Critics say the packed prisons are inhumane. An official insists they are safe. Today, it routinely holds 400 more than that. At the Philadelphia Detention Center, dorms designed to hold 144 prisoners each now hold 224.
Inmates exceed the original capacity by a third.
In the aging House of Correction, single-inmate cells have been converted to doubles. There, the prisoner population is now twice the original design. With Philadelphia police making record numbers of arrests, city prisons are crammed like never before. The daily count of people behind bars now often exceeds 7,100 - hundreds higher than the 5,600 the city had maintained was maximum capacity. The surge worries criminologists, defense lawyers and advocates of prisoners' rights, who say the overcrowded prisons are inhumane and potentially dangerous.