I believe our system has flaws that need correcting, but I do not advocate destroying the system to fix 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??”
The risks should be evaluated and the result being keeping innocent people waiting for as little as possible while also preventing criminals from getting away.
Firstly, pretrial detention averages 50-200 days, with some sitting in jail for years without trial. Secondly, the vast majority of those in pretrial detention are there for non-violent crimes. Thirdly, about 60% of the population of jails in the US are in pretrial detention.[0]
Remember, these are people who have not been convicted of any crime.
Calculate how long could you keep your job, your house and/or custody of your children if you were sitting in jail? Two months? Six? A year?
After you do that, consider that a large segment of Americans would have a hard time scraping up $400 for any sort of emergency -- especially if they can't work because they're in jail.
If there is a genuine flight risk (much more likely for those who can afford bail) or evidence that the accused may be a danger to the community, they should be held until trial without the opportunity to be released. But only if there is actual evidence that this is so.
Otherwise, you're essentially criminalizing poverty.
[0] https://www.pretrial.org/get-involved/learn-more/why-we-need...
Edit: Reorganized for clarity.
A suspect jailed and awaiting trial for murder would likely not have bail as an option. Eliminating cash bail doesn't mean eliminating the ability to hold people who are an extreme flight risk or who are likely a danger to others.
"Sit around for a few days" has more consequences than your dismissive attitude implies. Many people who land in jail like this will lose their job if they "sit around for a few days". If they're people who are already living on the margins of society, it's pretty likely that losing their job might, just might, make them turn to crime to make ends meet, even if they hadn't committed one in the first place.
Considering the comparatively tiny number of murders committed in such a way that an individual determination of the denial of any bail cannot be made, relative to the massive impact of just leaving “a few innocent people” in jail for “a few days”, I disagree.
For the people most likely to not be bailed out almost immediately—as in, people who have the fewest resources—sitting in jail for a few days can be (and usually is, hence the point of this article) absolutely catastrophic. Life-ruining, all out of the fear that one person might slip through the cracks.
That’s unacceptable. We can do better.
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.
And does the level of danger correlate to the criminal's wealth?
People are incarcerated for "possession of marijuana" together with a lot of things.
it is not only "possession of marijuana"
Based on what? It doesn't seem like you are very informed on this issue. As numerous other people have pointed out any reforms would continue to allow for potentially dangerous people to be held pretrial.
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.