America’s cash bail system creates two tiers of justice – one for the wealthy and one for everyone else. Regardless of what someone is accused of when arrested, if a judge grants bail and they can afford to pay it, they get to wait for trial at home, cloaked by the presumption of innocence. Putting thousands of dollars towards bail is easy for the wealthy. But for the majority of Americans, having even a few hundred dollars to spare for an emergency expense is unrealistic. This leads to automatic jail for the average person if they are accused of a crime and cannot afford bail. 

The media often sensationalizes stories of everyday people out on bail, yet when someone with extreme wealth pays their bail, the critiques are slim to none. Let’s dive into some examples where money overruled equality. 

Your taxes are finally filed. Whether you ultimately owed more or received a refund, it’s hard not to notice how much from your paychecks over the last year went to the federal government. But what exactly happens to those dollars? Can you meaningfully recognize whether they’re actually helping you, your neighbors, and your local community? 

Where Do These Dollars Go?

Certainly, the federal government spends taxes to help Americans in several important ways, especially through deep investments in social security, health insurance, and national defense. But aside from these large government spending items, federal tax dollars can work another way: by granting investment money in local government programs. 

Federal grant programs provide resources to help people, businesses, and local governments overcome a range of common obstacles. Take the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant (also known as “Byrne JAG”)  – the largest federal grant program dedicated to supporting innovative criminal justice programs across the country. 

When people think about government investments in criminal justice, they tend to think about more police or prosecutors. But there are many other ways that we can improve public safety and the functioning of our criminal justice system altogether.

Investing in Return-to-Court Solutions

While not the most glaringly obvious problem for Byrne JAG to focus on, low return-to-court rates come at a high cost. Even one missed court date due to everyday challenges such as a lack of transportation, often results in pretrial detention for months or even years. This time in jail disrupts legally innocent people’s lives while costing taxpayers $14 billion annually. 

Investing in simple solutions to improve how often people make it to court can avoid these costs. The Bail Project’s Community Release with Support model proves the efficacy of return-to-court services such as text reminders, transportation assistance, and access to voluntary supportive services like employment assistance, housing support, and mental health and substance use treatment. We have provided pretrial support for more than 30,000 low-income individuals nationwide using this support model. The result: our clients have returned to 91% of their court dates, saving over $92 million in tax dollars. 

The Bail Project’s model demonstrates that court return services can significantly improve pretrial outcomes – saving jurisdictions in the long term. Unfortunately, governments have historically underfunded these interventions. The initial cost of implementing these services may seem daunting, but counties and cities don’t need to foot the bill solely through their local budgets. 

How to Help

With federal grant programs like Byrne JAG readily available each year, taxpayers must lift their voices up. All it takes are a few steps:

• Find out if your local government provides any return-to-court services, and which they don’t (and encourage them to establish robust support!).
• Share resources on how effective The Bail Project’s model is.
• Ask your mayor, city or county council members, and local judges to apply for Byrne JAG and other federal grants to help fund the set up of court notification and transportation systems.

With his veto on April 9, Gov. Beshear signaled he would neither be complacent nor stand idly by while the state’s elected representatives foolishly advance House Bill 5, a bill that will harm public safety. Make no mistake: the so-called Safer Kentucky Act, by further criminalizing homelessness, poverty and substance misuse, and attacking charitable bail funds, will ensnare countless poor and sick Kentuckians within an unrelenting revolving door of justice-system involvement that will destabilize them in the future.

The bill drew criticism from criminologists and both sides of the political spectrum in part because it offers a solution to a problem that does not exist – violent crime rates have been declining in recent years – and it wastes taxpayer dollars, with estimates suggesting that the bill will cost $1 billion over ten years. This latter point is something the governor mentioned explicitly in the public statement he released explaining his veto. The money spent on jailing could be otherwise used for preventative programs like outpatient drug treatment, supportive housing, and jobs programs that address the root causes of crime and help people avoid justice-system involvement altogether.

