This week, Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) revealed her first major piece of legislation: a reform bill that tackles the cash bail system. She teamed up with Republican Kentucky Senator Rand Paul to introduce the bill, named the Pretrial Integrity and Safety Act of 2017, in an increasingly rare example of bipartisanship.
In a New York TImes op-ed co-authored by the senators, they argue the current bail system is inherently unjust:
Our justice system was designed with a promise: to treat all people equally. Yet that doesn’t happen for many of the 450,000 Americans who sit in jail today awaiting trial because they cannot afford to pay bail.
Whether someone stays in jail or not is far too often determined by wealth or social connections, even though just a few days behind bars can cost people their job, home, custody of their children — or their life.
In the current system, the vast majority of defendants cannot afford to pay bail. A New York Times Magazine story from 2015 found that 85% of arrestees cannot afford bail even when it’s set at $500 or lower. According to a 2015 report by the Prison Policy Initiative, many Americans are stuck in the system simply because they are too poor.
Jail churn is particularly high because at any given moment most of the 722,000 people in local jails have not been convicted and are in jail because they are either too poor to make bail and are being held before trial, or because they’ve just been arrested and will make bail in the next few hours or days. The remainder of the people in jail — almost 300,000 — are serving time for minor offenses, generally misdemeanors with sentences under a year.
There’s also a racial discrimination in the bail system, Sens. Harris and Paul argue. Black and Latino arrestees are less likely to post bail—and are charged higher bail than their white counterparts.
So to improve the system, the bill incentives aim to change how they do the bail process. It would create a $10 million grant to states who reform or replace their pretrial release processes. In an official statement, Sen. Harris’ office writes that states have to create “individualized, pretrial assessments with risk-based decision-making” to qualify.
The bill already has widespread support with endorsements from over 40 prominent organizations, including the ACLU, the NAACP, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.