We are proud to announce that The Bail Project has been featured by Inside Philanthropy in their recent donor brief, “Criminal Justice Reform: What Donors Need to Know.” This brief serves as a roadmap for donors entering the criminal justice reform space. By including us in this guide, Inside Philanthropy signals to the philanthropic community that The Bail Project is a high-impact choice for those wanting to address mass incarceration and injustice through financial support.

Inside Philanthropy identifies The Bail Project as an organization that bridges the gap between immediate relief and long-term reform. The guide writes: “While efforts to reform the systems of policing and mass incarceration are underway, there is still a need for services for people impacted by those systems now… Some groups provide services while also engaging in grassroots organizing and movement-building.” That two-pronged approach is The Bail Project’s bread and butter. 

Why The Bail Project is a Top Choice for Donors

The Bail Project combines direct service with systemic reform. Using donations, we provide free bail assistance and support services like court reminders, transportation, and social service navigation. But we don’t stop there – we’re fighting to fundamentally transform the pretrial justice system. Through legislative advocacy, we’re building the political will needed to end wealth-based detention and create a pretrial system rooted in safety and equity.

Since our founding, we have supported over 40,000 people navigating the pretrial system, which includes more than 35,000 individuals whose release we secured by posting bail and providing supportive services. With this support, those clients returned to court 92% of the time. This is powerful evidence that bail is not what makes people come back to court – evidence we use to advocate for policies that improve the broken pretrial justice system.

The Importance of Sustained Funding

Inside Philanthropy’s donor brief offers advice for those looking to support criminal justice nonprofits: “Don’t let the backlash stop real progress”. It encourages donors to provide “multiyear, general operating support”, which allows organizations like ours the flexibility to respond to emerging challenges and sustainably build a future without cash bail.

How You Can Support Our Mission

It is an honor to be recognized alongside other leading voices working to create a safer and more fair criminal justice system. 

We hope Inside Philanthropy‘s guidance encourages you to join our movement to eliminate reliance on cash bail and prove that a more humane, equitable, and effective pretrial system is possible. Join us today!

Today marks the 63rd anniversary of a fundamental change in our criminal justice system – one that expanded constitutional protections and reshaped modern public defense. On March 18, 1963, the Supreme Court decided in Gideon v. Wainwright that every person charged with a crime must be provided a lawyer, even if they can’t afford one. Now, we commemorate this milestone as “Gideon Day.” On this day, we honor Gideon’s legacy and celebrate the public defenders who work tirelessly to uphold it. 

However, more than six decades later, the full promise of Gideon remains unfinished. Across the country, people are walking into their first court appearances alone, with no one to help advocate for their freedom. This Gideon Day, it’s time to expand the right to legal counsel to everyone, from the very beginning of the pretrial process.  

The Historic Fight for Representation   

In 1961, Clarence Earl Gideon was arrested in Florida and charged with a felony for breaking and entering. Unable to afford his own representation, Gideon requested a court-appointed attorney. The court denied his request, forcing Gideon to represent himself during the trial. He was found guilty and sentenced to five years in prison. 

After trial, Gideon did not give up his fight for freedom. He wrote letters to the Florida Supreme Court and the Supreme Court of the United States from his prison cell, arguing that the denial of legal counsel violated his constitutional rights under the Sixth Amendment. 

His advocacy worked. The Supreme Court heard his case, deciding that the guarantee of counsel is a “fundamental right essential to a fair trial.” Gideon was re-tried – this time with counsel – and found not guilty.

True Justice Demands Pretrial Representation   

The earliest hearings in a criminal case are some of the most consequential: they determine whether someone goes home to their family or sits in jail awaiting trial. Research consistently shows that having a lawyer at this stage improves outcomes dramatically. People represented at their first appearance are significantly more likely to be released on affordable conditions – including release on their own recognizance or reduced bail – spend less time in jail before trial, and resolve their cases more efficiently. They are also less likely to feel pressured into accepting an unfavorable plea deal simply to regain their freedom and are far better positioned to mount an effective defense.

