Cash bail costs victims the most

My friend recently shared a story with me about growing up in an abusive home. He requested I keep his name and personal details private to protect himself and his mother.

“As I entered the room, the screams had stopped. My mom lay there on the floor. Barely breathing. Barely living. My dad exited the room, got in his truck, and left the house. I called 911. I was 8 years old. My mom was taken to the hospital in an ambulance. My grandmother came to comfort me and my 4-year-old brother. The police found and arrested my dad. He posted bail two days later — about the same time my mom came home from the hospital.”

As soon as his dad arrived home, my friend told me, the beatings started again. And each time he came home, it was worse. This narrative would repeat over and over again in his childhood.

He and many other victims of domestic abuse have been sounding the alarm about the dangers of cash bail and the need for immediate reforms. Too many people are living the reality that my friend — along with his mother and younger brother — lived. Even after the police took their father away, they endured fear on a daily basis.

Because even then, they weren’t truly safe. The system failed them — just like it fails so many today.

What happened when my friend’s father posted bail demonstrated an all-too-common pattern: People who have been arrested for violent, abusive crimes post bail and return home to perpetuate more violence.

Pennsylvania’s cash bail system has become a heated topic in recent months thanks to skyrocketing crime rates across the state and an intense election cycle. But within the highly charged bail reform debate, people are forgetting a critical issue: Cash bail does not promote public safety. It does not guarantee that those let out on bail won’t commit other serious crimes.

Cash bail does not promote public safety.

In fact, in many cases, the cash bail system revictimizes those who were harmed in the first place. The cash bail system is supposed to be used to compel defendants to appear at trial. When someone is arrested, a judge typically sets the bail amount, which the accused then pays. If he does not appear in court, he does not get that money back.

The problem with this system is that it allows dangerous, violent criminals back into the community as they await trial — as long as they can write a check.

My friend and his family escaped the situation they were in and the vicious cycle of domestic violence. And although they still live with those memories, they thank God they were not killed.

That is not always how it turns out. In a recent high-profile case in New York, a young mother named Keaira Bennefield was killed in front of her children after her abuser was released from police custody, in this case without having to pay bail. He had been arrested for violently attacking her.

The point here is not that cash bail would have stopped Bennefield’s abuser from coming after her again. It did not stop my friend’s father; it certainly has not stopped countless others. The issue is that New York’s bail system did not allow for public safety, specifically the victim’s safety, to be the determining factor for the abuser’s release, as it should have been. Though he was clearly a threat to the young mother’s safety, under New York law, the judge was powerless to detain him since he was only accused of misdemeanor crimes.

These stories are textbook examples of the revictimization perpetuated by pretrial systems that do not prioritize public safety, and they hammer home why revictimization needs to be a larger part of the conversation.

The current debate is so focused on tragedies stemming from no cash bail that it overlooks the fact that tragedies still routinely occur even when perpetrators have to make bail. The two can be simultaneously true. We should be able to highlight the injustices of a system that detains nonviolent offenders simply because they cannot afford bail while also asserting that policies that restrict judicial discretion are also detrimental to public safety as well as victim safety.

For former Trump administration official and founding member of the Public Safety Solutions for America coalition Ja’Ron Smith, a smarter pretrial system is one in which “people who are not flight risks or threats to public safety are not detained just because they can’t afford bail, dangerous people are not allowed to buy their way back into the community, and judges are able to use their discretion to protect public safety.”

This is the correct approach. We need to get over the idea that bail equals safety. Ultimately, the question of pretrial detention should be determined by the risk to public safety — not the money in someone’s bank account.