Advocates look to faith and stats to fix a broken bail system | Opinion
In the United States, people who’ve been arrested are innocent until proven guilty, but that presumption doesn’t always keep low-level offenders out of jail.
Those who can’t pay bail to ensure their appearance in court often go to jail until bail is waived, lowered or their charges are resolved.
The number of these presumed innocents who become inmates is daunting. Across the U.S., on average more than 460,000 are behind bars awaiting trial. Most of them are nonviolent, low-level offenders who can’t afford the cost of getting out. Among the most common charges they face are violations of motor vehicle laws or the failure to appear for a hearing.
In North Carolina, two Raleigh men, David Bland, a social justice activist, and Peter van Dorsten, an IBM retiree, are pushing for changes in the bail system. They say it needlessly jails the poor, the addicted and the mentally ill, while those with financial resources – including major criminals – can pay to be free before trial.
Bland and van Dorsten know that they won’t get far trying to get conservative state lawmakers to ease bail requirements, but they think they can create political pressure for reform by recruiting faith groups to push for reforms county by county.
“If you really feel like it’s this bad immoral thing then you need to go to your politicians and get them to change it. So that’s what Peter and I are trying to do,” Bland said.
Bland, 86, and van Dorsten, 70, are traveling the state to make the moral case for a legal reform.
Bland knows it can happen. As an assistant to Kentucky Gov. Julian Carroll, he helped with legislation to eliminate Kentucky’s private bail bond system in the 1970s. Other states, counties and cities have taken similar steps to ease pretrial release.
North Carolina has not followed suit, but some of its counties have eased bail requirements. Mecklenburg County is a leader in bail reform. Its changes allowed more offenders to await hearing at home and put off the need for a county jail expansion. Meanwhile, releasing more nonviolent, low-level offenders did not lead to an increase in crime or defendants failing to appear for hearings.
Wake County has taken a more cautious approach, but still has expanded its pretrial release for low-level offenses. The number of people on pretrial release has nearly doubled in recent years, rising from 600 to 700 to more than 1,100, plus 300 people released with electronic monitoring.
Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman said, “For those of us in the system, the real question becomes not how many are you holding in custody at any given time, but are you holding people in custody that don’t need to be held in custody.”
Drawing on his IBM background in information technology, van Dorsten is pushing for a comprehensive tracking of who is in jail and whether they need to be. He said many counties don’t know beyond a one-day snapshot. More data would let them see and adjust to trends. Meanwhile, taxpayers are paying for what in many cases are unnecessary detention and jail expansions.
“We have a broken system. We don’t have the data to manage it well,” van Dorsten said. “You cant manage something if you can’t measure it.”
Rep. Joe John, a Wake County Democrat and a former district attorney and judge, is sponsoring legislation that would provide a statewide study of how bail is used and how much it is overused, but the bill is going nowhere.
What’s needed, John said, is a “house cleaning” of minor and nonviolent offenses that have put poor people in jail. “That’s crazy liberal talk, I understand,” he said, “but that’s the only way we are going to get anywhere.”
Opposition from conservative lawmakers isn’t the only obstacle to bail reform in North Carolina. Many district attorneys and the bail bond industry oppose changing the system and state law sets a blanket bail requirement for failure to appear.
Nonetheless, Bland thinks moral suasion can overcome political reluctance and lobbying from those who use bail for prosecutorial leverage or for profit.
As it is, he said, too many people are being needlessly separated from their families and losing jobs when they can’t get back to work even as taxpayers pay the cost of unnecessary confinement.
Associate opinion editor Ned Barnett can be reached at 919-404-7583, or nbarnett@ newsobserver.com
