Our team in Kentucky was profiled by Spectrum News in Louisville, who spoke at length to one of our clients about the impact we had on his life and the conditions he endured at the crowded Louisville Metro Detention Center.
Poor people who receive welfare benefits from the state are increasingly at the mercy of cold, calculated algorithms that can cut off their assistance at any moment. Because being poor increases the chances of someone going to jail in America, people also face the prospect of judgement by pretrial algorithms, which purport to measure a person’s likelihood of committing a new crime or skipping court while out on bond.
Washington County Detention Center, in Northwest Arkansas, faces severe overcrowding even as The Bail Project provides bail assistance to dozens of people incarcerated there.
The government hasn’t collected national data on the race or ethnicity of people awaiting trial in jail since 2002. Prison Policy Initiative reviewed the academic literature published since then to offer a more current assessment of racial disparities in pretrial detention.
A letter written by our Bail Disruptor in Detroit, Rasha Almulaiki.
The Economist spoke with our client and team in Indianapolis about the stigma, cost, and difficulty of electronic monitoring as an alternative to cash bail.
The L.A. County Board of Supervisors has authorized the Public Defender to expand their work with the Bail Project to the Van Nuys courthouse, after a successful pilot program in Compton.
From the video:
“Pre-trial detention has shifted from brick and mortar prisons to ankle monitors for people that have yet to be charged with a crime. Advocates say that it’s an alternative form of incarceration as they see an increasing number of people held without bond.”
Had the 2020 reforms been in place in 2018, the courts would have been required to order some form of release without bail in an additional 20,349 cases.
Robin Steinberg, executive director of The Bail Project, discusses how the cash bail system unfairly targets the poor during Justice For All, an MSNBC Town Hall event with Lester Holt on criminal justice reform at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York.