美国国家公共电台 NPR California's Bail Overhaul May Do More Harm Than Good, Reformers Say

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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Last summer, California became the largest state to abolish cash bail¹. At the time, Governor Jerry Brown declared that rich and poor alike will be treated fairly. He has long argued the bail system favors the wealthy and punishes the poor. It turns out, though, the story's more complicated. Many of those who pushed hardest for bail reform now say the new system may be making the problem worse. NPR's Eric Westervelt reports.

ERIC WESTERVELT, BYLINE²: In the downtown San Francisco Public Defender³'s Office, you might think attorney Chesa Boudin would be excited about the recently signed California Senate bill, or SB 10, which abolishes money bail in America's most populous⁴ state. After all, Boudin and fellow public service lawyers have long called money bail an unconstitutional pillar of a biased⁵ system. The size of your bank account often determines who gets out of pretrial custody⁶, and the poor and people of color often end up on the losing end. But this deputy public defender is not in a celebratory mood.

CHESA BOUDIN: I was disappointed, and I felt betrayed. The new SB 10 doesn't actually change the racist⁷ system of mass incarceration⁸. It just expands it.

WESTERVELT: The new law was in response to a state court decision declaring that the cash bail system unconstitutionally denied people due process. Now under the new law, which takes effect next year, instead of setting bail, a judge will use a computer program as part of his or her determination whether a suspect is a low, medium or high risk for flight or to public safety. Boudin believes this will dramatically expand the number of people who will be detained pretrial. He points to one section in particular - deep in the bill, section 1320.18A subsection 5. That section's so broadly worded, Boudin argues, it could encompass⁹ anyone for any offense¹⁰. That, he says, will tilt¹¹ the power ever more into the hands of prosecutors¹², police and judges.

BOUDIN: Under SB 10 now, prosecutors can seek detention¹³ for virtually any crime, regardless of whether it's violent or involves weapons or whether the person accused has a prior history. Under this law, prosecutors have the discretion¹⁴ to seek pre-emptive detention of a person with no criminal record charged with a low-level misdemeanor.

WESTERVELT: And then there's its impact on plea deals. Currently across the U.S., more than 90 percent of criminal cases are settled in a plea deal that could include dismissal or a diversion program, not a trial. John Raphling with Human Rights Watch says he's deeply concerned this bill simply replaces one coercive tactic¹⁵ for another - bail for pretrial detention - that is, he says, to use detention to pressure people of color and the poor to plead guilty to lesser¹⁷ crimes, often regardless of their actual guilt¹⁶.

JOHN RAPHLING: This is pervasive¹⁸ in the criminal justice system. This happens every single day. The new bail reform law in California does not address that problem. Now you're just giving them a whole other mechanism¹⁹ to keep people in.

WESTERVELT: The ACLU and more than a dozen other legal groups have raised similar concerns. The bill also mandates²⁰ the use of pretrial assessment²¹ tools. Essentially²², it's a computer program that aims to measure risk after putting in arrest and conviction history and other data. That algorithm gives the bill a veneer²³ of objective science, attorney Raphling says, but in fact becomes a kind of feedback loop merely reflecting social biases²⁴.

RAPHLING: It's a pretty well-documented fact that police stop, search, detain, arrest black people more than white people, poor people more than wealthy people and that the courts treat people of color and treat poor people worse are the very factors that these risk assessment tools are looking at to judge who's higher risk.

WESTERVELT: And it's not yet clear just what data would actually go into the algorithm. The bill doesn't say. Cherise Fanno Burdeen, CEO of the nonprofit Pretrial Justice Institute, admits the new law is far from perfect, but she says some of these concerns are a bit alarmist. Fanno Burdeen notes that discretion to detain or release pretrial has always resided with judges. This new law, she thinks, will simply help judges get it right more consistently.

CHERISE FANNO BURDEEN: All that the new system will do is help courts make better decisions. It should also result in the right people being identified as a threat to public safety, and it should result in fewer people being needlessly incarcerated²⁵ pending²⁶ trial.

WESTERVELT: Meantime, the bail industry, which will be put out of business under the new law, hopes to overturn it at the ballot²⁷ box. An industry coalition²⁸ is currently collecting signatures to try for a statewide ballot initiative. That may put bail bondsmen in an awkward de facto alliance with scores of progressive legal groups who say they'll be ready to challenge the law's constitutionality in court as soon as it takes effect next year.

Eric Westervelt, NPR News, San Francisco.