To Shrink Jails, Let’s Reform Bail | Hacker News Reader

To Shrink Jails, Let’s Reform Bail

nytimes.com

40 pointsweston10 comments

The real thing to reform is the wait time for trial. The article mentions someone who sat in jail for 3 years waiting for trial on a theft charge. This is cruel both to people who can't afford bail, and to people who can. It's hard to move forward with life and make plans for raising a family or pursuing education with a potential jail sentence hanging over you. Also, the deterrent effect for a potential sentence 3 years in the future must be less.

Speedy trials would improve things all around.

Reforming bail sounds like a good idea. I don't know why anyone would trust Harris on the issue, though.

If she wanted to shrink jails when she was California's Attorney General, she could have respected court orders requiring prisoners to be released.

Likewise, she could have stopped "defending convictions obtained by local prosecutors who inserted a false confession into the transcript of a police interrogation, lied under oath and withheld crucial evidence from the defense."

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/magazine/kamala-harris-a-...

This is both interesting and unrelated to the bill.

There is not an issue on this planet, down to "is it raining outside," on which I would trust Rand Paul. But I don't have to trust him when I can read the thing. It's only eighteen pages long. (On my phone, otherwise I'd link it.) Beyond that, there are plenty of organizations more than willing to weigh in on stuff like this; you don't have to take the legislator's word on it at all.

As a non-lawyer, I'd expect to miss something important from the legislative text.

Your point about relying on other organizations is a good one, though. I generally take this approach, but I wasn't expecting anything to have been published yet on such a new bill. It looks like the ACLU, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and SPLC all issued positive press releases, though.

Since this article isn't asking you to trust Harris, I'm not sure what your comment has to do with it.

Huh? The article is written by Harris and suggests that a piece of legislation she wrote will solve the problem.

You're not arguing with the legislation she cowrote but with a detail from her history. You need to address the argument here, because it stands independent of her history.

> Kentucky and New Jersey, for instance, have shifted from bail toward personalized risk assessments

The cost of the New Jersey implementation, has been offensively expensive, to some. Lawyers charge by the hour. The new bail system requires additional bail screening/hearings. The inevitable delays (daily) have run up lawyer bills. It's assumed that this will improve with better processes and routines. Inefficiency, incompetence and incompatible systems being shoved together have led to a strange brew that costs 1-3 million (per court) annually there.

The ideological question is whether the state or private industry should profit from incarceration of suspects and what bar should be set for temporary release pending a court date.

Right now, the bar (bail) is financial and a judge has to be arbitrary with regard to assessed risk at arraignment. Working within the known bail system, in california, some judges will assign amounts knowing what bail bonds will cost. This has led to a strange inflation of bond costing and a glut of bounty hunters.

Cost overruns might be high right now, but I prefer that to a system that disproportionately forces the poor and people of color to be removed from society for (often) years at a time awaiting trial, whether or not they or guilty.

To shrink jails, take them out of private hands and disbar any judges who have received anything even remotely resembling a gift or kickback from a jail company.

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