CLEVELAND, Ohio – The average person arrested and booked on charges in Cuyahoga County can expect to spend about a month in jail – one of the longest average stays in the state, even amid wide disparities in reporting, a cleveland.com and Plain Dealer analysis found.
The average length of stay in the county jail that best aligns with the Department of Justice standard for calculating that figure is about 29 days. Though, the number has ranged in the last five years from a high of 34 days to a brief low of 23 days, coinciding with when the county took over jailing for the city of Cleveland and more misdemeanor releases started being factored in, data provided by the Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court show.
Those figures are significantly lower than averages around 200 days that were cited earlier this year as part of a jail study. Yet, they still appear higher than averages from most of the county’s peers across the state and nation.
Where Cuyahoga falls in the ranking all depends on who is reporting the numbers and which formula they use, cleveland.com found.
Ask the jail, and they will calculate the average based on how long everyone incarcerated on a given day has been locked up. This results in higher numbers – hundreds of days – best representing the experience of high-level offenders, who are held on higher bonds and whose cases often take longer to adjudicate.
Consult the sheriff’s office’s annual reports over the last five years, and they provide a range of stays between 16 and 31 days. How they calculate that figure is unclear. County spokeswoman Mary Louise Madigan said the county was unable to confirm where the figures came from.
Ask the courts, and they will use a formula from the Bureau of Justice Statistics that compares the average daily population to total bookings in an attempt to factor in every person who touches the system. The county, however, includes in its booking total those who go through the process but are immediately released without ever stepping inside the jail, as well as those who stay months to years, which can skew the average. This results in lower averages, which officials say is more representative of the typical experience after a person is arrested.
Ask the state, and they will give you a fourth figure, based on numbers they say are directly reported by the jails, using various calculation methods at each jail’s discretion. Some years those numbers align with the BJS figure, and some years they don’t.
The inconsistency in tracking and reporting makes it difficult to conduct a true analysis of how quickly justice moves in Cuyahoga, compared with other systems across the state. And yet, the number is vital to knowing whether inmates are being jailed for unnecessarily long stretches or if their rights to a speedy trial are being upheld. An accurate number is also important for planning for the jail’s future – the size of jail Cuyahoga County needs depends on how many people it expects to hold daily, and that depends a lot on how long each person stays.
Recently, the average length of stay also became a critical component to knowing how many inmates would need to be moved out of the jail if the county chose to renovate the existing facility. Hired consultant Eric Ratts with DLZ Architecture factored it into his assessment. He noted that Cuyahoga’s average daily population around 1,600 inmates and its “extraordinarily long” average length of stay of 150 to 200 days meant it would cost more to house those inmates elsewhere while construction is ongoing.
That reported length of stay, at the time, was staggering, compared with Franklin County’s jail, which Ratts said averaged around 36 days. But immediately, Cuyahoga Court of Common Pleas Administrative Judge Brendan Sheehan refuted its accuracy.
“That was stunning to me,” Sheehan recently told cleveland.com. “I was like, wait, that’s not right.”
Correcting the record
In November, Sheehan sent Ratts a letter, also signed by Prosecutor Michael O’Malley, asking him to correct his report. The problem, the letter said, is that Ratts’ numbers were based on how long those already incarcerated on a given day – in that case, Aug. 29 each year -- had been there, not a true average accounting for every person who touches the system, as is the industry standard for average length of stay.
“The number your report calculates, while perhaps valuable, is not the (average length of stay) and cannot be compared to other jurisdictions,” Sheehan’s letter to DLZ said. “Your number, based on one day in time out of each year, not only includes the court’s pretrial population, but also any person sentenced to a period of local incarceration, either by the Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court or the multiple municipal court within Cuyahoga County.”
By comparison, the Bureau of Justice Statistics computes average length of stay by dividing the average daily population by the number of annual bookings and multiplying that figure by the number of days in a year. That calculation is meant to capture the typical experience for someone who comes to jail, from admission to release, and it was almost seven times lower than DLZ’s figure.
“It’s just not a fair statement to be made,” Sheehan said of DLZ’s numbers.
“I’m not saying this is great,” he continued, referring to the BJS-calculated numbers. “I’m just trying to say if you’re comparing apples to apples, that’s what the number is...Do I think we can do better? Absolutely.”
Ratts told cleveland.com he reported the numbers exactly as he received them from the jail, but he now agrees that they were not a fair comparison to other counties that were using a different calculation. He has since removed all references to the jail’s population and length of stay averages from his report, he said, given they were technically outside the scope of his analysis.
The correction, however, did not change the report’s conclusions, he said. But it could change planning for a new jail.
“They both factor into the size of a new facility,” Ratts said.
