Fixing the Bail System
By Mayor Albert Kelly
With the huge volume and
fast pace of news these days, you might have missed the stories from late March
on the State Supreme Court Committee tasked with reviewing New Jersey’s bail
system and offering recommendations to fix that system.
The “Joint Committee on
Criminal Justice” released a rather thick report covering a lot of areas, but
the overriding stuff that got everyone’s attention includes the following; (1)
that pretrial release decisions be based on risk not resources, (2) use of
objective risk assessments for all people in jail awaiting trial, (3) have
nonmonetary conditions for release that match a defendant’s risk level, (4)
have enough pretrial supervision and services for those released, (5) solid
enforcement for noncompliance with pretrial conditions, and (6) provide enough
funding to get it all done.
Reforming the bail system
is no small thing. According to the experts, 40% of New Jersey’s jail (not
prison) population is behind bars simply because they cannot afford to pay even
small bail amounts for very minor offenses.
Now I know that there are
some people in the world who simply don’t care about these folks behind bars
because they figure these “poor slobs” who can’t afford the bail probably don’t
deserve it anyway. These are the “lock-them-up-and throw-away-the-key” crowd,
and they would sniff at the poor regardless. On the other end are those who
make money off the system in one way or another.
But if we’re going to have
anything remotely close to a serious discussion about breaking the cycle of
poverty and even homelessness; not to mention use of taxpayer funds or basic
justice, it should start here. If you’ve never thought about the real
day-to-day impact; it is enormous.
Let’s assume you are
basically living paycheck-to-paycheck and you are arrested for some minor
non-violent offense. After being arrested, you are held until the matter can be
brought before a judge and issues like your plea, legal counsel, and bail can
be addressed. Because it is a minor offense the bail is relatively small, but
because you don’t have the money or the collateral for a bail bondsman, you sit
in jail.
That starts the downward
spiral. Sitting in jail means you’re not able to work- which means you lose
your job. Losing your job means you can’t pay your rent or your other bills;
which means you get evicted and things can quickly escalate from there and when
there’s no one to help you out, it’s not a big leap from “paycheck-to-paycheck”
to “living on the street”.
Because many of us have
someone we can call; a friend or a family member to say we need help, we find
it hard to imagine that there would be no options. We have a nest egg- funds we
can tap- something we can do to put the brakes on a bad situation. But not
everyone has that and things can spiral out of control quickly.
If you have children; what
happens to them if you’re sitting in a jail cell for a minor infraction for
which you do not have the small amount of bail required to go home? With no
relatives to help with your kids; do they end of with the Department of
Children and Families (previously known as DFYS)? Can you get them back having
lost your apartment?
The number of scenarios is
endless. But no matter which scenario you choose, having those types of
consequences befall someone simply because they do not have the small amount of
bail necessary for release on a minor offense is not justice.
It is no big secret that
the current system impacts African-Americans and Latinos disproportionately;
this too is an injustice. And even if some remain unmoved by the plight of
individuals sitting in jail for monetary reasons; the cost-benefit argument
should be enough to convince them that reform is worth doing. Taxpayers should
not be burdened with paying the costs for incarcerating individuals
unnecessarily.
Beyond that, the inability
to “make bail” which results in job loss, child custody issues, and even
homelessness has a very definite economic impact on our communities. Of course
for me, there’s no price you can put on a person’s dignity, their reputation,
their spirit or their overall well-being. For all those reasons and more, it’s
time for some serious reform to our bail system.