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Los Angeles jails are a death trap that have claimed 37 lives this year.
It's been over four years since the LA Board of Supervisors committed to closing Men’s Central Jail. How many more people have to lose their lives before they take concrete action?
The United States likely detains millions of people each year for inability to post modest bail. There are approximately eleven million annual admissions into local jails.1 Many of those admitted remain jailed pending trial. At midyear 2014, there were an estimated 467,500 people awaiting trial in local jails, up from 349,800 at the same point in 2000 and 298,100 in 1996.2 Available evidence suggests that the large majority of pretrial detainees are detained because they cannot afford their bail, which is often a few thousand dollars or less.3
But the idea here is important
I know most of us think that NOBODY will ever arrest ME or anyone that I care about
But that is NOT true
We arrest and incarcerate a MILLION people or more annually, who can't afford bail
www.law.upenn.edu/live/files/6...
3. In this country, we are supposed to believe that people are innocent until proven guilty
Heck, I did a whole episode of my podcast on this one (back when I used to host a podcast)
decarcerationnation.com/86-tracey-me...
Data from 33 cities across the country discredits the claim that bail reform causes crime to increase
2. There is NO public safety difference between cash bail and "cashless bail"
Yup, you hear a lot of nonsense, but most studies suggest that reform is either POSITIVE or had no impact on public safety
This one is from my friend @amescg.bsky.social
www.brennancenter.org/our-work/res...
Okay, so before we move on, two critical points so far
* Pretrial incarceration CAUSES more crime than cash bail PREVENTS
* You evaluate policies against each other, not against themselves
In the United States, roughly 450,000 people are detained awaiting trial on any given day, typically because they have not posted bail. Using a large sample of criminal cases in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, we analyze the consequences of the money bail system by exploiting the variation in bail-setting tendencies among randomly assigned bail judges. Our estimates suggest that the assignment of money bail leads to a 12 percent increase in the likelihood of conviction and a 6–9 percent increase in recidivism. Our results highlight the importance of credit constraints in shaping defendant outcomes and point to important fairness considerations in the institutional design of the American money bail system.
More evidence
And remember, the important question is NOT the simple one (did people commit crimes upon pretrial release), the IMPORTANT question is DID MORE PEOPLE COMMIT MORE CRIMES AFTER REFORM THAN THEY DID BEFORE
chansman.github.io/GHF_Bail.pdf
Abstract. In misdemeanor cases, pretrial detention poses a particular problem because it may induce innocent defendants to plead guilty in order to exit jail, potentially creating widespread error in case adjudication. While practitioners have long recognized this possibility, empirical evidence on the downstream impacts of pretrial detention on misdemeanor defendants and their cases remains limited. This Article uses detailed data on hundreds of thousands of misdemeanor cases resolved in Harris County, Texas—the thirdlargest county in the United States—to measure the effects of pretrial detention on case outcomes and future crime. We find that detained defendants are 25% more likely than similarly situated releasees to plead guilty, are 43% more likely to be sentenced to jail, and receive jail sentences that are more than twice as long on average. Furthermore, those detained pretrial are more likely to commit future crimes, which suggests that detention may have a criminogenic effect. These differences persist even after fully controlling for the initial bail amount, offense, demographic information, and criminal history characteristics. Use of more limited sets of controls, as in prior research, overstates the adverse impacts of detention. A quasi-experimental analysis based on case timing confirms that these differences likely reflect the causal effect of detention. These results raise important constitutional questions and suggest that Harris County could save millions of dollars per year, increase public safety, and reduce wrongful convictions with better pretrial release policy.
Because this is such an underdiscussed part of the bail debate and so important, I am going to include more studies concluding that pretrial incarceration INCREASES CRIME
Here is another study
www.law.upenn.edu/live/files/6...
The consequences of pretrial detention are difficult to reconcile given that many of those detained pretrial are charged with offenses that, were they to be found guilty, would be unlikely to result in incarcerative sentences. Research suggests that pretrial detention is linked to substantially higher recidivism rates post sentencing—suggesting that even if pretrial detention reduces some criminal activity during the pretrial period this is more than offset by much higher recidivism rates after individuals serve their sentences. Further, pretrial detention removes individuals presumed innocent from their families and communities—often resulting in the loss of employment and housing, interrupted treatment, and, in some cases, the loss of child custody. Court imposed fines and fees are passed without making income-based adjustments and failure to pay such fines and fees can result in revocation of one’s driver’s license and further incarceration.
1. Pretrial incarceration generates CRIME....it generates MORE crime than bail prevents
There are two parts of this discussion: A) How BAIL is handled, and B) What happens when you detain people pretrial
YOU HAVE TO COMPARE BOTH
www.brookings.edu/articles/a-b...
Trump truth post about cashless bail causing crime and murder
Thread 🧵 Bail Reform
Trump went on another rant about "cashless bail" yesterday....so let me remind you why he is WRONG about this topic
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Nobody should be locked up just because they’re poor. A new report by @bailproject.org reveals how reform efforts across the U.S. are creating more just systems. We can build a better future where justice isn’t for sale.
Check it out: bailproject.org/beyond-bail #PretrialJustice