Cleveland.com, in October, requested the data county officials submitted to Ratts for his report and has not received it. But Gibson said Thursday that the figures came from the jail’s data team and represented a snapshot of who was in jail.
The county could not answer how it calculates average length of stay or which formula it believes would be most accurate. However, Gibson said the jail is taking steps to better track inmates going forward.
“We are preparing a comprehensive dashboard to track inmates at every step of the process, from sally port to health screening to booking to release,” Gibson said in an emailed statement.
Even corrected, the county’s average length of stay still appears longer than some of its peers’.
Using the BJS formula, Cuyahoga County inmates were held in jail an average two to 13 days longer than Hamilton County inmates, in Cincinnati, over the last five years, records provided by the department show.
Yet, over the same period, Cuyahoga inmates stayed one to 11 days fewer than inmates in the Franklin County jail, in Columbus. That excludes the year 2018, when Columbus’ average fell to 23 days, compared with Cuyahoga’s 34 days.
How each county jail counts bookings and whether they admit individuals accused of misdemeanors can alter those calculations, preventing a true comparison. In 2020, Cuyahoga stopped accepting inmates arrested on new misdemeanor charges, except in cases of domestic violence. So did Columbus, for a time, though a spokeswoman said they do currently have individuals jailed on misdemeanors.
Figures reported to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, though, paint a very different picture.
In 2021, for example, state records show Franklin County had an average length of stay of 21 days, Hamilton County reported 25 days and Cuyahoga reported 80 days. Cuyahoga had the second longest stay that year, behind Ashtabula County, which operates a 165-bed jail and reported an average stay of 100 days.
It’s unclear what accounts for the differences in reporting.
The state’s data, an ODRC spokeswoman told cleveland.com, “is solely determined and self-reported by the listed jails to the Bureau of Adult Detention.”
Average vs experience
None of the averages accurately reflect the experience of most of the men and women accused of more serious crimes who are held in the county jail pretrial.
As of October, there were 1,699 people in the jail, data provided by the county showed. At that time, about a third of the population had stayed 29 days or less.
The average, across the entire population, was 123 days.
That figure includes a small portion of people serving short sentences – less than a year – after conviction. It also includes some individuals held on charges for other municipalities or those who have been convicted and are awaiting transfer to prison.
Most of the people in jail, however, are awaiting trial, predominantly on felony charges for more serious crimes that take longer to investigate and try.
For those individuals, the length of stay from arrest to the conclusion of their case is more than three times the BJS average, an analysis by the Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court found. The average length of stay for pretrial detainees held on felonies at the end of September was 106 days, calculations from the court show. The median stay at that time was 76 days.
But the timeline also varies widely by case and charge.
Those accused of murder are held an average of 319 days, the court’s analysis showed, while domestic violence suspects faced an average of 59 days. Cases on the mental health docket also tend to last longer, leading to longer stays in the jail, the court said.
And then there are outliers.
As of October, 108 inmates had spent a year or more behind bars without being convicted. Eighteen of them had been there more than 1,000 days, or three years, a cleveland.com analysis found.
For two of the inmates, their case had drug on nearly five years.
One of them pleaded later in October to involuntary manslaughter in the 2017 shooting death of a Brook Park man and was sentenced to 14 years in prison, with credit for the 1,787 days he’d already served in the county jail. His case had been delayed by the pandemic, discovery challenges, getting new attorneys and even a new judge after the late Judge Joseph Russo died, the court docket showed.
The other inmate is still awaiting trial on a slew of charges in a 2017 incident in which he is accused of pulling a woman from her car at gunpoint and dragging her 100 feet as he sped away. He received a competency evaluation in August and is currently being held at a behavioral hospital, according to the court docket.
Any number of factors – judge changes, lawyer changes, delays in testing or medical reports, physical health, mental health, transportation issues – can extend a person’s stay, Judge Sheehan said. He meets each week with jail officials and criminal justice partners to discuss those challenges and how to overcome them, to keep cases moving, he said.
Every case has its own story, Sheehan said, noting that there may not be a one-size-fits-all solution to shrinking the jail’s average length of stay. Jail officials, judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys and the labs, experts and entities they rely on all contribute to extended stays.
If Cuyahoga really wants to reduce the number of days its residents spend in jail before conviction, he said, “That’s an overall system question.”
To read more about the county jail:
Cuyahoga County Jail’s increasing inmate population could lead to bigger - and costlier - new jail, consultant warns
MetroHealth places two employees on unpaid leave following the death of a Cuyahoga jail inmate
Cuyahoga jail providing 2 uniforms after cleveland.com reported inmates sitting in underwear, naked on wash days
Former inmates, staff share stories of life inside the Cuyahoga County jail
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