It’s a toxic mix: enhanced policing, a new opioid and heroin epidemic, and concentrated poverty. The result is growing jail populations not in our major cities, but in smaller, poorer towns, and cities across the country.

Trump’s new war against the undocumented is accelerating the damage, particularly in rural spaces along the southern and northern land borders of the country where county jails expand as detention orders proliferate. Even criminal justice reforms contribute to growing populations by producing shorter and more numerous sentences that get served in county jails.

This growing jail complex remains largely invisible, even in New York, where life in county jails scattered all over the state remains grim and often deadly. From inside my local jail in upstate New York come desperate pleas of medical neglect and abuse. Mothers come to community meetings anxiously reporting how their loved ones were denied medications for heart failure, chronic anxiety, and PTSD. A wife writing from a foreign country posts on the site of a local web community asking why her husband died in the jail, why she can’t get his medical records or his personal effects. A letter from an incarcerated person with chronic asthma reports: “I’ve been in this jail for over a month and have not received my pump.”