Conditions in many older county jails are grim, dangerous

If a fire broke out, a jailer notes, each cell door must be unlocked individually and someone would have to run outside to unlock an emergency exit.

From 1970 to 2014, the average daily number of inmates held in the roughly 3,000 county jails in America increased four-fold, from 157,000 to 690,000, according to a report by the Vera Institute of Justice, which works with government and civil leaders to improve justice systems.

David Fathi, director of the American Civil Liberty Union's national prison project, calls America's neglected jails "a failure of democracy."

Here in the Western Timber Belt where tax revenues from logging on public lands have all but vanished, many counties are hard-pressed to fund services.

In 2003, the families of the 17 inmates housed at the jail when the fire broke out accepted a $1.94 million settlement from the county in exchange for a promise not to sue.

The state then settled wrongful death claims, according to Beasley, Allen, Crow, Methvin, Portis & Miles, P.C., a law firm based in Montgomery, Alabama that represented the families.

Garduque of the MacArthur Foundation said the problem is that many detainees shouldn't have been locked up at all, and instead should be offered programs for mental health and substance abuse issues.

"Jails have become warehouses for the poor and the nation's largest mental health institutions, in some respects," she said in a phone interview from Chicago.