Crime

Getting Rid Of Cash Bail Led To A Historic Dip In Jail Population

Three cheers for criminal justice reform!

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counting marks on wall jailInnocent until proven guilty is a beautiful credo. Unfortunately, people who haven’t been convicted of a crime are treated in ways that are darn near criminal relatively often. For many poor people, cash bail is the polite way of saying keep your ass behind bars — people have had their freedoms attached to hundreds or even thousands of dollars before trial. Thankfully, Illinois practiced the good sense to get rid of cash bail. The results have gone swimmingly. From the ABA Journal:

The jail population is down in Cook County, Illinois, and pretrial detention hearings are getting longer throughout the state after a law eliminating cash bail took effect.

Illinois became the first state in the nation to eliminate cash bail after the state supreme court rejected constitutional arguments.

The system isn’t perfect, though. Smaller counties are having problems dealing with the detention hearings that have become longer since the act’s passage, but I think that the answer there is to gather more resources rather than to bring back a policy that violates the Constitution.

One of the bragging points of our peculiar division of federal and state authority is that each of the sovereign states can act as “laboratories of democracy” and test out new approaches to law. For only being a month out, there have already been great results. My hope is that the outcomes of this particular expriment are fruitful and spread over to other testing areas like New Jersey and New York.

How Elimination Of Cash Bail Is Working In Illinois After 1 Month [ABA Journal]

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s.  He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

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