In stepping in to correct the path of the legislature, Gov. Beshear has chosen to protect the community safety of the Commonwealth – and proven he understands that incarceration should be a measure of last resort, not the default. The governor’s actions are also a testament to the unassailable reserve of the countless community activists and advocates who protested this bill in the first place. The reasons behind community opposition to this bill are obvious – and were apparently heard loud and clear by the Governor.

At The Bail Project, where I work, we are especially concerned with the bill because it attacks charitable bail organizations, which provide a lifeline to Kentuckians who are legally innocent but detained pretrial because they can’t afford to pay bail. The bill would prohibit charitable bail organizations from posting bail amounts of $5,000 or more and prevent them from supporting people charged with a variety of alleged offenses. This is like outlawing food pantries in the midst of a hunger crisis.

Evidence shows our work is both necessary and successful. Between 2018-2023, we provided free bail assistance court notifications, transportation, and referrals to supportive services like drug treatment and housing assistance to over 4,200 Kentuckians across 28 counties who returned to 91% of their court dates, laying waste to the idea that cash bail is necessary to ensure someone returns to court.

Lawmakers would like you to believe that charitable bail organizations are the problem, not cash bail itself. But that’s a ruse – cash bail is the single largest driver of unnecessary pretrial incarceration. In fact, nearly half of the 21,000 people in Kentucky jails are there because they cannot afford bail. This creates a two-tiered system of justice that uses wealth – not safety – to determine who is released pretrial.

When people are incarcerated because of bail amounts they cannot afford, they risk losing their jobs, homes, even custody of their children. Their health declines. Incarceration for as short as 48 hours increases a person’s likelihood of being arrested again in the future. For these reasons, many states and jurisdictions are doing away with cash bail altogether. By refusing to reform the cash bail system as a whole, and by scapegoating organizations like The Bail Project, Kentucky’s lawmakers doubled-down on a failed public policy that devastates communities.

Gov. Beshear has made clear that he is not willing to gamble the safety and livelihoods of Kentuckians for a short-sighted political win. We now await the legislature’s response and hope that they will see the governor’s actions for what they are: a refusal to follow the legislature down a misguided path towards unnecessary incarceration and needless suffering.

People tend to say that government budgets are political value statements – they represent choices made by our lawmakers about what to spend money on and what not to spend money on. The cost of relying on cash bail and incarceration comes at the expense of resourcing other supportive services like education, job training, supportive housing, and mental health care – services that, if fully-funded and provided at a greater scale, would address the root causes of crime and close the revolving door of the criminal justice system for good. 

Our latest report focuses on the many detrimental “costs” – financial and otherwise – of incarcerating people pretrial. In this report, we estimate the incredible toll of our nation’s over-reliance on cash bail. After reading, you’ll more fully understand the magnitude and scale of this problem, as well as some of the solutions that can help Americans avoid the justice system altogether and create safer, healthier communities for all.

Women are the fastest growing group of incarcerated people and the vast majority are of reproductive age. Reproductive health care – which refers to a gamut of services, including but not limited to contraception and pregnancy care – mirrors the state of health care more broadly in jails: it’s inadequate, and often dangerous. Stories from our clients, including Maribeth and Ashley, highlight the dismal reality of being both pregnant and incarcerated as a result of unaffordable cash bail. 

To better understand the state of reproductive care and access in U.S. jails, we spoke with Dr. Carolyn Sufrin, associate professor of gynecology and obstetrics at Johns Hopkins University.

Safety is more than a measure of the presence or absence of crime. It is also safety from the economic, social, and environmental conditions that can lead to harm or diminished life outcomes. This can include, for example, a lack of medical facilities where someone can access treatment if they are or become ill, or a scarcity of quality jobs that leaves people with few employment prospects. 

