Category: bail reform

There are more than 3,000 county jails in the United States. They house more than 650,000 inmates on any given day. Roughly 70 percent of these inmates are pretrial detainees in jail pending trial because they do not have the…

In the late 1960s and into the early 1970s, federal courts across the country suddenly faced an increasing number of lawsuits from state prisoners seeking application and/or adjudication of a wide range of new constitutional rights extended in a number…

As we have pointed out, the wealth-based cash bail system has an iron-fisted grip in Texas that favors those who can afford to post bail over those who cannot.
 
However, Texas has a safety valve for people jailed for over…

Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott does not like the constitutional right to bail.
 
Under Article 1, Section 11 of the Texas Constitution’s Bill of Rights, “all prisoners shall be bailable by sufficient sureties, unless for capital offenses, when the proof is…

There has always been a stark contrast between the quality of justice dispensed by the American criminal justice between wealth and poverty. The bottom line is this: justice tends to favor wealth. Some will argue that it is a natural…

The COVID virus has devastated American jails and prisons. By the end of 2020, one in every five inmates in the country had tested positive for the deadly virus—a rate four times higher than the general population. That translated into…

Since 2016, there have been five lawsuits filed in federal courts in Texas alleging equal protection and procedural due process violations concerning bail practices in Houston, Dallas, and Galveston.  
 
As we reported in an August 2019 post, the Fifth Circuit…