The bail industry

Doing pretty good business in this city according to a new report released this week by the Vera Insitute.

The report argues that money bail and conviction fees are unjust, disproportionately harm black people, do not increase public safety and end up unnecessarily costing taxpayers.

“The extraction of wealth is a terrible suppression of economic and racial equity in this city,” Jon Wool, the Director of Justice Policy at Vera’s New Orleans office and one of the co-authors of the report, told The Lens.

According to the report, in 2017 New Orleans residents paid $6.8 million dollars for bail fees and premiums and $1.9 million in conviction fees. The majority of those costs — 88 percent of bail premiums and 69 percent of conviction fees — were paid by black families.

The current system of money bail also fails to keep the city safe, the report argues.

“In New Orleans, 65 percent of people arrested for the most serious crimes or who are flagged as high risk for other reasons avoid jail by paying bail,” the report says. Meanwhile, it claims, many are incarcerated simply because they can’t afford to bond out.

“We are using government’s most oppressive  tool — incarceration — in circumstances where it’s wholly unwarranted,” Wool said. “And it singles out poor people and black people, all in the name of raising revenues for government agencies and politically powerful for-profit industry.”

“That’s morally wrong. Bad policy, and morally wrong.”

Vera's report further proposes that by ending the cash bail system, the city can actually save as much as $8 million a year which it should spend on the courts, the DA, and the public defender and eliminate the "user pay" system that currently prevails. 

But, of course, it won't be that simple. People have vested interests in maintaining the $8.7 million industry as it is. DA Cannizzaro sounds like he's making his pushback against reforms a central theme of his reelection campaign. During the recent legislative session, lawmakers voted to bail out the bail bondsmen, so to speak, by retroactively approving $6 million worth of new fees they had been sticking their customers with. And, of course, the Mayor recently endorsed a plan that allows judges to lock up more juvenile defendants by ignoring a standard risk assessment tool.

So there's a lot of heavy lifting to come still if we want to get out from under this oppressive system.  Here's the link to Vera's report.