Today, Assemblymember Rob Bonta (D-Oakland) and Senator Bob Hertzberg (D-Van Nuys) announced plans to champion legislation to reform California’s seriously unjust and ineffective money bail system. What’s wrong with the current system you might ask?

While many people’s understanding of how money bail works might be limited to what they’ve seen on Law and Order, money bail is actually one of the biggest problems plaguing our justice system.

Every year in California, thousands and thousands of people are jailed while they await their trial simply because they can’t afford to post bail. In a state where the median bail amount is $50,000, it’s no surprise that many people simply can’t afford to buy their freedom in this broken system.

When someone is unable to pay the total bail amount up front, they have to make an impossible choice: sit in jail while their case moves forward, plead guilty, or pay a bail bonds company a nonrefundable fee to get out – all this even if they are innocent.

Yet even going to a bail bonds company is out of reach for many.

Bail bonds companies, for-profit entities backed by insurance companies, typically charge a nonrefundable 10 percent fee. Remembering that the median bail amount in California is $50,000, would you or your family be able to come up with $5,000 to pay the 10 percent nonrefundable fee to a bail bonds company? If you answered “no” to that question, you’re not alone: a recent survey by the U.S. Federal Reserve found that 46 percent of Americans could not afford a $400 emergency expense.

Every year in California, money bail forces thousands of people to sit in jail while they await trial.

 

You might be able to negotiate to pay the nonrefundable fee in installments, but remember that the fee you pay a bail bonds company is nonrefundable, which is different from paying the bail amount to a court in full. (Courts give you back your money if you show up to court.) That means that people often end up having to continue paying a bail bonds company even after they are found to be innocent or the charges against them are dropped. But we’re not talking pocket change here and these nonrefundable fees force families already struggling to make ends meet to accrue insurmountable debt.

As a result, many people of very low income are forced to sit in jail while they wait for their trial. Aside from unnecessarily tearing people from their jobs, families and communities, keeping someone in jail before their trial also increases the chances that that person – even one who is innocent – will end up pleading guilty, being convicted, and receiving a longer sentence than if they had been released while their case worked its way through the courts.

This is especially the case for people of color.

People of color are already over-policed, and arrested and detained more often than their white counterparts. Money bail only intensifies this existing race and class discrimination in the justice system. Because people of color are often over-charged with crimes that carry heavier sentences, they also face higher bail amounts. As compared to white men, the bail amounts for African American men are 35 percent higher. Similarly, bail amounts for Latino men are also 19 percent higher than the amounts for white men.

Recent research also found that, compared to people who are released sometime before their trail starts, people held in jail the whole time before their trial were four times more likely to be sentenced to jail and three times more likely to be sentenced to prison.

When people are jailed before trial, they aren’t able to meet with their lawyers regularly or find witnesses to help build up a good defense in their case.

Simply put, money bail adds insult to an already injurious justice system in which being low-income or a person of color puts you at a disadvantage from the start. What’s worse is that we also know that money bail isn’t really an effective means of making sure people show up to court.

Bail bonds companies would have you believe that decreasing the use of money bail will lead to a total breakdown of our justice system – people not showing up to court and havoc all over our streets. But that’s simply not the case.

In Washington, DC, where they have significantly reduced their use of money bail, 88 percent of the people released before trial made all scheduled court appearances and weren’t re-arrested. A non-profit program in New York City posted bail for low-income defendants, with 96 percent of the people they bailed out showing up to court. In more than half of the cases, charges were dropped. Conversely, people held on similar charges who were not bailed out plead guilty 92 percent of the time.

In too many ways, the odds are stacked against people with very low incomes. Our most fundamental of rights, our freedom, is not something to be cavalierly taken away from people simply because they are unable to pay for it. This is an unacceptable status quo. We must put an end to this injustice.

Margaret Dooley-Sammuli is director of criminal justice and drug policy for the ACLU of California.

This week, California state lawmakers introduced three groundbreaking bills that could prevent thousands of immigrants from being torn from their families, communities, and the lives they built here.

SB 6 gives immigrants facing deportation a shot at a fair immigration court hearing by ensuring they have qualified immigration lawyers to represent them. Research shows that immigrants that have an immigration lawyer representing them are five times more likely to win their immigration cases than immigrants without a lawyer, but most Californians facing deportation cannot afford or access one.

Similarly, AB 3 provides our public defenders with the necessary resources and training to adequately advise their clients about any possible immigration consequences in their cases. If passed, California would take a significant step toward helping prevent avoidable deportations.

SB 54 ensures that no state or local resources are diverted to fuel any attempt by the federal government to carry out mass deportations or a Muslim registry. The bill rightly turns off the valve to a mass deportation pipeline and closes the door on shameful attempts to scapegoat the Muslim community in California, a state that values diversity, public safety, and the humanity of all its residents.

By introducing these bills, the Golden State is standing firm in its resolve to uphold its values of fairness and due process. This is huge.

In a recent interview with 60 Minutes, President-Elect Donald J. Trump said that he planned to deport some three million immigrants—allegedly all “criminal immigrants.” Many people, myself included, were alarmed to hear this. The details of these new mass-deportation policies remain unclear, although some reports have surfaced that the policies would include anyone who has ever been arrested, even if the person was later found innocent or the charges were eventually dropped.

But California is moving in the opposite direction and instead undertaking efforts to make things fairer for immigrant and Muslim communities. Due process, the idea that everyonedeserves fair treatment by our government whenever any of their civil liberties are at stake, is a cornerstone of our democracy and one of the most cherished American values.

And at bottom, that is what these three bills are all about: fairness. It is about how we treat other human beings and about bringing some semblance of fairness into an inherently unfair immigration system.

Because the fact is that our immigration system is deeply flawed and outdated, and relies on an equally flawed and biased criminal justice system as its deportation pipeline. Many of the people with arrests or convictions have been subjected to racial profiling and discrimination.

Take for example the California Gang Database (CalGang). For years, community members and advocates alike denounced CalGang as an error-prone database that lacks transparency and accountability, and relies on racial profiling and discrimination. This year, a state audit confirmed what many of us have been saying all along when it revealed that 42 children younger than one year had been erroneously included in the database. Yet we know that the federal government relies on CalGang data to deport immigrants.

More importantly, these three bills recognize the humanity of people who have arrests or convictions, rather than playing into anti-immigrant attempts to demonize entire communities in one fell swoop, which were all too common during the presidential campaign. We must remember that people put at risk by President-Elect Trump’s deportation threat are members of our communities that have long ago served their time and changed their lives. They include immigrants like deported veteran Fabian Rebolledo, who served as an Army paratrooper from 1997 to 2000, including duty in Kosovo in 1999. In 2010, he was deported following a conviction for writing a bad check. He is 100 percent disabled due to his military service and a VA doctor has confirmed he suffers from PTSD. His U.S. citizen son was 10 years old when Fabian was deported.

In California, we do not abandon people like Fabian just because he has a record. We stand by him and his family and fight for him to get a fair shot in his immigration case.

We thank the legislators championing AB 3, SB 6, and SB 54 for their ability to see past demonizing rhetoric and prioritizing diversity, true public safety, and the humanity of allCalifornians. And to the countless immigrants that call California home, we hope they know that the ACLU will always stand by their side.

Carmen Iguina is staff attorney with the ACLU of Southern California.