Bail Reform: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

foreign [Music] story tonight concerns crime Batman's adversary and also his Kink come on you think someone dresses in a rubber suit just to avenge their parents he's a furry with a gadget belt grow up now with the midterm elections fast approaching tough on crime rhetoric has been a key feature of Republican attack ads often highlighting one policy in particular bail reform do you feel safe Mandela Barnes would eliminate cash bail setting accused criminals free into the community before trial landsman wants to end cash bail putting dangerous criminals back on the Street Beasley supports ending cash bail letting criminals out of jail using cashless bail and his own Lawless policies Bragg has put violent criminals back on our streets and has turned neighborhoods into danger zones okay of course everything seems scarier if you end it with a shot of a body bag for instance Doc McStuffins not a scary show but if they didn't episode said in the McStuffins morgue it's going to have nightmares for a while now these attack ads come at a crucial juncture for the movement to reduce the use of cash bail because since 2011 at least 19 States and dozens of local jurisdictions have adopted bail reform policies but many places have recently begun rolling back those reforms because amid the recent spike in certain categories of crime critics are pointing at bail reform as the major cause of it liberal lawmakers ended the bail for most offenses they created a revolving door of criminality it's almost impossible to get arrested and then put in jail unless you kill somebody it is baffling to me that we have politicians that aren't supporting policies that are going to make things better in fact they're doing the opposite we're still supporting bail reform and defunding the police there's a correlation between the bail reform and what's happening in our city it seems so clear that it is and to destroy the country's finest Police Department is is a crime I think on its own it's clear to a man with resting concussion face he honestly looks like he's studying a full body mirror desperately trying to find his penis it's now to the point where any crime mentioned on Fox News gets linked to battle reform whether it is relevant or not even after Nancy Pelosi's husband was attacked with a hammer on Friday morning by someone who was not out on bail they had a republican Congressman on to say this when you let dangerous criminals out out on the streets you know with bail and not put him in prison you're just asking for this this sort of incident to happen no he's wrong about a few things there again the suspect was not out on bail also no one gets bailed out of prison that is where convicted people go and finally choosing a narrow tie knot when your head is that big makes it look like a birthday balloon sailing over the capital Dome that is three big mistakes from that very grumpy balloon but given that you are hearing that misleading attacks like that absolutely everywhere right now there is a real chance of all the progress we've made being undone so tonight let's look at bail reform and this is actually our Second Story on bail we first covered it back in 2015 but maybe see that particular episode because you were too busy watching the 69th annual Tony Awards airing the same night where and this is true Kristen Chenoweth and Alan opened the show by highlighting one particular celebrity in the audience and the producer of Finding Neverland Harvey Weinstein [Applause] [Music] a week box office receipts for the last three months [Applause] yeah my point is it's been a minute since then so if you missed our first story here's a brief recap if you are arrested in order to be released a waiting trial you're often required to leave a certain amount of money or bail with the court as collateral with the idea that it'll help ensure that you return and there are plenty of issues with this system starting with the fact the bail hearings can be arbitrary at best because one you might assume that a judge would carefully weigh someone's charges and circumstances to decide whether there is any reason that they should not be released the reality can look very different take this hearing in Dallas we're going to bleep the person's last name here but I'm going to show you her hearing in its entirety penny you're here on a state jail felony theft with previous conviction spawned at five thousand dollars that's it that was the whole thing and I don't know exactly how long it should take to put a price on someone's freedom but it probably shouldn't fit neatly into an Instagram story and the thing is that's not an outlier overall it is common for bail hearings to last only a few minutes with no defense counsel present and they can be conducted with Incredible pettiness just watch this hearing from 2016 in Harris County Texas where a woman had been charged with a misdemeanor of possessing less than two ounces of marijuana there's probable cause bond is a thousand dollars are you requesting a court appointed lawyer sure give me a yes or no yeah give me a yes or no yeah I asked a question that calls for a yes or a no I don't expect anything but a yes or no not a maybe so or a yell or anything yeah or something I heard what you said your bond just went up to two thousand dollars okay first all the way off second yeah means yes it's not only she gave you a thumbs up and wait you knew what she meant you just wanted to be a dick and if you cannot afford a bail that a sassy judge felt like dishing out to you you might be forced to turn to a bail bondsman the way their business model works is that they will post your bail for you in exchange for a fee that's normally around 10 percent of it money by the way you don't get back no matter what the outcome of your case it is a lucrative business which writes in about two billion dollars per year almost none of which goes into their spending on ads like these they say I broke the law police are on my tail looks like I'm going to the county jail I gotta go Bail Bonds who I called and the courtesy and services [Music] you know it's not the direction that I would have taken for the Barbie movie but I trust Greta go Wing's Vision on this although credit to all three songwriters there you can find all those tracks on now that's what I call songs written by the nephew of the guy who owns a bail bond agency volume 