Counsel at first appearance also ultimately improves public safety and saves taxpayers money. When people are held in jail for even a few days, they risk losing their jobs, their homes, and custody of their children. As a result, they are more likely to be arrested again in the future. For every person left in jail with no advocate for release, taxpayers foot the bill – upwards of $14 billion each year nationally.

The Fight for Counsel Continues This Gideon Day

Despite ample evidence, the right to legal counsel at first appearance is far from a reality. Around half of U.S. counties still do not provide defense counsel at bail hearings.

Fortunately, several states are taking steps to improve access to counsel: 

• With the passage of Proposition 3 in 2025, Texas became the first state in the country to adopt the right to counsel at hearings where pretrial liberty is at stake into its constitution. 
• In Oklahoma, SB 1381 would establish a pilot program to guarantee the right to counsel at the very first criminal hearing. 
• In Maine, a County Superior Court ruled in 2025 that the state must provide continuous legal counsel to defendants who cannot afford their own attorney at all critical stages of the process.

The failure of our court systems to provide timely counsel is an injustice faced by far too many. The solutions are clear: guarantee the right to legal counsel at first appearance, allow defendants adequate time to meet with their attorneys and present evidence, and invest in public defenders and indigent defense programs. No person should ever have to appear in court alone simply because they cannot afford a lawyer. 

A Legacy Worth Protecting – And Expanding 

Sixty-three years ago, Clarence Earl Gideon changed the face of American law. When he presented his case to the Supreme Court, the justices were clear in their decision: state courts must appoint attorneys for defendants who cannot afford their own. This Gideon Day, let’s do more than remember the past. Let’s fight to ensure our constitutional right to legal counsel is not just a promise, but a reality.  

They were arrested, booked, and placed in a cell. They never stood before a judge. They never heard a verdict. Within days, or sometimes only hours, they were dead.

This sequence appears again and again in local reporting across the United States. In Mississippi, people jailed “for their own safety” while awaiting psychiatric beds died in county custody, many by suicide, according to reporting by Mississippi Today and ProPublica. In Kentucky, the Lexington Herald-Leader found that hundreds of people have died in local jails since 2020, most of them awaiting trial. In Georgia, the U.S. Department of Justice concluded that conditions in the Fulton County Jail were so dangerous they violated the Constitution.

These deaths tend not to produce national reckonings. They happen in county jails: facilities most Americans never see, think about, or easily distinguish from prisons. They are framed as tragic anomalies, administrative errors, or the unfortunate result of illness and addiction. But taken together, they tell a different story. 

Local jails have quietly become some of the most dangerous institutions in American life – not because they are malfunctioning, but because they are being asked to perform work they were never built to do.

Investigations into Local Jails Across the Country Reveal Unsettling Patterns

While conditions vary across jurisdictions, investigations from Mississippi to Washington State reveal patterns that are difficult to dismiss as isolated failures. Jails now operate as de facto mental health facilities, effectively the nation’s largest providers of care for the mentally ill. Policy analysis from The Bail Project similarly concludes that jails are structurally incapable of functioning as mental health providers, even as they increasingly serve that role by default.

This reality has only recently begun to receive sustained scrutiny, including in Anyplace But Here: The Uncomfortable Convergence Between Mental Illness and the Criminal Justice System by former sheriff Tony Thompson. Thompson describes how facilities designed for brief detention have become warehouses for mental illness, addiction, and poverty, all while lacking the staffing, medical capacity, and institutional stability required to keep people alive.

The first step is not violence; it is depersonalization – the stripping away of individuality that makes neglect feel normal.

One reason this danger can persist, even when it is widely understood, is that jails operate as what sociologist Erving Goffman called “total institutions” – environments that reorganize social life through control, routine, and isolation from the outside world. Vincent Schiraldi, a fellow at the Pinkerton Foundation and formerly chief executive of corrections, probation, and youth justice systems in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Maryland, describes this as a process that changes how harm becomes thinkable. “In total institutions, we rob people of their humanity,” he told The Bail Project. The first step is not violence; it is depersonalization – the stripping away of individuality that makes neglect feel normal. 

