Edric Wilson, a 47-year-old Black man, was jailed for 18 years without a trial.
He was arrested in 2006 on charges of capital murder and aggravated assault and sent to Harris County Jail in Houston, according to the Houston Chronicle. The murder charge was dropped in August 2024, and Mr. Wilson pleaded guilty to the unrelated aggravated assault charge. He was released on parole in February 2025.
The Houston Chronicle shared that Mr. Wilson is one of about 230 people identified as having been in Harris County Jail for more than two and a half years, along with another 1,350 people who have been behind bars for at least a year.
“Harris County, we’ve been noticing in the past five years that there were an enormous number of complaints about court resets and lengthy pretrial detention. Just reset after reset after reset,” Krishnaveni Gundu, co-founder and executive director of the Texas Jail Project, said to The Final Call.
A court reset happens when a court postpones or reschedules a hearing or trial. Ms. Gundu believes this usually happens to “coerce people into taking plea deals.” Outside of Mr. Wilson, she knows of one person who has been in jail for over eight years and another for over nine years.
But long jail times are not just a Texas problem. CalMatters, a nonprofit news organization, published an investigation in March 2021 on how 75% of California’s inmates were being held in jail without being convicted or sentenced for a crime.
At least 1,317 people were waiting in county jails for more than three years, and 332 people were waiting longer than five years. One man had been jailed for nearly 12 years.
Most of the defendants held in jail before their trials are Black and Latino, such as in San Francisco, where Black people are 5% of the population but make up half of the unsentenced inmates who were in jail for more than a year, according to the CalMatters story.
“People being held pretrial for hundreds of days is, unfortunately, not that uncommon,” Wanda Bertram, communications strategist for the Prison Policy Initiative, said to The Final Call. “I’ve heard about it in other places. … I’ve spoken to people about this in Detroit.”
Jail is supposed to be short-term. In its frequently asked questions, the Bureau of Justice Statistics defines jails as “locally operated short-term facilities that hold inmates awaiting trial, awaiting sentencing, or both, and those sentenced to a term of less than or equal to one year.”
It defines prisons as “longer-term facilities run by the state or federal government typically holding felons and persons with sentences of more than one year.”
From July 2022 to June 2023, people admitted to local jails spent an average of 32 days in custody before release, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2023 inmate report, published in March.
For experts in jail advocacy and pretrial reform, the factors that tie into longer jail time include being unable to post bail, backlogs in the court system, and the lack of social services.
The bail problem
The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, National Representative of the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, and the Nation of Islam have been longtime voices of guidance and warning, including in jail and prison reform.
In “The National Agenda: Public Policy Issues, Analyses, And Programmatic Plan of Action,” which was produced out of the Million Family March in 2000, called and convened by Minister Farrakhan, it outlines the issues related to America’s prison and jail system.
“The disproportionate incarceration of Black Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans and others in the United States is a crisis of mammoth proportions that we must address.
In many places, up to 50 percent of persons from our communities are on probation, parole or jail. Our failure to address this crisis will greatly diminish our family power and voting power,” the agenda notes on page 39 in the chapter titled “Prison Reform.”
Wendy Shang, a senior consultant for research and resources with the Pretrial Justice Institute, shared her concerns about bail affordability.
“In general, I think the issue that we’re concerned about that applies to a lot of people is when people are being held because they can’t afford bail,” Ms. Shang said to The Final Call.
“That is a major cause of people being held for excessive amounts of time, is because we’re not saying that they present a threat; we’re not saying they’re not coming back to court, but they just can’t pull the money together.”
She explained that bail is supposed to be a “mechanism for release,” but instead, “it has gotten turned around where people envision bail as being something that only some people can afford.”
In a report titled “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2025,” published on March 11, the Prison Policy Initiative presented data that most people in jail are awaiting trial due to being unable to pay bail.
Race also plays a role. In 2023, Pew researchers found that Black people made up, on average, 12% of their local community populations but 26% of the jail populations.
In 16% of jails, the share of Black people in the jail is at least three times their percentage of the local population, and in 29% of jails, the share of Black people is at least four times their population percentage of the community, according to a study by The Pew Charitable Trusts.
In addition, as of 2022, Black people were admitted to jail at more than four times the rate of White people and stayed in jail for 12 more days, or about two weeks more, on average.
Other studies show that Black men are less likely to get a non-financial form of bail.
“There are different kinds of ways people can be released from jail. The one we’re most familiar with is the court sets a bond, and the person eventually posts the bond. But there are non-financial forms of release.
There’s something called release on recognizance, where you just sign a piece of paper saying you’ll come back to court. Or sometimes they’ll have something like, if you don’t come back to court, then you owe a certain amount of money,” Ms. Shang said. “Black men are much less likely to get non-financial forms of bail. They are more likely to get higher bond demands.”