How do these conditions relate to public safety, though? Take transportation as an example. Research shows that public transportation infrastructure – like a bus or train system that runs on time and is affordable and accessible – allows people to get to work and access critical social services such as substance use treatment that altogether reduce cycles of rearrest and incarceration. The Bail Project’s clients, who return to court more than 91% of the time, receive access to transportation services because we realize that the latter is inadequate or inaccessible to many low-income communities across the United States. There’s also ample evidence that street lighting reduces crime. So too do employment opportunities for teenagers, as well as social cohesion and a person’s willingness to engage with government agencies and actors.

For too long, concerns about public safety have dominated headlines and policy agendas. And time and again, public safety has proven easily manipulated to serve bad-faith politicians looking to score political points instead of enacting effective policy. Everyone deserves to be and feel safe, but what is often the focal point of debates about public safety – more incarceration, more arrests – are policies that most Americans don’t support. What they want instead are things that build strong and healthy communities, like good schools, good jobs, affordable housing, and access to recreational spaces and services that help them get a leg up. 

As public safety has become conflated with the police and jails, we’ve lost sight of the fact that unequal access to opportunities and systemic underinvestment in services establishes the conditions that lead to crime in the first place. Crime occurs everywhere. But neighborhoods that feel less safe tend to be those that have experienced histories of over-policing and residential segregation; the same places that were subjected to “redlining” are places with diminished health outcomes, higher poverty rates, poorer quality housing, and less access to community-based services. 

The more we adopt a comprehensive approach to safety, understanding it as more than just the absence of crime but also the extent to which we provide opportunities for community thriving, the better we’ll be able to develop solutions that really make people safe. 

Local governments have started shifting towards this more holistic approach. Nearly 50 counties and cities have established local offices called “Offices of Neighborhood Safety” (ONS) that adopt a non-punitive, community-centered approach to violence prevention. Richmond, California, for instance, has invested in its ONS and seen tremendous results in the past 15 years: homicides have declined by 62% and firearm assaults have decreased by 79%. And in New York City, the New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice has developed NeighborhoodStat – a process whereby residents of public housing with high levels of crime are able to collaborate with city officials to develop social and economic solutions that combat the common conditions that produce crime. Examples of how investing in local infrastructure and services creates safer, more resilient communities abound. 

At The Bail Project, too many of our clients have fallen victim to short-sighted approaches to public safety: not only are they denied the presumption of innocence with unaffordable bail amounts, but they’re also not offered access to the help they need to avoid justice-system involvement altogether. Our model of Community Release with Support embodies the core tenets of community safety. 

The verdict is in: we need to rethink the utility of public safety as a term, and welcome community safety as a more accurate alternative. Community safety helps us to move beyond the rhetoric of public safety, which focuses too heavily on policing and incarceration, and allows us to instead concentrate on the factors that we know make communities safe. 

Last April, Raad Almansoori was booked in an Orlando jail and charged with assaulting and sexually battering a woman and then stealing her car. When Orlando’s 9th Circuit prosecutors dropped all but the car theft charges and reduced his bail in June, the 26-year-old was able to pay a for-profit bail bonds agent $2,500 to secure his freedom. Months later, Almansoori appeared to have fled the state, violating one of the conditions of his release. From there, he has been accused of repeated acts of violence against women across several state lines: He traveled to New York City, where he allegedly murdered a 38-year-old mom in a Manhattan hotel, and then he fled to Phoenix, Arizona, where he is accused of stabbing two women. Finally, in late February, he was apprehended and detained in Maricopa County.

The tragic case has drawn national attention, with Arizona and New York officials sparring publicly over Almansoori’s extradition. However, there is little to no discussion of the role played by the for-profit bail bonds industry. The hypocrisy of this rings loud and clear. Almansoori was only able to leave police custody in Florida because a bail bonds company stood to profit from his release.

Like many other states, Florida’s bail bonds agents are not subject to oversight from any agency working in the criminal justice system. Instead, the state’s Department of Financial Services regulates bail bond agent licenses as a business. Here’s how it works: A bail bonds agent will post a person’s bail in exchange for a fee, typically 10% of the total bond. These fees are nonrefundable, and the bail bond industry is estimated to collect as much as $2.4 billion in profit from these payments each year.