Jails Don’t Merely Contain Dangerous Conditions; They Produce Them

That framework also helps explain why jail crises cannot be reduced to a few “bad guards” or a few rogue administrators. Schiraldi – who spent much of his career as an advocate before running systems from the inside – said he once believed staff were “scumbags,” the stock villains of prison movies. But the reality, he found, was more unsettling: “They viewed themselves as the good guys. And yet, simultaneously, they were tolerating stuff they would never tolerate for a second in the community.” In other words, ordinary people – people who coach youth sports, go to church, raise families – can become participants in extraordinary harm, not always through direct cruelty, but through acquiescence.

Schiraldi’s explanation is not about individual depravity so much as social psychology under pressure. “It’s the Milgram study. It’s the Stanford prison experiment,” he said, invoking the classic findings that authority and group consensus can pull people toward behavior they would otherwise reject. “Under the cloak of authority – or authority-feeling consensus – people will do bad stuff.” 

In jail, that “authority-feeling consensus” can become its own code, stronger than policy manuals or constitutional standards. New hires step into a world where the practical lesson is not what the rules say, but what the culture expects: when to intervene, when to use force, when to ignore. And when staffing collapses, oversight weakens, and people arrive already in crisis, that culture does not merely shape conditions – it shapes whether people survive.

[T]hese facilities do not simply contain danger. They produce dangerous conditions through chronic understaffing, inadequate medical care, and the normalization of neglect.

Taken together, Schiraldi’s point is a grim extension of the larger story jail-death investigations keep telling: these facilities do not simply contain danger. They produce dangerous conditions through chronic understaffing, inadequate medical care, and the normalization of neglect.

The scope of the problem is difficult to quantify precisely, an irony that is itself revealing. Federal law requires states to report deaths in custody to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. But compliance is inconsistent, a fact documented by the Vera Institute of Justice in its report “The Hidden Deaths in American Jails.” Some states underreport deaths. Others submit data years late. In Mississippi, Mississippi Today and The Marshall Project found that dozens of jail deaths never appeared in official counts at all.

Independent efforts have filled some of the gaps. Vera’s analysis shows that jail deaths increased sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic and have remained elevated even as jail populations declined. In Kentucky, the Herald-Leader reported that roughly 70% of people who died in jail had not been convicted of a crime. In Washington State, a Columbia Legal Services report titled, “Gone But Not Forgotten” found that more than 70% of jail deaths occurred within the first two weeks of incarceration.

What disappears when deaths go uncounted is not just accountability, but pattern recognition. Without reliable data, each death can be treated as an isolated tragedy rather than evidence of systemic failure. The opacity protects institutions from scrutiny and allows the same conditions to persist.

Fulton County Jail in Atlanta, GA

The Most Dangerous Moments in Jails

To understand why jails are so lethal, it helps to understand how they differ from prisons. Prisons hold people who have been convicted and sentenced, often for years. Jails are meant to be temporary. They house people awaiting trial, serving short sentences, or detained for administrative reasons. Their populations turn over rapidly, explaining why, in 2024, while there were 657,500 people in jails throughout the country, 7.9 million people entered and exited jails that year. Intake is constant. Medical histories are incomplete. People arrive in crisis: detoxing, psychotic, suicidal, injured, or chronically ill.

The most dangerous moment in jail is not month three or year one. It is the first few days.

The most dangerous moment in jail is not month three or year one. It is the first few days. That first window is when many clients assisted by The Bail Project describe the most acute instability: withdrawal without monitoring, missed psychiatric medication, or placement in isolation before any meaningful medical follow-up occurs.