25. but if you can't afford to pay a bail bondsman to get you out you are stuck and many many people are in that situation which has led to a truly staggering statistic this graph shows local jail inmates in the United States in the past 20 years that population has shot way up and there's something surprising about that rise you can see it only if you look at inmates with convictions around 1999 that population leveled off meaning most of the rise came from this group non-convicted prisoners every day in the U.S nearly half a million people sitting in local jails haven't been convicted of anything it's true in fact right now roughly two-thirds of our jail population on any given day are people who haven't been convicted of a crime and most of them are there because they simply couldn't afford to bail themselves out which is terrible we shouldn't hold people captive in shitty conditions simply because they can't bow their way out that is what Spirit Airlines is for what all this means is that a simple arrest even for a crime that you did not commit can destroy your life because even a short amount of time in jail can completely turn it upside down and it's often not a short amount of time take Marvin Mayfield he was arrested for a burglary that he insists he didn't commit and he got stuck in Rikers for nearly a year before you went in you you had started a job you had secured in a place had a car right what happened to Oliver all of those things my job my car and my place were all gone after 11 months I couldn't hold on to it it's true he was in there for 11 months and obviously no job is cool with you just not showing up for 11 months unless of course you're this lazy and and all of this is before you get to the fact that holding someone pre-trial can give a prosecutor a huge amount of Leverage in obtaining a guilty plea again Marvin Mayfield maintains he was innocent but he pled guilty anyway and when you hear him explain why it makes sense after 11 months they said that if you plead guilty today you get time served and go home so your option was to stay in and fight this cave or you can go home today but another guilty plea another guilty plea to a felony on my record the worst and hardest blow of everything let's complete guilty to something I didn't do just to stop that suffering and I get that if I've been held in Rikers for 11 months with no trial and no end in sight I confess to anything if it meant going home Lindberg baby snatched it JFK Captain Zodiac Killer it me just please let me go home and yes I can see it too there is a resemblance except I'm kidding I look nothing like the Zodiac Killer and you will agree with that if you know what's good for you so cash bail is arbitrary destructive and basically criminalizes poverty and that is without getting into the massive racial disparities involved here and when you take all of this together you can understand why so many jurisdictions passed some form of bail reform over the last few years and notably in some places it was done with bipartisan support in 2014 New Jersey passed a bill that has since cut the number of people in its jails by half and it was championed by a surprising figure no longer must you stay in jail for minor offenses longer than you would have if you would actually be convicted of the crime which you're accused of committing just because your family doesn't have 500 to post bail yeah to his real credit Chris Christie supported by reform and remember this is the same Chris Christie who thought it was a good idea to be Pro traffic jam got photographed enjoying a beach that have been close to the public by a government shutdown and was the first major Republican candidate to endorse this historic whoopsy the right side of History has to be pretty obvious if even Chris Christie can find it and yet in many places the backlash to these reforms has been Swift and ugly and it always takes the same form you saw earlier fear-mongering about how reforming cash bail means that violent criminals are going to be wantingly set loose on the streets to reoffend but every part of that is much more complicated than it sounds for starters a huge amount of people in jail are stuck there on simple misdemeanors or non-violent charges and even when it comes to violent felony charges those happen on a very broad spectrum from murder to Simply Be involved in a fight and importantly being charged with something does not necessarily mean that you are guilty of it that is for a trial to decide yet too many people are only too happy to blur the line between charge and conviction early this year Chicago mayor Laurie Lightfoot did exactly that when criticizing pre-trial release programs in Cook County which implemented its battle reforms back in 2017. the mayor saying judges should not allow people charged with violent crimes to walk free on bail or electronic monitoring because if they're charged they're guilty when those case charges are brought these people are guilty and of course they're entitled to a presumption of innocence of course they're entitled to their day in court but residents in our community are also entitled to safety hold on you can't say someone's guilty and then say they're entitled to a presumption of innocence those two ideas just cannot coexist you can't be guilty and innocent at the same time just like you can't be hungry and full or tall and short or British and happy it's one or it's the other believe me and Illinois's bail conversation has only gotten more heated now that a Statewide law eliminating the use of cash bail is set to take effect in January Republicans have called it The Purge law and have attacked it in some pretty gross ways including these unusual mail list of Voters papers they've been delivered under different names this one the Chicago City Wire they all claim to have real data and real news but it's also a campaign message not a real newspaper there are two pages of photos of men mostly black and Latino who according to the paper will be released on bond into Page County the controversial newspaper like mailings are from Republican strategist Dan Prof who runs the people who play by the rules pack Wow first that is strikingly racist and second those mailers were complete horseshits they say to the new law mandates murder suspects awaiting trial be released from jail which it does not they also feature a list of charges that they claimed were non-detainable but the truth