The vast majority of bail bonds agents engage in no process to determine whether an individual has a safe home to return to, a phone by which to receive court notifications or a ride to subsequent court dates. Their pursuit is profit, and that requires maintenance of the cash bail system. In essence, the courts are turning power over to a for-profit industry that allows bail bonds agents to decide whether a person will be released on bail pending trial. This eclipses a judge’s decision of whether to release or detain a person pretrial based on the facts of the case, rather than their access to money.

By contrast, criminal justice reform organizations, such as The Bail Project, have been tackling the issue at its root. By posting free bail assistance and providing pretrial support for nearly 30,000 low-income individuals and analyzing their rates of return to court, The Bail Project has shown that people return to 91% of their court dates without having any of their own money on the line. This evidence lays waste to the myth that bail and bail bond companies are necessary for the proper functioning of a justice system.

And yet, despite growing evidence that the cash bail system is fundamentally flawed, charitable bail organizations have come under increasing attack. So far in 2024, at least five states have introduced regulatory or restrictive legislation aimed at charitable bail funds. This comes in the wake of other states trying to pass similar legislation in recent years.

Meanwhile, market analysis of the bail bonds industry shows that it has grown 4.3% each year on average between 2018 and 2023. Today there are around 15,000 bail bonds agents across the country. Each year they bail out around 2 million people and rake in billions in profits while lobbying aggressively to expand the cash bail system and restrict charitable bail organizations.

The truth is, our pretrial system is largely dependent on a for-profit model that has rarely been called into question. Until we can move this conversation more productively toward systemic solutions and away from polarized debates, we are doomed to continue to shift blame onto judges, prosecutors and sometimes charitable bail funds. These individuals are treated as if they can predict the future and are held to a standard that one group — the for-profit bail bonds industry — is noticeably exempt from.

This op-ed originally appeared in the South Florida Sun Sentinel.

If you’ve ever seen a courtroom show on television, you’re familiar with the scene: a prosecutor recites a list of violent crimes; the judge slams their gavel down, saying, “Bail is set in the amount of…”; and then you hear a very, very high number. As we’ve discussed, TV gets a lot wrong about the criminal legal system. And this courtroom scenario is no exception. Viewers are left with the impression that the only people who are held in jail on bail are the ones who are charged with serious offenses, like murder – when in fact, the majority of people jailed pretrial who cannot afford their bail are charged with minor offenses. 

The truth about cash bail is that it affects millions of people per year – all of them presumed innocent and most of them charged with nonviolent offenses. Most people who end up in jail are there not because they were charged with a serious crime, but because they can’t afford the cash bail required for their release. In 2023, more than two-thirds of people held in local jails before trial were locked up due to nonviolent charges. 

For instance, thousands of people every year are held in jail solely because they missed a court date, like our clients, Lisa and Ashley. Both women were incarcerated, with bail set, because they had missed their court dates on prior cases. We all miss a date here and there – a dentist appointment, a scheduled call with a friend. But for Lisa and Ashley, their missed court dates led to high, unaffordable bail amounts. 

Across the country, people are regularly incarcerated pretrial because of traffic offenses. In Michigan, a pregnant woman was arrested for driving with a suspended license – her first driving-related offense. Her bail was set at $10,000, despite the fact that she was eight months pregnant. She couldn’t afford bail, and so when she went into labor five days after her arrest, she was forced to give birth on the floor of the jail – all because of a traffic charge. In Wisconsin, a man spent 84 days in jail on suspended license charges, even though when the police stopped the car, he wasn’t driving – or in the vehicle at all.  Had the man been able to afford his $5,000 bail, he would not have spent 84 days in jail for a traffic case that was eventually dismissed by the prosecutor. Locking these individuals up doesn’t promote public safety, it only harms people’s lives.

