Photo Illustration Credit: Greg Henry/Shutterstock, Jeremy Brooks/Thomas Hawk/Flickr, Courtesy ACLU Action.
Millions of people face a hard choice: pay bail or sit in jail. They haven’t even been convicted of a crime. They simply have a case underway. But when you can’t afford bail – even a few hundred dollars bail – it means going to jail and risking your livelihood.
Cash bail is exploitative– and as with the rest of our country’s mass incarceration system, it is plagued by racial and economic injustices.
The $2 billion bail industry turns an enormous profit off people’s inability to come up with cash. For-profit bail takes the already exploitative bail system and charges 10 percent on top as well as outrageous interest rates. Bail bond corporations lure people and their families into arrangements wherein the corporation pays the bail amount and gets a nonrefundable fee in exchange. This traps people in a cycle of debt and fees.
And guess what – even if all charges are dropped and you’re found not guilty, no one gets their money back.
Corporate insurance companies make huge profits off of the current bail system. Yet money shouldn’t determine someone’s freedom.Wall Street shouldn’t be the gatekeeper that decides who gets released from jail. It’s time to remove the role of big insurance companies from the bail system.
Take action to tell big insurance companies to get out of the business of making profit off of bail. With your support we can shine a light on how bail bond corporations function and pressure them to end their harmful investments in unjust practices.