THREAD. A quiet catastrophe is unfolding in Los Angeles. A group of judges met in secret and decided to require a cash bail schedule starting on June 30. I have been unable to find a single news story about it, so I'll explain what's happening and why it matters.
A cash bail schedule is like a menu. It means that, after you are arrested, you can't get out of jail unless you pay a cash amount that is listed on a chart. The chart requires different amounts of cash for different cases. If you're too poor, you're separated from your family.
Los Angeles already has the most crowded jail in the U.S. It's the largest jail in the country that jails the most people per capita of any society in the world. The new cash schedule will jail 10,000s more people in the next few months and create a human rights emergency.
Many people will die in the LA County jail because of this schedule. Four people died in the jail in ten days in the beginning of March alone. 1000s of people will lose their jobs/housing, and 10,000s of LA children will be separated from their parents. witnessla.com/four-la-county…
We have won lawsuits across the country finding this barbaric practice of wealth-based family separation and pretrial human caging unconstitutional. This exact schedule system was struck down elsewhere in California as violating the Fourteenth Amendment.
Here were some of the amazing results after our civil rights case @CivRightsCorps struck down the monstrous cash bail schedule in Houston, Texas:
https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1500929061442535426
Cash bail makes communities less safe. In addition to overcrowded jails, infectious disease, physical and sexual assaults by jail guards, and horrific medical care, the empirical evidence shows schedules make people more likely to be arrested in the future. They increase crime.
Cash bail also destroys the wealth of poor communities. In the next year, the schedule will extract between $50-100 million from poor LA families in premiums paid to for-profit bail companies.
But it's not just about profit. For the judges, it's about something else. It's about coercing guilty pleas. Everyone in the system knows there are too many cases to give everyone lawyers and a jury trial.
Judges need people to plead guilty to keep the assembly line dockets churning, and the best way to do that is to keep them in jail and to offer them release if they waive their right to a trial. This bureaucratic pressure is a primary hidden driver of systemic cruelty.
I'll have much more to come on this, but I wanted to say something about it right away since it hasn't been deemed "newsworthy" by local or national media.
On a related topic, I've just published my latest free newsletter that discusses what journalists choose to cover and what they choose to ignore, how they choose to cover those issues when they do, and how these choices are leading us toward fascism. equalityalec.substack.com/p/corporate-me…
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