When it comes to paying court fees, bail, and fines, poor people almost always pay the price, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tony Messenger tells Molly Jong-Fast on this bonus episode of The New Abnormal. He would know, he wrote a whole book about the topic called Profit and Punishment: How America Criminalizes the Poor in the Name of Justice.
It may seem obvious, but a lot of people out there, mainly on the right and even in the media, try to push the narrative that getting rid of cash bail will have the states overrun with criminals raping and pillaging—and they’re wrong, says Messenger.
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“The folks who push back on cash bail reform, they just want to talk about that one guy who’s a bad dude who got on cash bail and ended up shooting somebody or committing domestic violence or doing something bad. And unfortunately some of my colleagues in the media, we blow those things up and that gets the big headline instead of the 99 people who did exactly what they were supposed to do and went home to their families and kept their jobs and, thus, didn’t have incentives to continue to commit crime,” says Messenger. But he explains why that isn’t a fair assumption.
“The Arnold Foundation did a study in 2013 and they focused on low-risk defendants in jail in Kentucky. And what they found is that people who were held on cash bail for as little as 24 hours were more likely to commit further crimes than those similarly situated people who were sent home without cash bail. So the use of cash bail in those circumstances actually makes us less safe,” he explained.
It’s not just about bail, though. The system of oppression through things like court fees and traffic fines is much more sinister, which he and Molly discuss in this episode, along with the only two things the Koch Bros. and the left agree on.
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