It feels like I've started something here!

I can certainly see how it's an unfair system in that it makes it much harder for poorer people than it is for wealthier individuals to get out of jail when they should probably be there (and no doubt there's a racially disparate proxy effect to that, moreover), but I also don't see how poorer communities benefit from having more criminals free to commit more crimes.

First of all, these are not necessarily "criminals" we are talking about. These people have not been convicted, they have been accused. It is somewhat alarming how easily people are willing to call these people criminals and say we need to lock them up for months or years without a trial.

But also, if you believe this, should we not have a system designed around harm prevention and not around money? If we truly believe that an individual is dangerous, why would we say "Okay, if you can pay us we'll let you out"? That seems nonsensical. Not only does it mean that rich dangerous people can just walk free, like you mentioned, but it also means that poor dangerous people can walk free if they make an agreement with a bail bondsman (which is an exploitative private system leeching off of the injustices of cash bail). Eliminating cash bail may also result in some individuals who may have previously been released after paying a high bail, instead being held in jail if we are making decisions based on harm reduction, further increasing public safety. 

(This also ignores all of the downstream harms of cash bail)

The US doesn't need cash bail. It needs to stop using our criminal justice system to enrich private enterprises and start using it to prevent harm. I understand the fear of eliminating cash bail, and I'm sure you will hear the media make a lot of noise about what individuals who commit crimes waiting for trials, but I personally can't stomach these injustices and the damage that this system does on the basis of an unproven fear.

I was not attempting to presume anyone's guilt or innocence per se, but to simply assess that many people who quite frankly are clearly guilty and pose an obvious danger to those around them wind up free as a result of terminating the cash-bail system and we can plainly see the real-world results in those communities that have already done so. They're not good. The results are, as you might expect, more crime, including more violent crime. That is the bottom line here from my perspective.

Harm prevention is of course a great thing, but let's be serious here. The mindset too many progressives embrace when it comes to criminal justice is akin to arguing vis-a-vis health care that we could prevent the need for hospitals if we just closed them all and redistributed their funds into preventative health care. You know that's not how that works!

Again, if they are "clearly guilty" and "pose an obvious danger", why in the fuck would we let them free if they paid us enough? That is just garbage policy and frankly, it is a weak crutch for supporting cash bail. 

Further "you can plainly see the real world results", isn't really true. There is little academic evidence of this claim. 

As for your assertion of the "progressive mindset", I honestly don't care about your opinion on the progressive bogeyman and the fact that you think that is an argument here is embarrassing.

You're right, people who clearly are guilty of like violent crimes and just as clearly pose a continuing danger to others shouldn't be released, period. Your class position shouldn't matter an iota before the law. That's how it would work in a better society than we have. But we don't live in that more perfect society. The only real-world effect of scrapping cash-bail and replacing it with jack squat is more, mainly poorer, people getting raped, maimed, robbed, and killed. That's just not my idea of justice or equality.

I don't mean to be a cynic about human nature, but I just think we have to be intellectually honest, not just idealistic.

Ignore the whole communism / capitalism angle, but you remind me a little of this, mostly the second part, about "the practical man": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jytf-5St8WU

Removing cash bail does not mean replacing it with a system in which everyone charged with a crime has to be let free

I don't know why you seem to be unable to fathom anything other than a black hole to stand in the absence of cash bail. It isn't very complicated. A judge is simply tasked with making a determination whether an individual should be held in pre-trial detention or released. This decision is based on whether that individual poses a credible risk, either to public safety or to not show up to trial. 

You also continue to fail to demonstrate any substantial evidence to your implication regarding the negative consequences of removing cash bail. I will however say that if we wish to reduce crime, the easiest way would be to lock everyone up. You can't commit crimes if you are in prison, and a scenario with MORE murder and rape is hardly my idea of justice or equality so maybe just jail everyone? (The point, is that there necessarily must be some tradeoff between freedom and safety, as taking a hard-line safety stance will always devolve into oppression). 

Yeah, one would have to "ignore the whole communism/capitalism angle" because you know which end of that spectrum I'm much closer to and it's not exactly the one you're implying.

But let us take Peter Kropotkin's example of the peasant revolts against serfdom and the feudal codes. In your video, he cites an argument between two groups of intellectuals, liberal men and radical men (he specifically says "man" nearly every time he describes a group of people), and concludes that the radical ones were correct in their position. It's fitting that that was is his viewpoint of how history works -- one faction or another of intellectuals winning a debate and history moving on the outcome -- given that Kropotkin himself was born into an aristocratic land-owning family. In this historical debate over the proper fate of the peasantry -- the people who actually formed the overwhelming majority of the Russian population at the time -- by neither sex nor class position would I have had a place in this academic debate. Rather, someone like me would've been would've been one of the illiterate commoners; one of the serfs themselves. And yeah, it doesn't get much more practical than that. The serfs I guarantee you were not idealists, they were survivalists. Survival is the natural ideology (if you will) of the working poor in any age. They rebel when they lose the ability to survive. And that includes against parties that would subject them to needless violence and death for the sake of ideals.

Take this from someone who, for my most of both my teenage years and adult life, counted myself an anarchist (like Kropotkin). In earlier times, asked to cite a type of criminal justice system I'd like to see here, I'd have referred you to what the Zapatistas of Chiapas or more recently the Kurdish-led rebels of Northern Syria have implemented. I used to believe that you could just train everyone in police work for six months or so and then have the general public enforce the law instead of a specialized institution called the police, that crime is basically just a form of mental illness that should be organized around mending the relationship between the culprit and the victim, this sort of thing. That's not ancient history either, that's like last year me. At the start of the protest wave over George Floyd's murder, I was on the fence bordering on support for the "abolish the police" line and argument. My change of opinion has been gradual, but skews recent and is largely the result of just being a serious feminist, tbh. While the general programs of the Zapatistas and of Northern Syria's Kurds are far superior to the alternatives that exist around them and would like to see them destroyed, I can no longer get behind the idea of applying their ideas about criminal justice here because I've watched them fail victims of social violence, and especially survivors of sexual violence, far, far too often. And frankly, the recent localized experiments we've seen in this country even just moving in that same general direction with steps like ending cash-bail or the mere threat of cutting funding for police departments has consistently yielded nothing but higher crime rates, including of violent crime. It's been a wake-up call that has caused me to realize that my view of humanity has been a bit too optimistic in the past; that my thinking has been too youthful and in need of an injection of more common sense.

The reason I see a gaping black hole in the absence of a bail system is because that's exactly what's been realized so far in those places that have ended cash-bail. These experiments tend to get largely reversed for good reason and that's because they don't provide judges with enough room for discretion on who goes free and who doesn't. The case of New York City serves as a perfect illustration. It took only a matter of days for the public to observe the negative consequences of just simply ending cash-bail after the city council did so in late 2019 and earlier this year even the Democrats (principally the black working class ones, in fact) voted to replace the city's current mayor with a (black) former police captain who favors reversing most of that policy after double-digit surges in violent crime.

But sure, my pointing that out is exactly the same as proposing that every single person on Earth should be thrown in prison for life. Exactly. The. Same.