She called it a snowball effect: an already higher contact with police plus higher bond demands equals more Black men in jail; being less likely to get out of jail leads to being more likely to get a sentence of incarceration.
Ms. Shang also described the harmful effects jail can have on individuals and their families. Individuals face the possibility of losing their jobs, homes and cars. In addition, their children are now having an adverse childhood experience, which can put them at risk for future physical and mental health issues.
Ms. Bertram pointed to cases being pushed back by courts as another reason for lengthy jail stays. “That’s often because courts have too many cases to manage or are not managing their cases efficiently,” she said. One of the other reasons for the court backlog is people missing court, she added, which leads to the creation of new hearings.
She listed several solutions to help: one, having policies that help people attend their court hearings on time, as most people do not miss court on purpose, including better reminder systems; two, having built-in services such as childcare and three, releasing people from custody before they go to trial as often as possible.
“Perhaps you have people who are in jail who, truly, the seriousness of their offense means they really need to be there, but there are also people who are sitting in jail pretrial with charges that are not even that serious,” she said.
One further solution she named is eliminating cash bail. Illinois was the first state to do so, with pretrial detention depending on the seriousness of the charges, she added.
“It could be that the solution to Harris County’s problems is very simple, and it’s just to release more people,” Ms. Bertram said.
Social services failures
As Mr. Wilson languished in jail for nearly two decades, he was also in and out of state mental hospitals, according to the Houston Chronicle. He was believed to be “incompetent to stand trial” and forced to go in and out of hospitals attempting to restore his competency despite arguing there was nothing wrong with him.
While there is still debate on whether Mr. Wilson was competent enough to stand trial, Ms. Gundu blamed part of the jail problem on the criminalization of mental illness. She described Texas’ county jail system as “the largest warehouse of people with mental illness in the state.
“And the reason that has happened is because the state has completely dropped the ball on building out a continuum of care in the community for mental health care,” she said. “We’ve just left them to the streets and the jails, because jails have become the easy button.”
While only about 18% of the general population has a mental illness, an estimated 44% of those in jail have a mental illness, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. About 11% of 18–25-year-olds and 6% of those over 25 have a substance use disorder, but 63% of people in jail have a substance use disorder.
“People with these disorders have challenges in getting appropriate treatment and often incarceration exacerbates their symptoms. This can lead to individuals staying incarcerated longer than those without behavioral health concerns,” according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration
“Because we’ve criminalized them for the mental illness and disability, then they sit there waiting for competency restoration,” Ms. Gundu said. “Competency restoration is not mental health care.
We just send them to the state hospital, or we have a jail-based competency restoration and we try to stabilize them so we can punish them for their disability. And all these different factors have led to the really long stays you’re seeing in the jail.”
Reforming the system
For Ms. Gundu, the change and reform of America’s jail system starts with building mental health care places that invite people in, where people can live with dignity and purpose.
“If we actually build healthy communities, the need for jails would be obsolete. You wouldn’t need such big jails,” she said. She believes fewer people would be touched by the criminal legal system if people had equitable access to health care, affordable housing and economic opportunities.
“People are more prone to incarceration when their basic needs are not being met—housing, healthcare, jobs, food. If that’s not being met, then they’re more vulnerable to incarceration.
And then once they have been incarcerated, they are even more vulnerable to future incarceration,” she said. “It’s such a vicious cycle, which is why we keep talking about front-end preventive investments.”
Ms. Shang believes in pretrial reform as a temporary solution for those currently in the system, but she also thinks a larger conversation needs to be had about what actually creates safety.
“Do we want people to be permanently affected by their experiences in jail?” she questioned. “We just really need to be thinking bigger about why we have mass incarceration. Why other countries, other developed countries, use jails at a much lower rate than we do and people are safe?
“We have this idea that jails create safety, and what the data is telling us is that it does the exact opposite,” she said. “How do we think better around that?”
The National Agenda offers additional insight and solutions. On page 39, it states: “Too often we allow our incarcerated sisters and brothers to be forgotten and disconnected from the community.
As we work to raise the cultural and political consciousness of our families in public housing and ghettos, and in the suburbs and upscale areas, we must also work to raise the cultural and political consciousness of our family members in the jail cells and chain gangs, and in the solitary wings and death rows.
“Federal, state, and local governments consign many of us to a life of prison numbers, overcrowded cells, parole hearings and disenfranchisement by planning to imprison us rather than planning to educate us.”
The National Agenda offers several recommendations, including:
Provide incarcerated persons with an avenue for community participation and support;
Raise the cultural and political consciousness of the incarcerated;
Prevent incarcerated inmates from being abused or lost in the system, as a result of their own actions or as a result of government neglect or misconduct;
Monitor the general treatment and parole status of those incarcerated from our communities.
More must be done to ensure people who endure unjust and unnecessary lengthy jail stays are not abandoned or forgotten.
