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.

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. 

On any given day, more than 9,000 Oklahomans are sitting in jail. They are likely to be in a facility that has dangerous overcrowding or recently failed a health inspection. Or they may simply be in jail because their name falls at the bottom of the list for transfer to a state mental health facility ― like the person who recently had to wait over 1,000 days.

The jail population in Oklahoma has not kept pace with decreasing crime and arrest rates in recent years, leaving the state with one of the highest incarceration rates in the United States. How can this be? The answer lies in the pretrial system, according to a new report from the MODERN Justice Task Force, commissioned by Gov. Kevin Stitt in July 2023.

People charged with a crime in Oklahoma are spending more days in jail as they await trial, undermining the presumption of innocence. And Oklahoma is incarcerating its way through a public health crisis. Despite having the second-highest rates of mental illness and substance use disorders in the country, state funding for mental health services has declined by 11% over the last decade. The absence of effective treatment means people often cycle in and out of jail, adding fuel to the flame of the jail system crisis in Oklahoma.

But above all, the new report shines light on what we do not and cannot see when it comes to the pretrial system in Oklahoma. After a deep dive into the data systems and infrastructure, the task force found that each of Oklahoma’s 75 county jails is independently operated and has a mutually exclusive system of collecting data on the people it holds behind its bars. Think of it like a game of telephone, stretched across the state: Sometimes operators are speaking the same language, and other times they are speaking different languages entirely. But what gets lost in translation has immense consequences.

Without a centralized system, policymakers cannot connect the dots among jails and grasp the urgent challenges facing the pretrial system as a whole. On the flip side, a policy change implemented in a jail in one county that may be replicable across others remains hidden, out of sight. Yet, 71% of voters in Oklahoma want to see more done in terms of criminal justice reform, according to a 2023 poll by Arnold Ventures.

We can begin to address the multiple challenges that contribute to the thousands of people held in pretrial incarceration in Oklahoma ― nearly 70% of the total jail population ― only when we can clearly see those challenges in the full light of day. When we have comprehensive public data, we are bound to have better outcomes. It’s for this reason that the task force, in its report, recommends reforming pretrial data collection and reporting.

At The Bail Project, we know the importance of data. As so little data is collected about the pretrial population at large, our national database provides key insight into this under-researched population. One thing we know from our data is that if you provide supportive services, clients will return to court most of the time ― we’ve posted bail for over 29,000 clients, who return to court over 91% of the time.

Policymakers need good data to make good decisions. Consider the MODERN Justice Task Force report as the first piece of evidence. The task force has delivered in making plain the need for modernizing data collection and reporting through a centralized, statewide system in order to create community safety for all Oklahomans ― whether they live in Cimarron County or Oklahoma County. Now, we urge lawmakers to follow the evidence by legislating a bill to create such a system.

This op-ed originally appeared in The Oklahoman.

Across the country, 7 million people are sent to jail each year. Of those in jail on any given day, more than 60% are there because they cannot afford the cash bail amount required for their release. While legally innocent, those unable to afford bail often remain in custody for 30 days, and sometimes well beyond a year, awaiting their trials. People of color, particularly Black individuals, are more likely to receive higher bail amounts and accordingly experience longer lengths of stay in jail. Those who can’t afford bail experience the collateral effects of incarceration — the loss of employment, housing insecurity, and disconnection from family and community — effectively serving a sentence before being found guilty or convicted of any crimes. In contrast, those with access to financial resources might never spend a single day in jail because they are released immediately upon bail payment to resume their lives and resolve their legal cases outside of jail walls.

You would be hard-pressed to find data and reporting in your state on those who must pay bail for their release and their subsequent court outcomes. Without this information, the core rationale of cash bail, that a deposit is needed to ensure people will return to court, is purely speculative. Today, most U.S. government institutions monitor racial/ethnic and gender disparities related to their services or policies. However, ask your local representative, judge, or sheriff for information on racial/ethnic differences in jail populations due to cash bail policies, and you’ll come back empty-handed. Understanding the efficacy of cash bail is essential because it has undeniably driven the growth in jail populations. In an era where big-data tracking and advanced analytics is easily achieved, the lack of government transparency on cash bail and its consequences is irresponsible.

At The Bail Project, we understand the relationship between effective policy and information sharing. High-quality data helps policymakers make good decisions. Our position that cash bail is unjust and unnecessary is informed by our data collection and monitoring.

