Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren vocal bomb here. If you're arrested in most cities
Speaker 1: and towns in America, you'll be fingerprinted, booked, and tossed
Speaker 1: in a jail cell until the judge sets your bail. Technically,
Speaker 1: bail means any kind of conditional release from custody between
Speaker 1: your arrest and your actual trial date, but in most
Speaker 1: cases bail means money. Cash bail is one of the
Speaker 1: oldest ways of ensuring that the accused person shows up
Speaker 1: for trial, dating back to the medieval Anglo Saxon's cash
Speaker 1: bail allows a defendant to be released from jail before
Speaker 1: trial by giving the court cash or collateral. The money
Speaker 1: or property is returned to the defendant if and only
Speaker 1: if they show up to court. Today, most cash bails
Speaker 1: aren't paid directly by the defendant, but by a third
Speaker 1: party bail bonds agent also known as a surety bondsman.
Speaker 1: That's because the cash bail schedules used by most judges
Speaker 1: X crime equals x dollars in bail don't factor in
Speaker 1: a person's ability to pay. For example, if you were
Speaker 1: to look at the twenty eighteen bail schedule for Orange County, California,
Speaker 1: you'd see that the bail for residential burglary is set
Speaker 1: at fifty thousand dollars. A bail bonds agent charges ten
Speaker 1: percent of the full amount, nonrefundable for your release, and
Speaker 1: promises the court to pay the balance if you don't
Speaker 1: show up. They also promised to hunt you down and
Speaker 1: collect on your debt. But bail bonds agents don't have
Speaker 1: to post bail for everybody. Some people, like drug addicts
Speaker 1: and repeat offenders, may be too risky, and others are
Speaker 1: simply too poor to cover the ten percent fee, so
Speaker 1: they sit in jail awaiting trial, sometimes only for a
Speaker 1: few days, but often for months, and in extreme cases,
Speaker 1: for years. Currently, four hundred and forty three thousand people
Speaker 1: who haven't been convicted are sitting in America's jails awaiting trial,
Speaker 1: according to a nonprofit group called the Prison Policy Initiative,
Speaker 1: that's seven out of every ten people in jail who
Speaker 1: have yet to be convicted or sentenced. Note that jails
Speaker 1: aren't the same as prisons. Jails are designed for shorter stays,
Speaker 1: whether it's a short sentence or a pre trial detention.
Speaker 1: According to a report by the Prison policy Initiative. The
Speaker 1: total number of Americans incarcerated in both jails and prisons
Speaker 1: is more than two point three million. The real crime
Speaker 1: for criminal justice reform groups like this one is that
Speaker 1: the cash bail system produces two very different outcomes depending
Speaker 1: on how much money the defendant can scrape together. A
Speaker 1: person arrested for felony assault who poses a potential safety
Speaker 1: risk to the community could walk free if they make bail.
Speaker 1: A person arrested for misdemeanor shoplifting could sit in jail
Speaker 1: for weeks because they can't come up with a few
Speaker 1: hundred bucks for bail. We spoke with Rachel Soddle log Vin,
Speaker 1: vice president of the Pre Trial Justice Institute. She said
Speaker 1: money has now become the primary determining factor of whether
Speaker 1: or not you're released. Her organization advocates for eliminating cash
Speaker 1: bail entirely and maximizing release by moving to a risk
Speaker 1: based system that assesses a defendant's threat to public safety
Speaker 1: if released and his or her likelihood of appearing in court.
Speaker 1: Bail reform isn't a new issue. Speaking at the nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty four National Conference on Bail, Ail and Criminal Justice,
Speaker 1: Attorney General Robert Kennedy concluded, what has been made clear
Speaker 1: today in the last two days is that our present
Speaker 1: attitudes toward bail are not only cruel, but really completely illogical.
Speaker 1: What has been demonstrated here is that usually only one
Speaker 1: factor determines whether a defendant stays in jail before he
Speaker 1: comes to trial. That factor is not guilt or innocence.
Speaker 1: It's not the nature of the crime, it's not the
Speaker 1: character of the defendant. The factor is simply money. How
Speaker 1: much money does the defendant have. But despite being on
Speaker 1: reformer's radar for more than fifty years, only recently has
Speaker 1: city and state governments begun to really do something about bail.
