St. Louis bail disruptor Tracy Stanton penned a powerful op–ed for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch sharing her personal experience at the inhumane Workhouse jail.
The Bail Project’s statewide advocacy and policy manager Mike Milton wrote an op–ed for the St. Louis American on the critical need to address the systemic issues of poverty, institutional racism and public health inequities which drive so many into the criminal legal system.
Kentucky was an early adopter of risk assessments in an effort to release more people without bail. But the algorithms are reproducing systemic inequities.
In the weeks since George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis, a broader swatch of Americans, including many white Americans, have begun to engage in conversations about how systemic racism shapes the criminal justice system in the U.S. The dialogue has often focused on shifting money away from law enforcement and into social services, housing initiatives and jobs programs.
But another key part of dismantling a system that disproportionately incarcerates Black and Latino men, activists say, rests in abolishing a cash-bail framework that can lock people into cycles of poverty and legal discrimination.
George Floyd should be alive today, like so many others whose lives have been taken by the brutality of our criminal legal system, from the policing practices that reflect America’s history of institutional racism to those dying in jails because of cash bail
“Bail reform is ultimately about protecting the bedrock principle of the American legal system — the presumption of innocence — and ensuring that it applies to all of us equally.”