Over the past five years, we have provided free bail assistance to 27,856 individuals who could not afford the cash bail set as a condition for their release. Our clients are similar to the pretrial population nationwide. All of them have bail amounts set against them that are well beyond their reach, and without our intervention, they would have remained unnecessarily incarcerated because of poverty. Seventy-seven percent of our clients are male. Sixty-nine percent are people of color. More than 40% report a history of substance misuse, and over 30% face mental health challenges. We’ve collected data on our clients in over 30 cities as diverse as Atlanta, Phoenix, St. Louis, Cleveland, Northwest Arkansas, and tribal lands in Flathead, Montana. Our data tracking shows that the assumption that cash bail is needed to ensure people will show back up in court is false. Our monitoring indicates that The Bail Project clients returned to over 91% of their court appearances, attending 101,639 individual court dates. This court appearance data proves that most individuals – across demographics, geographic regions, and behavioral health needs – return to court to resolve their legal cases without any of their own money on the line, laying waste to the idea that a financial incentive like cash bail is needed.

The Bail Project analyzes data that most jail and court systems can access but underutilize. We monitor this data to advocate for our clients and raise questions about financial waste and mismanagement. While our clients had successful return-to-court rates, the harsh truth is that most would have remained in custody without The Bail Project’s assistance until their cases were resolved. Without our support, people would have spent approximately 1,184,048 more days in local jails, costing taxpayers over 92 million dollars to incarcerate people who are legally presumed innocent.

Cash bail undermines the presumption of innocence and costs taxpayers billions each year. Such an extreme intervention requires evidence to demonstrate worth and effectiveness. At The Bail Project, we understand our responsibility to provide data regarding our free bail assistance and client outcomes. Shouldn’t we expect the same accountability from our criminal legal system?

In September 2022, Lashawn Thompson tragically died after 3 months inside Fulton County jail. His body was covered in bed bugs and insects. The cause of death? Severe neglect. The cause of incarceration? Being unable to afford his $2,500 bail for a misdemeanor charge.

Unfortunately, horrifying stories like this are all too common. On any given day more than 400,000 legally innocent people are held in abhorrent and often deadly conditions in jails across the country. These people – our family, friends, and fellow community members – have not been convicted. They are being jailed pretrial as they await their day in court. The vast majority are forced to suffer through unsanitary conditions, violence, and deplorable healthcare for one simple reason: they cannot afford to pay the price tag on their freedom.

Even one night of pretrial incarceration can be devastating: people lose their jobs, homes, and health. Their family members suffer. Approximately one third of sexual victimization involving jail staff happens in the first 24 hours in custody, and roughly 40% of jail deaths occur within the first week behind bars.

And the crisis of death by incarceration is not getting any better. In fact, it’s getting worse. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2019 (the most recent year for which data is available), approximately 1,200 people died in local jails—a 33% increase in less than 20 years. 2022 marked the deadliest year at Rikers Island in nearly a decade. Since 2021, more than 50 people have died while jailed in Harris County. Over the course of just nine days in March 2023, three men lost their lives while being held in Men’s Central Jail in Los Angeles, California.

One of the cornerstones of our democracy is that people are innocent until proven otherwise. Yet the horrendous conditions in our nation’s jails can be tantamount to a death sentence for people who have not even been convicted. We cannot accept even one of these deaths, let alone thousands.

And while improving jail conditions to reduce harm to people being held in these facilities is an important and valuable intervention, there is another more immediate life saving solution: ending the use of cash bail.

Right now, cash bail, the single biggest driver of pretrial incarceration in America, is all that stands in the way of millions of legally innocent people being able to defend themselves from their homes, instead of from inside their jail cells. Still, in courts across the country, bail is set at amounts that people cannot afford, violating the U.S. Supreme Court and our Constitution, and undermining the validity of our justice system and these important constitutional rights. We do this for no better reason than to punish. Research shows that bail, and the increased incarceration caused by excessive bail setting, does not reduce crime. In fact, it drives people further into debt and poverty, worsens the consequences of drug dependency, and exacerbates physical and mental health issues, which are at the root of most crime.

If we want to keep our communities safe, we need to reconsider when and why we detain people in the first place. Bail reforms, which generally focus on removing or limiting the use of cash bail against defendants who are accused of various offenses, aim at making sure most defendants are not held in jail while awaiting trial solely because they cannot afford to pay their bail. It’s common sense: Fewer people subjected to jail means fewer people facing woefully inadequate health care services, threats of physical and sexual violence, and death that occurs when people are inside our country’s jails. It also means better and fairer court outcomes—research shows that, compared to someone who is detained in jail pretrial, people who are released have fewer convictions, take fewer plea deals, and receive sentences that are less likely to require additional jail or prison time. By reforming the system to help people avoid jail altogether, we also decrease the chances that someone will become justice-involved down the line.

By ending cash bail, we can uphold the promise of equal justice under the law and actually improve public safety. And most importantly, we can save lives.