Illinois is the first state in America to abandon cash bail
At the back of room 100 in the Cook County criminal court, in south-west Chicago, a conversation is taking place before proceedings start. The room is packed, and two young men awaiting a decision on the fate of a friend, arrested the night before, chat with a woman who explains why the place is so busy. As of this morning, she explains, nobody arrested or charged in the state will be asked to put up money to be set free before trial. “You mean you don’t even need to put up property?” asked one of the men in reply, surprised. No, she explains. “Nah,” says the other man, sceptically. “This is a business.” If the judges cannot charge people money, they will lock everybody up, he opines. “It is gonna be back to three men in a cell.”
On September 18th, Illinois became the first state to completely scrap cash bail, when it implemented a law passed more than two-and-a-half years ago. In the 1950s Nelson Algren, a poet, wrote that Chicago was “still the easiest joint in the country in which to get a jump bond”, with “the price commonly being whatever you have in your wallet.” Now, the price will be less even than that. The idea, in the words of Kim Foxx, the chief prosecutor in Cook County, which covers Chicago and its inner suburbs, is that people should not be held in jail “by some arbitrary monetary amount”. Advocates hope it will set a precedent that other states might follow. But the men in the courtroom are not the only sceptics about how it will play out.
The case for the reform is simple. “The money-bond system is fundamentally irrational,” says Sarah Staudt of the Prison Policy Initiative, a criminal-justice-reform charity. Domestic abusers were often freed on bond, whereas homeless shoplifters ended up in jail, she says. And pre-trial imprisonment imposes huge costs on people who are still legally innocent. They can lose jobs, see relationships collapse or become…
2023-09-21 07:51:46
Article from www.economist.com
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