Description: The Bail Project offers a starting point including bail and pretrial justice in a broader vision of democracy and collective wellbeing.
Home » After Cash Bail: A Framework for Reimagining Pretrial Justice
On any given day, nearly half a million people languish in jail cells across America, waiting for their criminal cases to move forward and severed from their lives and communities even though they have not been convicted of a crime. 1 Wendy Sawyer & Peter Wagner, “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2019,” Prison Policy Initiative, March 2019. It is no surprise that nearly one in two adults in the United States have had a loved one incarcerated. Brian Elderbroom, et al., “Every Second: The Impact of the Incar
The human toll of this crisis is catastrophic, levied almost exclusively on the poor, and disproportionately on communities of color. People who are jailed pretrial often wait months, and sometimes years, for their cases to resolve. In the meantime, they can lose their jobs, homes, children, and critical community ties. 5 See Nick Pinto, “The Bail Trap,” New York Times Magazine , August 13, 2015. Inside jail, people risk sexual violence, 6 Over 23,000 people report being sexually assaulted in jail each year