ABSTRACT
Chapter 4, “Someone has to pay a price,” focuses on the material harm that pretrial detention inflicts, showing how being detained erodes people’s financial security and economic wellbeing in ways that have consequence during and after the actual detention. Regardless of whether or not they were convicted, this chapter shows, people who are detained pretrial lose their jobs when they cannot not show up for work and lose their homes when they miss rent payments. For poor people, who comprise the majority of those detained, even quantitatively small costs have qualitatively large consequences, which affect family members at home as much as those held in jail. This chapter builds on and expands scholarship on collateral consequences by showing how many of the material consequences of incarceration—often associated with having a felony conviction—are equally real for people who are not convicted of crimes.
