The Post and Courier’s recent “Caught in the Cycle” series documents something painfully important: South Carolina is failing people with serious mental illness at every turn — in the community, in the courthouse and in the jail. These are not distinct problems. They are interrelated and compounding, and addressing one without reckoning with the others guarantees the cycle continues.
The Charleston County Criminal Justice Coordinating Council has spent 10 years tracking who goes to jail and why, how pretrial release decisions get made, how long cases take and whether people stay out of trouble while their cases resolve. Informed by data, local stakeholders made targeted improvements: deflecting people to services such as the Tri-County Crisis Stabilization Center, citing people for low-level offenses instead of booking them, providing judges with risk-based information, ensuring defendants had legal representation at bail-setting and getting evidence to attorneys faster.
Over the past decade, reported crime in Charleston County fell while jail bookings fell more than twice as fast, dropping 74 percent against a growing population. Crime rate tracking confirms that putting fewer people in jail did not make the community less safe.
Research found 76 percent of those deflected to the Crisis Stabilization Center had no subsequent arrest. For those who did cycle back, housing instability and behavioral health needs, not the absence of incarceration, drove the pattern. Black men with schizophrenia spectrum diagnoses were the most likely of any group to cycle back. Almost 1,000 individuals cycled repeatedly through the jail in 2025, and that figure is trending up. The system as designed responds to the crisis, not the underlying medical condition.
The Charleston data consistently show financial bond produces worse outcomes than release on recognizance across risk levels; most people released stay out of trouble waiting for court; and when rearrests happen they most often occur within six months when prior cases are most likely unresolved. A deeper study added two findings: Fewer than 5 percent were later charged with a violent offense, and individuals with unresolved prior cases were more likely to be rearrested, connecting case delay to pretrial outcomes.
Case delay compounds those outcomes, yet most counties fail South Carolina’s own case processing standard, which is already more forgiving than national standards. Fewer than 1 percent of general sessions cases resolve by trial; most end in pleas or dismissals, meaning the wait is for a negotiated resolution, not a jury. People held in jail reached that resolution in roughly 200 days; those out of custody waited nearly 600. That 400-day gap creates pressure to resolve cases through a plea regardless of the merits and compounds harm for victims and defendants. Prosecutorial screening can reduce delays and get better cases to court.
These are not separate problems. They are the same people moving through the same system. A discretionary arrest leads to a bond hearing where, regardless of risk level, the ability to pay often determines who goes home. Those who cannot afford bail wait in jail for months while their case winds toward a resolution that often takes years. A small group cycles repeatedly, returning to the same unaddressed conditions. We should be designing systems for success, not managing the consequences of failure.
Most fixes are practical choices to do things differently when the evidence supports it. Not every fix requires new funding. Some require coordination, political will and honesty to admit that doing what we have always done is a costly choice. Where results have been limited, local action ran into what only the state can change. Every county deserves both the capacity to see those limits clearly and a state partnership committed to addressing them.
South Carolina has the resources to act, yet the infrastructure most likely to break the cycle remains underprioritized. Instead, the state has authorized programs it has not funded and passed laws it has not implemented. The Legislature authorized competency restoration inside jails; four years later, only one county has a working program. A Pretrial Reform Commission was written into law in 2023 and never convened.
Charleston’s record demonstrates what is possible, and our model is replicable. Every county that builds it makes the statewide conversation about what needs to change more grounded and actionable. The evidence already exists. The next session is an opportunity to act on it.
Kristy Pierce Danford is the founder of KPD Technical Assistance and former founding director of Charleston County’s Criminal Justice Coordinating Council.