Speaker 1: New Jersey passed bail reform and launched its new assessment
Speaker 1: based system in January of The Maryland Supreme Court ruled
Speaker 1: in February of seventeen that defendants can't be held in
Speaker 1: jail pre trial simply because they can't afford bail, and
Speaker 1: bills have been introduced in states like California, Connecticut, and
Speaker 1: New York to reduce the reliance on cash bail for
Speaker 1: pre trial release. The bill a bond industry has been
Speaker 1: lobbying hard against changes to the cash bail system which
Speaker 1: it insists is still the best way to ensure that
Speaker 1: defendants won't skip out on their court date. Jeff Clayton
Speaker 1: is executive director of the American Bail Coalition. He takes
Speaker 1: issue with a statistic that seven and ten people in
Speaker 1: jail are awaiting trial and haven't been convicted or sentenced.
Speaker 1: Clayton says that most detainees aren't there because they can't
Speaker 1: pay bail, but because the judge has placed them on
Speaker 1: other holds for violating probation or a pending charge in
Speaker 1: another jurisdiction. Also, to say they haven't been convicted ignores
Speaker 1: the fact that they may have a long history of
Speaker 1: prior convictions. The real question about cash bail, he said,
Speaker 1: is what would the alternative be and would it look
Speaker 1: any better? For that, there's really only one place to look,
Speaker 1: and that's the Pre Trial Services Agency or p s A,
Speaker 1: headquartered in Washington, d C. The p s A, and
Speaker 1: independent federal agency with a forty five year track record,
Speaker 1: is widely regarded as the gold standard of pre trial
Speaker 1: criminal justice reform. While cash bail is still legal in
Speaker 1: d C and used in rare cases, the p s
Speaker 1: A releases eighty percent of defendants on their own recognizance,
Speaker 1: meaning nothing but a pledge to return for trial even
Speaker 1: without bail. The p s A has seen nine of
Speaker 1: release defendants appear at all of their scheduled court dates
Speaker 1: and remain arrest free between pre trial release and their
Speaker 1: trial date. How does it work? The p s A
Speaker 1: uses a risk assessment tool that calculates each defendant's real
Speaker 1: threat as a safety or flight risk, using metrics like
Speaker 1: the defendant's current charges, criminal history, age, and other attributes,
Speaker 1: race not among them. Based on this assessment, the system
Speaker 1: recommends the least restrictive non financial release conditions. Next, a
Speaker 1: team of p s A case workers sits down with
Speaker 1: each defendant, particularly the higher risk individuals, to lower their
Speaker 1: barriers to success. There's on site drug testing and an
Speaker 1: in house drug treatment facility. Defendants with mental health issues
Speaker 1: are referred to community counseling partners. The p s A
Speaker 1: can provide help with employment and housing to help disrupt
Speaker 1: cycles of poverty and crime. If a defendant skips on
Speaker 1: a court date, the judge doesn't automatically issue a bench
Speaker 1: warrant for his or her arrest, the p s A
Speaker 1: case workers conduct a failure to appear investigation, which includes
Speaker 1: phone calls to the defendant, to the defendant's family, to
Speaker 1: other jurisdictions, and even to hospitals if the defendant has
Speaker 1: known health issues. All of this costs money. The p
Speaker 1: s A has three hundred and fifty full time employees
Speaker 1: sur case workers, with an annual budget of sixty five
Speaker 1: million dollars. Clayton of the American Bail Coalition said supervision
Speaker 1: and all these alternatives are hugely expensive, and noted that
Speaker 1: New Jersey's new system, which follows the p s A
Speaker 1: model closely, may cost in the hundreds of millions of
Speaker 1: dollars to operate. Leslie Cooper, director of the p s A,
Speaker 1: says that the agency's core tenants, risk assessment and release
Speaker 1: conditions tailored to that risk, are scalable and replicable anywhere,
Speaker 1: and can be customized to fit a jurisdictions budget. What's
Speaker 1: harder is the culture shift that needs to happen from within.
Speaker 1: Cooper said. If a jurisdictions culture of criminal justice has
Speaker 1: developed around the use of money bond as a system,
Speaker 1: particularly money bonds that are secured by a third party
Speaker 1: bail bondsman, it's a huge cultural change to tell people
Speaker 1: that your system can be equally, if not more effective,
Speaker 1: when you take away money. Nothing sells the case better
Speaker 1: than being able to say it works and we have
Speaker 1: the numbers to prove it. The bail industry and criminal
Speaker 1: justice performers rarely see eye to eye, but Clayton of
Speaker 1: the American Bail Coalition agrees that diverting some detainees to
Speaker 1: drug and mental health treatment is the way to go.
Speaker 1: He said, people with mental health and drug issues and
Speaker 1: all these problems, nobody's going to post bond for them.
Speaker 1: Doesn't mean that we need to keep these people in jail. No.
Speaker 1: Today's episode was written by Dave Ruse and produced by
Speaker 1: Tyler Klang. For more on this and lots of other
Speaker 1: judicial topics, visit our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com.