Arts & Sciences undergraduate Leo Solga has been studying what happens in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania before someone goes to trial. What he’s learned reveals just how little is understood.
2 min. read
“Thank you for your question, but we just don’t have that information. We hope you have a great day.” That message, or something like it, was one undergraduate Leo Solga received many times as he tried over several months to track down data on pretrial detainees in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Solga, a political science major in the College of Arts & Sciences, persevered, ultimately learning that statewide pretrial detention statistics are inconsistently tracked and recorded. He published the results in a paper for Penn Carey Law’s Journal of Law & Social Change.
Leo Solga is a fourth-year political science major in the School of Arts & Sciences.
Curiosity about magisterial district judges fostered Solga’s initial interest in pretrial detention. He’d heard from a professor that many of these officials—local judges who handle mostly minor legal matters but who are also, as Solga describes them, the “gateway to the justice system”—are not lawyers. He decided to explore the issue as a fellowship topic during his first year at Penn.
His research, which included driving around the state and talking to judges and judicial officials, prison and jail wardens, and pretrial services directors, confirmed that two-thirds of magisterial district judges in the Commonwealth are indeed not lawyers, and that the races to elect them are also often not competitive.
That discovery got Solga thinking about pretrial detention. “One of the most powerful things magisterial district judges can do at this first level of the judiciary is set an arrestee’s bail,” he says. Solga was curious to know more about how the magisterial district system operated. While working in the office of State Representative Mary Jo Daley during the summer after his second year at Penn, he shifted his research focus from magisterial judges to pretrial detainees.
“I started Googling all over the place and reaching out to my contacts from the previous summer,” says Solga. “I was asking, ‘What happens to these pretrial detainees? How many are there? What crimes are they being detained for? Are they being held because they can’t make cash bail? How long are they being held?’”
The answers to these questions were “terribly inconclusive,” he says. “Nobody really knew.” After filing dozens of “right-to-know” requests with Pennsylvania counties and exchanging hundreds of back-and-forth emails, and plotting everything on a spreadsheet, Solga came away with outcomes he found “pretty concerning.”
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