Like 70 percent of the roughly 13,000 people held in New York City's jails on a typical day, most of the Joneses were pretrial detainees, locked up but presumed innocent. A substantial number of them were remanded by a judge without bail being set. But most were in jail only because they could not afford their bail.
Some were held on large bail amounts—inmate G. Jones, accused of felony weapons possession, was held on $75,000—but in many cases the price of liberty was small. E. Jones, charged with a class B misdemeanor drug count, had been inside for nine days on $500 bail. J. Jones, accused of petit larceny, was on his 15th day of pretrial detention on $750 bail. If the rest of the city's jail system were keeping up with the Joneses, it would mean that roughly one in 10 inmates was behind bars on bail of $1,500 or less.
New York State law allows a judge to set bail only if it is necessary—and to the amount required—to make sure a defendant appears in court. Bail is not supposed to punish. It's not designed to protect the public from people deemed dangerous. The whole purpose of bail is to get people out of jail while ensuring they show up for court. Yet for tens of thousands of defendants in New York City, unaffordable bail gets them locked up before they are convicted of anything.
That costs the taxpayer money, disrupts the lives of defendants and can even pervert justice by thwarting the chances of the innocent to prove their case. Detained defendants are at a disadvantage in preparing their defense and are more likely to get convicted and be sentenced to jail. They are also under greater pressure to plead guilty even if they believe they are innocent, since staying in jail to fight one's case takes a steep toll. Detainees weighing a guilty plea "make a decision that's not really about guilt or innocence," says Zeke Edwards or the Innocence Project. "It's about in or out."
The fall issue of City Limits Investigates, Prisoners Dilemma: How NYC's Bail System Puts Justice On Hold, looks at the city's bail system and sees a complex and shifting picture involving indigent defendants, young prosecutors, overworked public defenders and arraignment judges who must make a quick, crucial decision based on scant, incomplete and sometimes wrong information. Whatever the factors that contribute to it, however, the reality is that bail leads to the incarceration of thousands of people each year who have not been found guilty.
New York City pioneered efforts at bail reform in the 1960s; as a result, most defendants in the five boroughs are released without bail before trial. But because of the huge volume of arrests in New York City—rising even as crime falls, and increasingly dominated by low-level offenses—some 52,000 people each year have bail set in their criminal cases. While some of them do post bail and get out of jail, 42 percent never do, and not necessarily because they're facing seven-figure bails: In a year's time, half of those who don't make bail are held on $1,000 or less. They've fallen into a trap: The bail is too high for them to pay because they are poor, but too low to make it worthwhile for a commercial bail bond agent to bother posting.
