It appears that California is about to
conduct a vast experiment in criminal justice reform.
California will become the first state to let people leave jail before trial without having to post bail, under a law signed by Gov. Jerry Brown on Tuesday that largely leaves pretrial release decisions up to local judges — a change praised by legislative and judicial leaders but condemned by some criminal defense advocates.
Posting bail has long been a way to make sure that persons accused of crime stay around to apppear in court. If the judge requires a bal amount, then the defendant has incentive to appear. Of course, poor folks may not be able to afford the bail amount.
More than 48,000 county jail inmates in California — two-thirds of the jail population — have not yet been convicted of a crime, and most of them are being held because they are unable to post bail, according to a recent state study.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Of course, that's one of the benefits of our great republic. One state can conduct an experiment and the rest of us can watch and see how it works. In this case, I don't have any great expectations of success. In this case, I predict utter failure, but I'm willing to be convinced.
2 comments:
Isn't this 'similar' to what NJ is doing?
What a great idea! Lets release almost 50,000(alleged)criminals who have no other job and see what they do. It's like the Stanford Prison Experiment in reverse.
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