Do you know someone who has shoplifted? Most of us do – whether as a kid or an adult, it’s a fairly common petty offense. In 2022, in the wake of a pandemic that has left so many people strapped for cash and unable to provide for their families, more than 15,000 people in New York were charged with petit larceny, the most common form of which is shoplifting. Over 2,000 of them had bail set in their cases. Similarly, in Tennessee, a woman charged with taking less than $250 of merchandise from a store had her bail set at a staggering $142,750. These circumstances are a far cry from the felony smash-and-grab robberies you may have seen being sensationalized in the media.

Judges have a tremendous amount of power in setting bail amounts – and unfortunately, judicial discretion often works against poor people and people of color. People who sit in jail unable to afford bail suffer a host of collateral consequences – losing jobs and wages, facing housing insecurity, and even losing custody of their children. This is why so many people facing unaffordable cash bail give up their right to a fair trial and end up taking plea deals.

Bail affects people charged with serious crimes, as well as those charged with minor offenses – it’s a part of the criminal legal system that hurts anyone who doesn’t have the money to pay. 

The Bail Project’s goal is to create a more equitable pretrial justice system, which means advocating for policies that steer us away from cash bail. Cash bail is unjust, and creates systemic disparities based on race and class – not safety or second chances. This inequality rings true for low-level offenses and also for more serious charges. So next time you forget to pay a bill, let your car insurance lapse, roll through a stop sign, or accidentally grab an extra apple at the store without paying for it – just remember, your actions are no different from those of the thousands of people who are ensnared in the pretrial system every year for low-level charges. You shouldn’t be jailed if you can’t afford bail, and neither should they.

States and jurisdictions across the United States are ending their reliance on cash bail. Harris County, Texas – the home of Houston and third largest urban jurisdiction in the country – is one model of successful reform. In 2019, Harris County began allowing people charged with misdemeanors to be released back into their community without paying cash while they await trial as a part of a comprehensive set of reforms adopted under the O’Donnell consent decree. A court-appointed independent monitor was also set up to review and report on the reforms.

To better understand bail reform in Harris County, we spoke with the monitor, Professor Brandon L. Garrett.

In the face of injustice or a shared yearning for change, Americans have historically exercised their right to assemble in public spaces, fervently engaging in protests that echo the principles enshrined in our Constitution. To advocate for justice and equity through public demonstration is democracy in action. 

American Values at Risk

Americans value protesting as much as they do another common principle: the presumption of innocence. Our First Amendment contains the right to public protest, and this continues to be a catalyst for change during pivotal moments in history. The right to free speech empowers citizens at a protest to collectively chant, wield signs with poignant messaging, and employ language, all of which are potent tools for societal transformation. 

However, protestors sometimes encounter legal hurdles, including arrest, which exposes them to another facet of the criminal justice system – unaffordable cash bail. Understanding these intersections is paramount, as the right to protest and the right to a fair and equitable criminal justice system are interconnected strands of the democratic fabric.

Know Your Rights

Regardless of the cause of the protest, it’s critical to know your rights and understand the laws associated with organizing or participating – as well as what you should do if you are approached by law enforcement. It’s not uncommon for law enforcement to disrupt a protest. If individuals are arrested as a result, bail may be set as a condition of release.

Despite constitutional protections against excessive bail outlined in the 8th Amendment, the economic landscape, marked by high rates of inflation, renders bail amounts unattainable for many. A person’s options are limited if they cannot afford their bail. Most states allow people to hire a for-profit bail bonds agent to pay their bail, if they can afford the 10% non-refundable fee to do so. In some jurisdictions, The Bail Project could pay a protestor’s bail for free, sparing them the expense of having to hire a bail bonds agent altogether. Without money to pay a bail bonds agent or access to The Bail Project’s services, someone might have to wait in jail until their court date, which can take days, weeks, months, or even years. 

If someone you know needs help paying bail and they’re incarcerated in a location The Bail Project operates in, start by submitting a referral.