No Cash bail
Ideally, bail is meant to serve two purposes: 1) it maintains the American ideal that an individual is innocent until proven guilty. This way, their normal, everyday lives are not disrupted while they await further court action and until they have been found guilty in the court of law after receiving their right to due process. 2) It fuels court fees and costs by motivating the accused to attend future hearings or face financial consequences imposed and collected by the courts.
In recent years, a number of states have proposed and enacted laws eliminating cash bail. Under the new laws, a cash bail is no longer an option for most misdemeanors and non-violent felonies. For individuals charged with serious crimes like violent felonies, sex offenses, and witness tampering little has changed and the ability to enforce cash bail will still lie with the courts.A primary reason many states who have made changes to their cash bail system is because of the clogging up of their jails. Across our nation, states and federal systems are struggling to find space for all the incoming individuals being incarcerated. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, more than 500,000 people in the United States were detained in jails before their trial in 2018. New Jersey was one of the first states to reform their cash bail system. In their first year with the new system in place, their pretrial jail population fell by 20%.
In New York some defendants, with a history of arrests for violent crimes, and an existing arrest warrant for a different crime, were released on cashless bail; only to commit another violent crime! In a typical cash bail system innocent individuals, with no criminal record, who can not afford cash bail, might face pretrial jail time of days, weeks, months, and in some extreme situations, years!
NO COMMON SENSE
ANALYZE THE EXAMPLE
* Which supports and barriers were in play?
* What were the dynamics?
* Who, or what, won the Tug-of-War?
* Discuss the outcome with your friends and family.
* Use Post #4 as a reference for the dynamics, and the relationships, between supports and barriers.