and propensities for violence or disciplinary problems. As a result, many jails operate their booking and receiving units at a relatively high level of correctional security, and also witness a disproportionately large amount of violence and disciplinary problems as compared to mainline facilities.

1 Trivia
2 See also
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Trivia

For many years, people imprisoned at the Los Angeles county jail would write home to relatives and loved ones, claiming to be staying at the "Graybar Hotel". This nickname became so popular that eventually, when people wrote to "residents" of the Graybar Hotel, the Post Office would deliver the mail to the Los Angeles County Jail. When the old county jail building was demolished after a new one was built, some media outlets reported that the Graybar Hotel was being torn down.^{[citation needed]}