Changes to bail reform bill spur alarm

Former backers say amended legislation gives judges the power to jail more people.

SACRAMENTO — California lawmakers haven’t released the details of landmark legislation meant to overhaul the way judges assign bail, but the bill’s former supporters are raising alarm over possible changes that could give judges more power to incarcerate a wide array of people.

An Aug. 6 version of the amended bill obtained by the Los Angeles Times shows that judges would have greater discretion over “preventive detention,” a practice that allows them to decide which people to hold without the possibility of release. The changes to Senate Bill 10 also would narrow the number of lowlevel, nonviolent criminal defendants automatically eligible for release after their arrest.

A staffer for state Sen. Bob Hertzberg (D-Van Nuys), the bill’s coauthor, said the proposal has undergone several rounds of changes since then. But

some sponsors have already dropped their support and others are working to kill the legislation, arguing that the crux of last week’s amendments — which include giving judges and probation officers more control over the pretrial system — are likely to remain the same.

Bail agents and lobbyists, meanwhile, are gearing up to launch massive opposition of their own, saying the revised changes would decimate the industry.

An official version of the bill is expected to be released by Thursday, when SB 10 faces a decisive vote in the Assembly Appropriations Committee.

Hertzberg and Assemblyman Rob Bonta (D-Alameda) combined efforts in late 2016 to unveil a pair of identical bills that would eliminate the use of bail fee systems and require counties to establish their own pretrial services agencies. Under the proposals, those agencies would develop a “risk-assessment tool,” a type of analysis to evaluate people booked into jail to determine whether and under what conditions they should be released.

Only Hertzberg’s bill weathered the legislative process. Gov. Jerry Brown and state Supreme Court Chief Justice Tani CantilSakauye have become deeply involved in the negotiations, advocating for overhauling a bail system they have said hurts the poor.

But San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi, the first to voice public criticism of the leaked language Monday, wrote in a Sacramento Bee op-ed column that the new bill “essentially replaces the evils of money bail with a worse evil known as preventive detention.”

Raj Jayadev, director of Silicon Valley DeBug, one of the leaders of the bail reform movement and a former cosponsor of the legislation, said the changes would allow judges to incarcerate more people based on subjective criteria and subject more people to risk-assessment tools found to be biased against communities of color.

“They are taking the rallying cry of communities to end money bail to introduce a new pretrial system to incarcerate more people,” he said. “How can we look at families in the eye and say this is better?”