is that in Illinois as in most places that have passed bail reform for serious and violent crimes suspects can still be jailed pre-trial if they are considered a public safety risk or likely to flee so those claims were basically the more most misleading thing to appear in newsprint since the idea that Dagwood could pull Blondie come on look at him and then look at her there's just no way or ten and Dagwood's to buy Funny Pages standards she married down a long way down and to see just how successfully Bale reform opponents can demagogue this issue just look here in New York the Big cuckoo City that go honk honk this state's male reform law took effect on New Year's Day of 2020 and just eight days later long before there was any data on its impacts state legislators were out there trying to get it repealed I think people are getting scared I think people are feeling unsafe and more unsafe as each day goes by we're going to hammer this I want to be clear we're going to hammer this every single day we're going to make the point that this is what the public cares about that was just eight days in so unless a ton of people chose the New Year's resolution be scared of bail reform and actually stuck with it past January 3rd to equally unrealistic scenarios I'm pretty sure that Suffolk County Carl McLaughlin here is hammering away at thin air and the thing is violent crime did rise in New York in 2020 just like it did everywhere else in America both in places that passed by reform and in places that didn't and yet the NYPD relentlessly labeled bail reform the cause it's then commissioned a Dermot Shay repeatedly took to the press to label it a major reason for increases in crime and gun violence but when the New York Post checked those claims using the nypd's own data they found that in the first six months of 2020 out of 528 shooting incidents exactly one had been committed by someone released under bail reform and that wasn't the only time that Shea was misleading he also went on a local Morning Show here to suggest that the suspect in a purse snatching was out on bail he has 11 open court cases right now think about that how is this allowed to how is this allowed to continue to to to to Foster like this well one side will say as long as he shows up at Court then everything is working well and I would I would say that everything is not working well the lemon open court cases is something that you don't want to deal with someone that we wouldn't want to encounter on the streets now that may well sound scary to you but I've got some good news they found that guy with 11 open cases it was actually pretty easy to do because it turns out he was already locked up in Rikers at the time the crime took place so she accused the wrong guy entirely but I'm sure New York slept much safer knowing that that guy was safely behind the same bars he was already behind before just two days after that interview Shea had to appear before the state legislator and interestingly all the fear-mongering and Bluster that he'd spread on newspapers and TV completely collapsed in a forum where he was actually expected to answer honestly were there people out uh who who with no bail for example or Bill being said and they made bail I don't know um and then committed another shooting and were arrested again for basically the same crime when you look at who we arrest for crimes it's going to be small numbers when you look at the the entirety of how many shooting arrests we make and the percentage it's not dramatic I'm sorry the percentage is not dramatic you are constantly claiming battle reform was driving up shootings there are Hermits on mountaintops you know exactly two things all of reality is but the brief dance of light across the water surface and Dermot Shea says bio reform is responsible for the rising crime in New York and you would think he'd be embarrassed by being forced to admit that the percentage is not dramatic but just two months later he was back on TV saying this is bail reform what is leading to more shootings 100 more gun possessions happening 100 100 there is no doubt well which is it damn it are the numbers not dramatic always better reform 100 leading two more shootings because those things are mutually exclusive the only place where not dramatic and a hundred percent can exist at the same time is in Kristen Stewart's whole General Vibe she's giving it her all but she's also giving us absolutely nothing it's totally amazing and the problem is all of this the exaggerated claims and The Sensational headlines have made a real impression on people public approval of bail reform in this state has plummeted and the state legislature has now rolled back portions of the law twice and that is the thing it's hard to overcome the emotional impact of the claim that bail reform harms Public Safety and I'm not saying that you can't find isolated instances of individuals who have been rearrested for new crimes while out awaiting trial you can do that and anytime someone is a victim of a crime that is terrible but if Public Safety is genuinely your priority cash bail has never fundamentally been about that for all the ads currently claiming that people charged with violent crimes and now walking the streets they always were as long as they had enough money to make bail under too many places current systems a person facing a marijuana misdemeader who doesn't have two thousand dollars is going to get stuck inside a jail but a Serial sex offender who makes I don't know hypothetically a million dollars a week in finding Netherland receipts gets to stay at home and when you pull back and look at the overall figures of where the bail reform has any statistically significant link to crimes the answer so far has been pretty conclusively no one analysis looked at studies in seven different jurisdictions and none of them found that bail reforms lead to a meaningful increase in crime and research has even shown that if you can avoid unnecessarily jailing people you can actually reduce the likelihood of future arrests which does make sense does it because if you don't upend people's lives by needlessly locking them up for pre-trial they're in a much better position to stay out of trouble in Harris County Texas the place where you saw that dick is Judge earlier researchers found that after cash bail was drastically reduced in their misdemeanor courts there was actually a six percent decrease in new