America’s criminal justice system is a patchwork of local, state, and federal policies that together resemble a maze with too many entrances and too few exits. When low-risk people enter this maze after arrest, pretrial policies can ruin their lives.
One young man recently died in a New Hampshire jail after he was unable to post $100 bail. Jeffrey Pendleton, 26, was booked on March 8 on a marijuana possession charge, a misdemeanor for which a judge ordered the typical low-figure money bail. Unemployed and unable to pay, the former Burger King worker was still locked up when jail officials found him unconscious in his cell on March 13; he was declared dead hours later. Pendleton is one of many defendants, including Sandra Bland in Texas and Kalief Browder in New York, who could not afford even low bail amounts and either died in custody or committed suicide after getting out. These cases are not anomalies, but the result of a pretrial justice system designed in a way that needlessly and tragically upends the lives of unconvicted people.
Most of the 12 million jail bookings in the United States each year are for low-level, nonviolent charges. Yet far too many of these defendants remain in jail while awaiting their day in court because they cannot afford money bail. More than 60 percent of peoplelocked up in America’s jails have not yet been to trial, and as many asnine in 10 of those people are stuck in jail because they can’t afford to post bond. They are presumed innocent until proven guilty, according to a bedrock principle of the justice system. Low-risk defendants charged with offenses like shoplifting or traffic violations often wait in jail for days, months, or even years for a trial. But that’s the reality of the current justice system, one that spends nearly $14 billion a year on pretrial confinement.
[For more of this story, written by Cherise Fanno Burdeen, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/pol...-making-bail/477906/]
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