Abolish the Cash Bail System

While its not perfectly divided this way, it's worth noting that the US has different things called “jails” and “prisons” and that the former are mostly for pretrial and short-sentence incarceration and mostly run by local governments, while the latter in state systems are almost exclusively for post-conviction felony sentences, while they are used for all purposes in the federal system.

This is important, because while the number of pre-trial confinements in the US is way too high, if you fail to understand that distinction statistics about the proportion of jail inmates that are on pre-trial confinement may be grossly misleading.

There is a graphic overview of the whole detention picture here: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html

It makes sure people are less likely to run away while at the same time doesnt force them to sit in jail while they await trial.

It should be relative to your ability to pay, and the commercial bondsman industry seems messed up, but those are implementation details and not the core of the system.

*as an interesting note, in Canada its illegal to be a commercial bondsmand - https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-46/section-139.ht... i think that helps make the bail system be much more sane.

From everything I read, it's rather scary to be poor in America, especially if you have to deal with the judicial or medical system.

Bail is in fact supposed to be a function of your financial status, and the severity of the crime.

What do you suggest as an alternative to bail bonds? Maybe ankle monitors for those awaiting trial?

I think maybe the thing that should most change is outlawing bail bondsmen. It seems like they distort the market for bail bonds significantly and may be causing some/most of the problems with bail, and at the same time this system empowers private individuals with duties that should be the responsibility of the state (finding and detaining people who didn't show up to court).

As someone who grew up in Norway, if I somehow found myself on a US jury I'd be had pressed to be able to morally justify voting "guilty" even if the accused stood up in court and committed the crime in front of me, because of the inhumane prison system and length of sentences.

It's a system that is fundamentally about satisfying a desire for vengeance at all cost, not about making society better.

[I'll add to this that Norway had a pretty brutal prison system too, until a prison reform movement started gaining traction in the 60's. The interesting part is that as it turns out, treating people like humans instead of abusing them tends to reduce re-offending]

Since they aren't, I think non-cash bail is a good idea, with strict requirements to check in with an officer, etc. If they don't meet their appointments or break the terms of their bail, I'm also okay to see them incarcerated pre-trial.

However, there needs to be some provision to make sure that they don't stay in jail longer than what their offense would have garnered. If someone is in jail pre-trial for half the median time an average punishment if they were found guilty, then the charges should be immediately dropped. This should give prosecutors more incentive to get their acts together and have a trial in a reasonable amount of time.

Isn't bail adjusted based on the persons financial status?

Unlike road fines and the like, it's one of the few things that do take into account a persons wealth.

There's a pretty good movie called Midnight Run that would need a new premise without cash bail. Other than that, yeah, no argument.

Judges aren’t robots, either. Bail is assessed by both means and severity of crime. If you’ve never been in a courtroom, you might not know this.

I have always assumed that the goal was to decrease flight risk for people (from the perspective of the court), thereby allowing larger swaths of people to be released pre-trial.

That means, if you think there's a good chance you're going to be convicted, it might actually make more sense not to post bail. Then you'll end up released at an earlier date.

If you've already lost your job and can't afford rent anywhere, it might also make sense - getting a job and renting a place are hard to do, and to do all that only to later be convicted and sent to prison and end up defaulting on your rental contract and being declared bankrupt - might not be the best move for your post-prison prospects.

In theory, bail, via a bondsman, is an amount of money that will Ensure that the bail-bondsman will go track down the defendant in the event they do not appear for court as required.

That said, I don’t think the argument is persuasive enough to result in the system in place in most US jurisdictions.

Unfortunately, there is an incentive for local prosecutors to convict people of offences with sentences longer than a year, so as to have them moved to state prisons, but that's a somewhat separate issue.

Its because people (generally) believe bad people should be punished, and good people do not get arrested.

The money is presumably to cover the cost of sending someone out to find the accused and drag them to the courthouse. If someone can't afford to pay the bond and then tries to run, I don't see how that money can be reclaimed except for the taxpayer covering it.

Someone has decided it is easier to simply keep the accused in jail. Assuming they've done the math on costs properly it would make sense. Taxpayers shouldn't be in a position to cover the cost of people running from the law.

It is an uncomfortable system that clearly biases in favour of the rich - but the rich are the ones covering the cost of it all so I am comfortable standing up and saying I don't mind if they get special treatment. Wealthy people pay something like half the taxes; it seems reasonable that they can wait for their day in court in comfort. Wealth comes with privileges and they aren't criminals until they are convicted.

