My friend said there is a clear difference and tried to explain it to me, but I still don’t really get it. Is jail like a holding place until you get to prison?
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Jail is for pretrial offenders and offenders who have short sentences, typically under a year. A jail is run by the county, the prisons are run by the state or the feds. The feds may have a jail, but if you are pretrial for a fed case you normally sit in a local jurisdiction’s jail.
A lot of people will go to jail and never land in prison, many sentences for minor felonies just aren’t long enough to justify prison intake. Prisons, on the other hand, really only see serious offenders who have multiple year sentences. If you ever hear a judge say something like “you are being remanded to the department of corrections…” you are going to prison. It means he or she is ordering you to be handed over to the state agency for keeping. They won’t always do this, they can and do sentence people to 90 days in county jail. In that case the judge is not ordering you to prison, but you are still going to be behind ‘bars’ as it were.
People use the terms interchangeably and they are wrong to do so, there are very significant differences between prison and jail. The most significant is the diversity of environments, jails are all pretty much the same. Prisons have different levels, they can look like a farm or Alcatraz based on your crime, risk of escape, and history with the prison system. I had a family member who was imprisoned and at the end of their sentence the facility didn’t even have a fence. It was, however, still a prison in the strictest sense of the word. That family member eventually got out and violated parole, they were ordered to spend 90 days in the county jail as a result of that violation.
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