By Sam Levin, Étienne Laurent/EPA, The Guardian, November 14, 2022
Los Angeles residents jailed because they can’t afford to pay bail have filed a class-action lawsuit challenging the system that often keeps low-income people behind bars before they’ve been charged.
The complaint was filed on Monday on behalf of six people in LA jails who were recently arrested but have not yet seen a judge, been arraigned or assigned a public defender.
The case is the first to challenge LA’s “bail schedule”, the county’s formal guidelines for the cash amounts based on alleged offenses.
LA county is home to the largest jail system in the US, which has recently been mired in scandals involving claims of widespread physical abuse against incarcerated people and “barbaric” conditions where people are chained to chairs for days and made to sleep on concrete floors. Bail leaves thousands of poor people behind bars, according to Public Justice’s Debtors’ Prison Project and the Civil Rights Corps, two non-profit groups that filed the suit.
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