These posts are intended to be helpful resources for understanding how some of our civic systems work. This is a personal project and is not associated with my role at the City of Asheville.
A Brief Foray into Criminal Charges
In the next few posts we will begin to explore what charges people are being held on in the Buncombe County jail. Before that, however, I want to give you a rough map to the system of criminal charges. Crimes in North Carolina (and beyond) are broadly grouped into two categories, misdemeanors and felonies. Misdemeanors are not as serious as…
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Who Is In Charge of the Criminal Legal System?
The last few posts have explored data about who is in jail in Buncombe County and how long they stay there. We will continue that exploration, but it’s important to have some context about the criminal legal system within which it occurs. For one thing, the jail itself, which is run by the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Department, is uniquely not…
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How Long Do People Stay in the Buncombe County Jail? Part 2: Race & Gender Patterns
We saw in the last post that the majority of people incarcerated in Buncombe County pretrial are only there for a few days. We also saw that there are significant racial and gender disparities in the jail, but that they varied according to whether we focused on the population in jail at a particular moment (including an average over time)…
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How Long Do People Stay in the Buncombe County Jail? Part 1: Overall Patterns
This is another question that has different answers depending on the specific frame. Let’s start as we did last time and look at how long the 464 folks in the Buncombe County jail this morning, June 30, 2022, have been here. The result is displayed in the chart at right. So if you ask a random person in the jail…
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Who is in the Buncombe County Jail?
Before we get into statistics, I want to start by acknowledging that the people who get booked into the Buncombe County Jail are just that: people. They have families and friends, jobs and kids and partners, and they have stories about how they came to be where they are. It is easy to think of people in jail as “inmates”…
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How many people go to jail in Buncombe County?
Daily intake from arrests varies from one day to another, but based on the first six months of 2022, about 15 people on average are booked into the jail every day. Before the pandemic, the Buncombe County Jail had a total capacity of 604 beds (96 women and 508 men) between the main facility and a lower-security dormitory-style annex. Since…
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Under Construction 