The crime of doing time just for being poor
Every day of 2016, New York City held an average of 7,633 people in jail for pretrial detention. That qualifier is important: It means these are people who have yet to be convicted of any crime — who are, in one of our criminal justice system’s most important stipulations, presumed innocent.
So why are they in jail? Well, for half of them, about 3,800 people at any given moment, it’s basically because they’re poor. They can’t go home because they don’t have enough cash on hand to make bail.
Many of these defendants are held despite being accused of lowlevel, nonviolent offenses like drug use. They’re held despite the fact that “pretrial detention disrupts people’s ability to work, pay rent, and take care of their families, and drastically increases the chances that one will be found guilty of a crime.” They’re held though many may well be innocent, and many of those who are guilty pose no real risk to their community.
Detaining them simply because they cannot buy their freedom is unjust and unnecessary.
That pretrial detention increases the likelihood of conviction is noteworthy. While we might guess this jail time scares the guilty into confession, the sad truth is the innocent get cowed into confessing, too.
You see, pretrial detention makes it more likely defendants will take a plea deal. (More than 97 percent of federal criminal cases and 94 percent of state criminal cases in America are resolved this way.) Innocent people take plea deals significantly because they know going to trial risks a much longer prison sentence. If you’re stuck in pretrial detention because you can’t make bail, a plea deal that gets you home sooner is going to begin to look attractive regardless of your guilt.
It gets worse. At New York’s notorious Riker’s Island Prison specifically, as many as 1,500 people at a time have been held for a year or longer pretrial. Shockingly, in 2015, we learned that six people had been jailed six years or more without being convicted of the crimes of which they were accused. That is unconscionable.
On top of all that, New York City’s bail payment system is so byzantine those who do muster the money to pay may not manage to navigate its nightmarish bureaucracy. Successfully posting bail for someone is an all-day project in New York.
The technology of the process is wildly outdated: Online payments and personal checks aren’t permitted, and credit or debit payments are only accepted at a single location with a 9 percent “convenience fee” tacked on top. If you bring a money order that isn’t the exact right amount, the whole process starts over, no matter how many hours you’ve waited already.
Oh, and if you do successfully post bail, it can still take up to a week for the release to be processed, more than enough time to leave someone’s financial life in shambles if they’re on the brink of poverty already.
This situation becomes more troubling still when you realize it’s not isolated to New York, as Rare’s Jack Hunter has documented.
As you read this, 3,800 people are jailed in New York City because they’re poor, as are hundreds of thousands of other Americans around the country. Isn’t it time that changed?
Mark Zuckerberg is on the road.
The founder and CEO of Facebook made a resolution to visit all 50 states to learn more about concerns of folks who use his product — you may recall that he was in Dayton to talk with people fighting the opioid crisis.
According to The New York Times, Zuckerberg says his desire to learn is genuine. The paper wrote, “’I think he’s just really curious and wants to visit all the places that he’s never been,’ said Ashley Gant, 27, who spoke with Mr. Zuckerberg (at) her family’s Wisconsin dairy farm in April. Over a midday meal of roast beef, mashed potatoes and her grandmother’s applesauce Jell-O, Ms. Gant said, she answered the chief executive’s questions about daily life on a farm. ‘It felt like an everyday conversation with someone who isn’t from around here .It just so happens that he also invented Facebook.’”
Email me at rrollins@ coxohio.com.