>Serial is heading back to court. This time, in Cleveland. Not for one extraordinary case; instead, Serial wanted to tackle the whole criminal justice system. To do that we figured we’d need to look at something different: ordinary cases.

>So we did. Inside these ordinary cases we found the troubling machinery of the criminal justice system on full display. We chose Cleveland, because they let us record everywhere — courtrooms, back hallways, judges’ chambers, prosecutors’ offices. And then we followed those cases outside the building, into neighborhoods, into people’s houses, and into prison.

https://serialpodcast.org/

The idea is both to make sure that people show up for court and to have a bounty to give to bounty hunters if they do not to enforce compliance, rather than putting that on the police themselves, because there just aren't enough cops around to round up everyone who simply wouldn't show up otherwise.

But yeah, being poor is effectively a punishment in and of itself and not just in this circumstance, either.

As a US person it amazes me the level to which many in the US will defend normative practices simply because they are. It amazes me further their willingness to provide and accept post hoc justifications for systems that were explicitly created with racist intent.

2. Everyone has the right to a free public defender. I don't know if there's any study on how they compare to private lawyers.

3, 4, 5, and 7. Low income people are eligible for Medicaid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicaid

6. I've never heard of location mattering

I wouldn't really base my worldview of something on what I see in fiction, since the purpose of these shows is to show drama, rather than to be informative. It wouldn't be as exciting to watch people solve their problems by applying for welfare.

This one might just be confirmation bias as lesser sentences may be indicative of less violent criminal behavior. Without knowing what they controlled for, it's hard to accept this one as evidence.

The others make sense.

Your wider point stands though: there's little reason to believe a replacement system instituted by the US Government would be better than the current one.

If you want a place where you can help, look up mutual aid bail funds for your city. There’s probably one and they’re always looking for volunteers or donations.

Oh, right. Because it fits right in with the bullshit reflexive contrarianism around here.

What is interesting to me is that the article itself does not consider this alternative at all. But the simplest way to drastically reduce the number of people who are in jail pretrial because they can't afford bail would be to make the things they were charged with no longer crimes. For example, simple drug possession.

> Criminals who have not yet crossed paths with the system to really get punished to the point of changing or thrown in jail will harm and kill people.

Harming and killing people, and threats to do those things, would still be crimes in a system where the things you describe were decriminalized, and if those kinds of crimes were the only crimes the justice system had to deal with, the system could afford to hold people charged with such crimes in jail pretrial without bail if it was deemed too risky to release them, because it wouldn't take months or years to try them.

It was Xanthan Gum. He was in culinary school and had split a bag of Bob's Red Mill (expensive for some young people) soup thickener with a friend that he wanted to experiment with. He had no prior record whatsoever.

Luckily, he was able to get out on OR only because about a dozen of us called the jail as soon as we heard, and spoke to the recognizance volunteer that happened to be on duty and he only spent the night on jail.

It took over three months for the DA's office to actually test the substance and drop the charges. If he hadn't been lucky enough to have quite a few highly motivated friends that knew the system in that city, he'd have stayed there the whole time.

For soup thickener.

> On the flip side, the cash bail system also tends to let high-risk or violent, but wealthy, offenders go free with little to no meaningful supervision. Research conducted by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (JJAF) found that, in the two largest jurisdictions they studied, nearly half of the highest-risk defendants were released pending trial. On the other end of the spectrum, they found that “low-risk, non-violent defendants are frequently detained.” In other words, the cash bail system does an extremely poor job detaining defendants who pose a serious risk to public safety — particularly those who appear likely to commit crimes of violence — and to releasing those who do not.

Abolishing cash bail is about not unnecessarily imprisoning people who would be safe to release, but who are still held under the current system because they can't afford to pay the bail.

“It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.“ - Justice Blackstone

I don’t understand why and how we got so far away from the idea that state punishment is the last resort, instead making it the first. Especially in the States, we do so many things that, even in the moment we are doing them, seem needlessly cruel yet justify them as “but what happens if one bad person continues to be bad and we miss the chance to smack them hard??”

N.B. - This is federal law, I'm not going to try to dive into individual state law unless I'm being bribed with aged alcohol. Especially Louisianan law.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/3142

And does the level of danger correlate to the criminal's wealth?

Actually, that probably doesn't go far enough. We could probably get away with 95-99% collateral damage if we knew we were keeping a single extra dangerous person safely behind bars. It's just people's lives we're throwing away after all. What we need is to start arresting people sooner. As soon as they're suspected of a crime just throw them in jail so that they can't escape while we finish the investigation. We'd probably have better than anticipated performance because with the bolstered confidence in our police force more people would be willing to call in suspects and trust that something would be done about their perceived misdeeds.

