Flo, a 59-year-old Chicago resident, spent two months in a local jail after being unable to pay $7,500.
He said in 2016 his gambling problem led to “a bad choice” and he was arrested for burglary. Flo was unable to pay 10 percent of the $75,000 bond set by the judge (the bond required to satisfy the Chicago court requirements or obtain the remaining bond from a bail bond lender in other jurisdictions) and was jailed pending trial. . He lost his job as a heating and cooling technician.
“Your bail is too high and you can’t get out,” said Flo, who asked that his last name not be used because of the stigma associated with incarceration.
That will change in Illinois on Monday, when the state becomes the first in the nation to eliminate the use of cash bail entirely. The practice, rare in other countries, ties a defendant’s freedom to his or her ability to pay, and activists say it contributes to U.S. incarceration rates that are significantly higher than in other advanced economies.
about 427,000 people imprisoned They are awaiting trial in local U.S. jails, according to the advocacy group Prison Policy Initiative. This means that eight out of 10 people held there have not yet been convicted of a crime. Although black and Latino people make up about a quarter of the U.S. population, data from 2002 (the last time this data was collected nationally) shows that they account for 63 percent of the pretrial detention population.
The new policy would replace a monetary bond with a hearing before a judge, if requested by prosecutors, to determine whether a person requires pretrial detention because he poses a flight risk or threatens public safety.
Illinois’ rule change, which can only be implemented after a legal battle that goes all the way to the state’s Supreme Court, will have ramifications far beyond the Midwest. The bill takes effect during an election cycle that has been marked by heated debate over criminal justice reform, a key topic for conservative candidates across the country.
New York’s modest bail reform eliminated cash bail for most misdemeanors and nonviolent crimes in 2019 but remains a lightning rod for Republicans in the 2022 midterm elections, with several right-wing candidates taking a swing at Democratic incumbents after publicly campaigning An embarrassing loss. Safe platform.
New York’s Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul earlier this year watered down the state’s reforms, empowering the state after a close race against a rival who blamed the abolition of cash bail for rising crime. giving the judge more discretion. New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a former police officer, signaled he would support further rollbacks.
“We’ve seen bail reform implemented in a number of different jurisdictions, but unfortunately it’s been met with some resistance,” said Stephanie Wylie, a consultant at the Brennan Center for Justice, a think tank in New York. “Bail reform is often wrongly attributed to any crime trend, even crime trends that we might be seeing across the country.”
Crime rates have increased across the United States in recent years. In the first year of the coronavirus pandemic, the country saw the highest increase in homicides in modern history, despite some evidence that Recently reduced in major cities.However studies in New York, e.g. one Researchers at the University at Albany said “bail reform had a negligible impact on rising crime rates” and that recidivism rates fell.
Opponents claim that the data collected sample too broadly, rather than focusing on the most dangerous criminals, and that a general decline in arrests could skew the results of such analyses. Some view bail reform efforts as a Trojan horse campaign by activists seeking to abolish incarceration altogether.
“We don’t want a system that treats poor people differently than rich people,” said Hannah Meyers, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. But she insists that with recent criminal justice reform efforts, “there’s been a complete reluctance to have a conversation about all the trade-offs…” . . Both sides suffer because, of course, the bail system allows you to prevent dangerous people from committing another crime and prevent people who have bullied their victims from bullying their victims again. “
As evidence of this trade-off, conservative news networks have seized on cases like Darrell Brooks Jr., who drove into Wisconsin two weeks after being held on $1,000 bail on a separate crime Christmas crowd.
But Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, who heads the nation’s second-largest prosecutor’s office, covering parts of Chicago and surrounding suburbs, noted that a defendant’s ability to pay has no bearing on the danger they pose. Illinois’ reforms “no longer consider money when determining risk.”
“Those who are a threat to public safety, who may be able to cause harm but can receive money even while awaiting trial, are the ones we should be concerned about,” she said. “People who are in jail for long periods of time . . . because they can’t afford bail create worse outcomes for all of us.”
Tanya Watkins, executive director of Solidarity and Liberation on Chicago’s South Side, said pretrial detention can lead to people confessing to crimes they didn’t commit just to go home. These convictions may result in housing or employment discrimination and harsher penalties for any future crimes, even minor ones.
One of the most serious cases involves 22-year-old Kalief Browder, who after being held without trial for three years on New York’s notorious Rikers Island was unable to He committed suicide after paying bail.
Such incidents stand in stark contrast to the treatment of white-collar defendants, such as FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who was released on $250 million bail. His bail was later revoked amid accusations he tried to intimidate witnesses.
But in Illinois, Foxx said she looks forward to ending a system that disproportionately harms poor, black and Latino families.
“We’ve known for a long time that money bail is a dysfunctional system,” she said. “It’s rare for public policy to catch up with common sense, and I think this is the pinnacle of it.”
Svlook
