I was not surprised when Orland Mayor Keith Pekau portrayed Chicago as “the picture of lawfulness” and described the Safe-T act as “one of the most anti-public safety bills in the country”.
The Safety, Accountability, Fairness and Equity-Today, or Safe-T Act, which will be in effect in the state in the January of next year, removes the money component in pretrial detainment and is considered one of the most comprehensive money bail reforms in the nation. This means that should a judge decide that the offender poses no threat to a person or the community, people will no longer be required to pay money bail, which sometimes could be as high as tens of thousands of dollars, to go home.
Opponents argued that under the bill, some crimes will be non-detainable, including second-degree murder, criminal trespassing, and arson. Illinois House Republican Leader Jim Durkin contended that the law would “give drug cartels free rein on Illinois streets” in the Chicago Tribune. These opposing voices from people like Rep. Durkin and Mayor Peaku soon went viral on social media, perpetrating a fallacious image of the purge, which came from the popular film of the same name and on the day of which criminals will rampage the street and their crimes are unpunished.
To understand these people’s logic, we need to first know how the cash bail system works. According to a report by the Vera Institute of Justice, after an arrest happened, a judicial or law enforcement officer may set conditions for the offender to be released. This can range from oral agreements to restrictions on activities. More often, the condition is financial that offenders will have to pay some money in cash or bond, the form and amount of which are decided by the judicial officer, to avoid jail time. The monetary bail requirement poses burdens on low-income people who are often racial minorities and is described by the liberal think tank Center for American Progress as “criminalization on poverty”.
As an international student, I have never been personally infected by the bail system. In fact, the first time I heard about the phrase was in my volunteering with the nonprofit Restorative Justice Community Action or RJCA.
As a volunteer with the organization, my main task was attending restorative justice conferences as a community member in which other volunteers and I sit with our clients, offenders who participated in our program to have their records expunged, listened to their tellings of the incidents and offered restorative suggestions to forge their relationship building with communities they harmed. The conferences usually started with people sharing their stories during which a lot of participants mentioned that they were incarcerated in jails for a time between a few hours and a few days because the money was too high for them to pay. The first time I heard about people saying it, I was totally in shock. I asked the participant, “what money are you talking about?”, and everyone was looking at me with strange eyes.
It was later that I knew they were talking about cash bail, a term I was unfamiliar with when growing up but pervasively impacted people who live in the US, especially those who are low-income and racial minorities.
I worked with RJCA for a total of three years and attended over 20 restorative justice conferences with more than 30 clients. During these conferences, I heard the word “bail” at least six times and witnessed how this short period of detention destroyed people’s lives. In these stories, there are fathers who were forced to be separated from their newborn kids, middle-aged men who lost their jobs and couldn’t feed their families, and kids who repeatedly told us how scared they were when staying in the cold cells.
As a result of my experience, I was not surprised when I later read researcher Christopher T. Lowenkamp’s conclusions that for low-risk offenders, pretrial detainment, which is largely caused by monetary bail, fostered recidivism to a degree between 40 to 51 percent, depending on the length of detainment. The negative association between detainment and recidivism is reinforced by the study by Stanford Law School students Heaton, Mayson, and Stevenson, who also found that misdemeanor offenders detained pre-trial “are 43% more likely to be sentenced to jail, and receive jail sentences that are more than twice as long on average”.
In fact, there is robust evidence suggesting that pretrial detainment did little to prevent future crimes or reduce risks to the communities if any, and the effect is often the opposite. Rather, what it achieves is fostering greater inequalities in the criminal justice system and making racial minorities suffer, as even a few days of detention in jail can trigger serious socioeconomic consequences, such as “loss of employment or housing and pressure to plead guilty”.
Because the bail system is so harmful, it’s imperative for Illinois to find out an alternative, and the Safe-T act, which is thoughtfully written by legislators, is a good one
One common critique from republicans is that the bill will create “non-detainable crime”. This saying is deceptive and manipulative. A fact check conducted by NBC Chicago found that according to this bill, a pretrial release will be rejected, should the person commit a felony due to the involvement of force in the person’s criminal act, i.e.the crime is a forcible felony. Per Illinois statute, some crimes under this category include the murder of both the first and second degrees, aggravated assaults, arson, burglary, as well as criminal stalking, battery, and sexual assaults. Moreover, a person would also be detainable if a judge finds him at risk of a “willful flight”, defined as “evading of course of justice by voluntarily withdrawing oneself in order to avoid arrest or detention”. Opposite to what republicans said, the bill will not free criminals to the street to “encourage” them to revenge on the victims. Instead, it will help to make sure only people who are violent and dangerous are detained. This is why the act has received support from victims’ rights advocates, said JB Governor in an Instagram post.
The bill coincides with the judicial philosophy of “innocent until guilty”, that is, defendants are assumed to be innocent unless proven to be otherwise by a judge with evidence indicating his crimes. The bill is in favor of people who are convicted of misdemeanors or nonviolent crimes, most of them are low-income racial minorities, by requiring every decision of detainment must come after intensive bail hearings that will happen within 72 hours of an arrest or 48 hours for a felony crime, where prosecutors must submit written statements to the court with clearly outlined evidence that the person will pose a specific threat to a victim or society and that no solutions other than a detainment could reduce the risk of harm. Such requirement is hard to be met for nonviolent and minor crimes, which currently accounted for over two-thirds of the jail population. Consequentially, the bill would lock up criminals who will threaten public safety while making people who are nonviolent free from pretrial detainment.
We should be clear that the Safe-T act will not solve all problems produced by the old cash bail system nor will it be capable of remanding harms that have been done to those who spent their time in jails due to economic unaffordability. However, it’s an important step we must take to advance to a society where detainments are based on the crimes committed, not the financial ability of the defendant, and where greater racial equity is achieved.