ABSTRACT
Chapter 3, “But what will become of the innocent?” focuses on what is perhaps the most understudied—and yet ethically egregious—aspect of pretrial detention: the pretrial detention of people who are ultimately not determined to have committed a crime. This chapter reviews the legal discourses on punishment and innocence, including Supreme Court rulings and dissents, and legal scholarship on these issues, highlighting the inadequacy of the legal definitions of both in relation to the lived realities thereof. Detailing the experiences of five people who were never convicted of any crime, including a 17-year-old boy who was found not guilty at trial after nine months of detention and several other respondents whose charges were dropped anywhere from a few days to a few months after they were first detained, this chapter highlights the paradox between the legal presumption of innocence and the lived experience of punishment. In addition to documenting the punitive experience of detention for these innocent individuals, this chapter also shows the other consequences of pretrial detention on people’s lives, livelihood, and wellbeing, and foreshadows the issues of both material loss and psychological harm that are discussed more extensively in subsequent chapters.
