Jaicee said:
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. |
You are misrepresenting both the text of the law and its effects.
The law in NYC did not simply release everyone pre-trial. It created a subset of crimes (most misdemeanors and non-violent felonies) in which cash bail was not permitted, however violent felonies, sex offenses and numerous other crimes were still eligible for cash bail or pre-trial detention without bail. This has since been amended to include some additional crimes and allow judges to take into account a person's legal history (both good changes imo).
-Further, as an aside, NYC is far from the only place that has reformed cash bail. Illinois recently passed legislation to eliminate cash bail and did so by implementing risk assessment tools to allow the courts to decide whether an individual should be released or placed in pre-trial detention. Reforms in New Mexico and Maryland similarly provide courts with the power to make these decisions (though in these examples, they don't provide clear guidelines as to how these decisions are made).
The idea that what we have seen in reality is that when cash bail is eliminated, everyone goes free is objectively incorrect.
As to the effects of the NYC law, yeah, people freaked out. Color me unsurprised. Let's look at what your article states about this:
"It's not gone," Funk said of what he called "attention-grabbing anecdotes that sway policy much more than the statistics that tell us which policies work and which don't." |
| "The hysteria around the situation completely ignores the fact that people have been released and accused of horrible things for a long time," said Michael Gianaris, the deputy Democratic leader of the state Senate, who sponsored the bail reform law. Under the traditional bail system, the people who got released "had the money to buy their freedom," he said. |
"For every story that gets sensationalized, there are hundreds of people who have been able to keep their jobs and remain with their families while accused of low-level crimes," he said. |
"I don't think there was a more difficult issue to work on than bail reform," Hertzberg said. "It's hard to understand and easy to derail. The people you are fighting for don't have money or much of a voice." And there is always the fear of "one bad story, one bad actor" who could make bail reform look dangerous, he said. "I guess you can lock everybody up. But if you do that, the justice issue is huge and the cost issue is huge," Hertzberg said. |
That article is largely a condemnation of people buying into the conservative talking points and selling of overblown anecdotes to drum up fear, so good job buying in. There simply isn't strong academic evidence that the effects of bail reform are disastrous, so Conservatives pick a story and sell you that instead, hoping that it'll scare you enough to trigger a knee-jerk reaction.
Also, I am not claiming that you are proposing the imprisoning of everyone on Earth, I am claiming that your hard-line safety approach is not enough to demonstrate the moral imperative of cash bail, as it completely ignores concerns regarding freedom. Again, if we are always to err on the side of safety, we lose all freedom, so there must be some other calculus involved which you are either not stating or not recognizing which allows you to draw this line where you choose to draw it.
I'll ask you the question another way: How many people are you willing to lock up pre-trial to stop one crime?