So you're just gonna assume everyone that's arrested is guilty even before the trial?

You are also misrepresenting or misunderstanding dismantling of the police. It's not necessarily about using less resources in the neighborhoods, but about using them correctly. If someone is needing a welfare check, maybe send in a person trained for this and not cops with guns blazing, for instance.

If someone is a danger, or a flight risk, maybe they shouldn't be out at all if that's the determination reached by a judge.

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Secondary points, the social movement. I strongly agree that Police REFORM is necessary. At least in the US things are bad enough that a not-small portion of the population feels the police are out to get them, or at best unlikely to be a positive influence on any outcome. Peace Officers are necessary. A recognition that many situations require de-escalation and a variety of social outreach to achieve the best results for both society at large and the individuals involved.

Believe in reform and redemption, and apply it to everyone and everything.

However people held in jail may not have committed a crime, in fact should be presumed to be innocent even if they have committed a crime.

Also at a bail hearing a judge will determine the person's risk of flight, and if they did in fact have means and motivation to flee they will be held without bail.

It seems the unfortunately named SARS squad were committing more crime than they were solving.

> poor and powerless being victimized by crime every day

Quite a few people would say, if you actually ask them in their neighbourhoods, that the people who are more likely to victimise them on a daily basis are the police. That's why all the protests have appeared.

1. There are people from those actual communities asking and fighting for those things. You are assuming only suburban white advocates.

2. Cash-bail: "It's not like the cash bail system was some ridiculous fanciful notion that someone created to torture the poor." Who is saying that. The linked article is first and foremost concerned with the effect of cash-bail i.e. it affects poor people more negatively that it does rich people. It's broken system. Perhaps something like Finland's salary-based speeding ticket system would work well (but should incorporate wealth has many rich people don't have salaries).

3. Dismantle the police: the idea here is that armed police are now involved in situations where that is not required. Not only is it expensive and inefficient, but it has horrible outcomes. It's the old "if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail" problem. "They need more police presence and enforcement of law and order for their neighborhoods, not less." This has not been proven to work.

Not always a good reason.

> It's not like the cash bail system was some ridiculous fanciful notion that someone created to torture the poor.

The evolution of modern cash bail from old pledged-money sureties, like many aspects of Gilded Age capitalism, may not have been consciously been designed for that purpose, but might as well have been.

It's true that pledged-money sureties also probably wouldn't work in the modern world, which is also why other places that used them evolved away from money bail entirely rather than to cash bail, a system used as the main basis of pre-trial release in the US and the Phillipines, and pretty much nowhere else.

> I don't know why, but that seems to be considered discriminatory these days.

Because it, in fact, is.

> Maybe if people are experiencing hardship from being held in jail, they should try not to commit crimes?

You mean “should try not to be accused of committing crimes”; bail addresses pre-trial, not post-conviction, confinement, which is not even notionally based on guilt.

> Dismantle the police? I think the people worst served by this idea are the poor and powerless being victimized by crime every day. They need more police presence and enforcement of law and order for their neighborhoods, not less.

> Dismantle the police? I think the people worst served by this idea are the poor and powerless being victimized by crime every day.

Why would you think that.

> They need more police presence and enforcement of law and order for their neighborhoods, not less.

There have been decades of reform on exactly that premise that have produced the accelerating crisis underlying the defund/dismantle/abolish movement.

The problem is, whether or not it results in moreno police presence in the relevant neighborhoods, pushing more resources to the police at the expense of alternative uses of local funds does not produce more “enforcement of law and order for their neighborhoods”, except in the sense where “law and order” is a long-standing political euphemism for suppression of the kind of people living in those neighborhoods.

Within the social justice movements themselves there is a considerable debate over whether the problem here is the basic model of law enforcement (the dismantle/abolish position) or just it's overprioritization at the cost of alternative local services, forcing it to expand it's scope beyond where it is suited (the defund position), but neither is arguing that the law does not need to be better enforced in poor and minority neighborhoods, what both are arguing is that the present system of policing is not suited to doing that, and that the experience of the past several decades has not shown that increasing resources to that system under the banner of reform is a solution.

> Think about the side effects of the symbols you want fulfilled. And if all your involvement is sitting in your white neighborhood and not having to deal with the effects of your advocacy, maybe you shouldn't be so opinionated to say how things should be changed.

It's mighty white of you to assume that social justice movements like BLM are all about white people in white neighborhoods tossing ideas from the sidelines but they are very much not.