Sunday, May 24, 2015

"Abolish Bail"

While I was doing research for my Junior Theme last month, I started following Michelle Alexander, civil rights lawyer and author of The New Jim Crow, on Facebook, as a way to get more sources and learn more about my topic. I still follow her, so I saw that just the other day she posted a link to an article on her page: "Too Many People in Jail? Abolish Bail." The article is consistant with much of the research I conducted for my Junior Theme, which attempted to answer the question: Why are there so many African Americans in prison? Unlike my research, however, this article tells of a possible solution to the problem, posed by mayor Bill de Blasio of New York, that I and Michelle Alexander agree would help to begin to solve the problem: "abolish bail."

One major reason why there are so many people in prison (the chart below shows just how alarming the increase has been) is because there is a huge backlog of cases in the courts. That is, thousands of
Prison Population vs. Year
people are in prison simply because they are awaiting trial. "According to a 2011 report by the city's Independent Budget Office, 79 percent of pretrial detainees were sent to Rikers" (where Mayor Bill de Blasio is from) "because they couldn't post bail right away." People are literally being detained in prison because they are poor.

Mayor de Blasio's solution is to abolish monitary bail all together. He argues that the people the jails would be releasing are not a high threat because the people who are threatening and need to be detained are not given bail in the first place. Perhaps this should be considered seriously. There are an overwhelming amount of people in jail, which needs to be fixed. In the words of Michelle Alexander, keeping people detained for being poor is "immoral and unjust and counterproductive."

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