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Our Speaker: Katherine Hubbard, Deputy Director of Litigation at Civil Rights Corps. https://civilrightscorps.org/
Every night in America, there are more than 450,000 people awaiting trial in jail cells solely because they cannot afford to make a cash payment. That is because in most jurisdictions, people are required to pay bail in order to secure their freedom. Poorer people, particularly people of color, often can't come up with money for bail, leaving them jailed for months or even years awaiting trial. Meanwhile, wealthy people accused of the same crime can buy their freedom and return home. The bail system perpetuates widespread, wealth-based jailing despite alternatives that are more effective at achieving the goals of protecting public safety and getting people back to court.
The results of this system are devastating: people who cannot pay bail are separated from their families, they may lose their job or custody of their children, and they risk suffering violence or contracting disease in jails with dangerous and unsanitary conditions. It also affects their ability to mount a defense against the charges--people who are detained pretrial on unaffordable money bail are more likely to plead guilty and be convicted, and are more likely to receive longer sentences than people released pretrial. The money bail system also results in a massive transfer of wealth out of poor communities and communities of color into the hands of bail bond companies backed by large insurance companies.
In 2020, a new law came into effect in New York State ending the assessment of cash bail in most cases involving misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies. The law aimed to reduce the risk that someone would be jailed because they could not afford to pay for release and reduce the unnecessary use of incarceration, which can have a profound effect on peoples’ lives. Since then, the law has been amended twice in response to widespread opposition from law enforcement and some government officials who claim that cashless bail leads to increases in violent crime. What should we make of these claims and the backlash against bail reform?
Bio of Speaker: The work of Katherine Hubbard, Deputy Director of Litigation, Civil Rights Corps, focuses on challenging the criminalization of poverty, particularly wealth-based pretrial detention. Her work with the San Francisco Public Defender culminated in the landmark Humphrey decision, in which the California Supreme Court struck down the pervasive practice of courts setting money bail without considering an individual’s ability to pay. Katherine’s work in Alabama and North Carolina has resulted in injunctions against wealth-based bail schemes. She has also successfully litigated several cases against Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department for executing illegal search warrants, resulting in damage awards totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars for her clients.
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