prosecutions of people over the three years following their arrest so it works out better for absolutely everybody but I do get that those stats don't sound nearly as flashy over footage of a crime scene you can't make a crime ad that looks like this do you feel safe you should study after study shows bail reform has not been linked to an increase in crime and arrest rates pre and post-reform have either remained identical or slightly dropped and this dead body it's just 70 pounds of ham in the shape of a man it's honest but it doesn't pack quite the same punch does it and for all the fears of letting someone who is a danger onto the streets again Bell reform doesn't take away judge's ability to detain someone that they genuinely believe to be a threat in 49 states all except New York judges are allowed to consider both risk of failure to appear and Public Safety in pre-trial decisions and even in New York it was generally accepted judges did it anyway as potential dangerousness has been the de facto use of bail here for decades and reasonable people could disagree on how exactly to make those determinations but one place that some experts point to as a model is New Jersey whose system now looks like this judge Sybil Elias is weighing whether to free or detain a man who appears from the county jail by closed circuit notice there is no mention of money for bail because the new system eliminates that instead it uses information such as convictions not arrest not socioeconomic factors punched into a computer the trial court administrator will give each defendant a score of one to six for risk of reoffending and risk of skipping core even if a defendant has a high score prosecutors must ask for a detention hearing within three to five days and must present clear and convincing evidence to detain someone yeah and that seems pretty good right although I will say it is by no means perfect for one assigning people a crime score sounds like something RoboCop does right before he punches you out of a window and it's worth noting computer algorithms are not immune to buyers themselves one such system in Broward County Florida was particularly likely to falsely flag black defendants as future criminals wrongly labeling them at almost twice the rate as white defendants it was basically a racist computer which I realize is probably Elon musk's next billion dollar idea and New Jersey's approach isn't the only one that can work bow reform has looked different in Harris County and in New York but in each of those places it's resulted in fewer people behind bars and no negative impact on Public Safety the point here is if we wanted to there are multiple ways to design a system that truly prioritizes Public Safety but if you count the accused as part of the public which you really should we should be considering their safety too because terrible things happen when you are locked up pre-trial and it's not just that you can lose your job and your home you can lose your life an investigation of over 500 U.S jails founded between 2008 and 2019 they saw over 7 500 inmate deaths and of those people nearly 5 000 were never convicted of the charges on which they were being held here in New York at Rikers where most people are held pre-trial 17 people have died this year so far and I know this conference station gets heated but it's important to remember why bail reform was so important to begin with and in thinking about this story I'd like to share something that has really stuck with me because when we did our bail segment seven years ago right until the last minute we were going to include a clip of Khalif Browder now if you're not familiar with his story at 16 he was wrongly arrested for stealing a backpack now this was the clip that we were going to use of him the guy comes out of nowhere says I robbed him and the next thing you know they put in the customer I don't even know this dude router's family couldn't make the ten thousand dollars bail on the robbery charges months turned into years he tried to commit suicide several times in June he was suddenly freed with no explanation no apology no nothing they just said oh case dismissed don't worry about nothing like don't what do you mean don't worry about nothing I just took over three years of my life I didn't get to go to prom graduation nothing it was in the many years I'm never gonna get those years back never never now we pulled that clip out of the show just before typing when we found out that he killed himself the night before and his death isn't even included in any of the tallies of people who were killed by Rikers despite the fact it sure feels like it should be the collateral damage of locking so many people up pre-trial is enormous to defend this system is to defend a people wrecking machine so where do we go from here well if we're not careful we're going to go backwards which will be a huge mistake and I would argue that any future system should be built on a few basic principles first for someone charged with a low level offense we should prioritize letting them remain free pre-trial instead of defaulting to keeping them in jail second whenever any bail hearings do happen they should be longer than 10 seconds I cannot believe that has to be said out loud also people should have counsel with them at bail hearings I honestly can't believe that has to be said either and finally if someone is detained we should be Expediting their trial so that they are not waiting years for a court date I'm not saying the reform is easy or that it's simple there are going to be disagreements even among Advocates about best practices here but right now we can't even have those important conversations because all the air in the room is being taken up by fear-mongering ads fake newspapers and and confidently delivered lies from men in uniform and look even after convictions we're clearly locking far too many people up in this country but to do it before they've even been convicted of anything is proof that civil liberties only apply tangibly to the privileged and for everyone else they are entirely theoretical and anyone even trying to defend a system like this is basically morally bankrupt isn't that right Dermot 100 100 there is no doubt yeah for once I cannot argue with you there

Channel: LastWeekTonight

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Length: 26min 37sec (1597 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 31 2022