Abolish the Cash Bail System

I mean I live in a state that outlaws bail bondsman, but “cash as surety” is very much a thing.

Focusing on the bail bond system is a distraction.

Hard choices need to be made about who is incarcerated pending trial, and how they are incentivized to show up.

Taking the profit motive out may or may not be a good idea.

But by focusing on the contractors, you’re avoiding the bigger picture.

Except that even studies by the US Department of Justice show that risk of financial loss has one of the lowest impacts on likely to appear in court. This is also not recent discovery, this was heavily researched in the 70s.

Ironically just releasing people as soon as possible actually has one of the largest impacts on making sure people show.

https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/32349NCJRS.pdf https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publications/abstract.aspx?ID=5374...

It should also be noted that all efforts to repeal the ACA don't come with anything to deal with problem #3.

Inevitable HN critiques of each new boutique bespoke programming language and text editor du jour is poor landing page, missing screenshots, and example code buried in some wiki.

How is this any different?

Pretrial Services Association doesn't even get named. Just some links 1/2 down the article.

For other future dummies, like myself, who've actually organized and passed legislation, here's a draft TLDR:

Our pretrial cash bail system sucks. Especially for the poor. There's lots of negative knockoff effects. Here's an explainer [article], [wiki], and [video]. After 60 years of talking about reform, we need a plan.

We advocate adopting the federal Pretrial Services Agency (psa.gov) risk assessment system nationwide. Like DC and NJ did 20+ years ago. They've proven effective, costs less to administer, is more fair, and leads to better outcomes. Link to impressive metrics [here].

Here's how you can help. Support your state or county based org, listed [here].

Your state not listed? No worries. Here's a [simple guide] to bootstrap an org for your state. With handy links to [model legislation], [resolutions], and [talking points].

Please [contact us] our national campaign for additions, corrections, and questions.

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Edit: Aha. This Harvard workbook doesn't suck. http://cjpp.law.harvard.edu/assets/BailReform_WEB.pdf It even has model legislation. Perfect for the target audience (legislative aides). Great starting point for creating a workbook for dummies, err, activists, like myself.

> You know, systems were established for a reason.

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.