This pattern appears repeatedly in investigations and audits. The Washington State report documented deaths from withdrawal and suicide shortly after booking. A California state audit found that its jails performed insufficient safety checks. In Minnesota, the Department of Corrections ordered Hennepin County to reduce its jail population after finding that missed welfare checks contributed directly to deaths related to medical emergencies, substance withdrawal, and suicide. New York City’s Department of Correction reports that incarcerated people missed nearly 15,000 medical appointments in December alone.

Yet intake in most jails remains an administrative process rather than a medical one. Screening is rushed. Staff are overextended. Follow-up is inconsistent. Safety checks that are supposed to occur every 15 or 30 minutes are missed for hours at a time. Clients released with Bail Project support pretrial frequently recount requests for help that go unanswered or watching others in visible medical distress wait extended periods before assistance arrives.

In prisons, systems are built, however imperfectly, for long-term management. In jails, everything happens at once, and nothing stays still long enough for problems to be absorbed. The system depends on vigilance. What it gets instead is triage.

The Effects of Understaffing Jails

Nearly every investigation into jail deaths eventually arrives at the same root cause: staffing.

Local jails across the country are chronically understaffed, a finding echoed in audits from Wisconsin, Texas, Florida, Oklahoma, and North Carolina. In Bexar County, Texas, officials acknowledged that fewer officers were overseeing increasingly volatile populations. In Leon County, Florida, a consultant warned that jail design combined with staffing shortages created potentially dangerous situations for both detainees and staff.

When staffing collapses, every safeguard collapses with it. Wellness checks are skipped. Medical complaints are dismissed. Emergencies are missed.

When staffing collapses, every safeguard collapses with it. Wellness checks are skipped. Medical complaints are dismissed. Emergencies are missed. Violence increases, not because people in custody are uniquely violent, but because supervision breaks down.

A Department of Justice investigation in South Carolina found that people in jail faced a substantial risk of being stabbed, raped, or beaten due to inadequate staffing and supervision. In Oklahoma County, repeated health inspections failed after inspectors found cells dangerously overcrowded and staff unable to monitor detainees properly.

But understaffing does not occur in a vacuum. Jails are overwhelmed because they are filled beyond necessity, housing people who could safely await trial in their communities. 

Research outlined in The Bail Project’s Inside Bail Reform: Six Core Components of Safe, Fair, and Effective Pretrial Policy identifies proven alternatives – such as pretrial screening, court reminders, and voluntary support services – that reduce detention without increasing failure-to-appear rates, underscoring that population size is a policy choice, not an inevitability.

No staffing model can make mass pretrial detention safe. The Bail Project’s work reflects this reality: the most reliable way to reduce harm inside jails is not to manage overcrowding more efficiently, but to prevent unnecessary detention altogether.

Jails Are America’s Largest Mental Health Institutions

Nowhere is this clearer than in the treatment of mental illness. In some cases, people arrested during psychiatric crises are booked into jail before any hospital bed is located. The Bail Project has assisted clients who were placed in solitary confinement “for safety” while awaiting transfer, only to deteriorate further inside.

Jails have become America’s largest mental health institutions by default, a reality documented by the The Bail Project and reinforced by local reporting nationwide. People experiencing psychosis, suicidal ideation, or severe addiction are routinely incarcerated because there is nowhere else to put them. Psychiatric beds are scarce. Community treatment is underfunded. Police become first responders to crises they are not trained to resolve.

This is not a story of individual malice. It is a story of systems that cannot function as designed under the pressures placed upon them. Officers are tasked with roles that combine security guard, nurse, social worker, and crisis counselor. Failure is inevitable. Harm flows downward.

Once inside jail, care is often fragmented or nonexistent.

Once inside jail, care is often fragmented or nonexistent. Medications are delayed or interrupted. Suicide watch is implemented without adequate monitoring. Isolation replaces treatment. In Mississippi, people jailed while awaiting mental health treatment died in custody, despite being detained explicitly for their own protection. In Fulton County, the U.S. Department of Justice found detainees suffering from untreated illness, malnutrition, and mental health crises in conditions so severe they violated constitutional standards.

Additional Jails Aren’t the Solution

When deaths pile up, the most common political response is a familiar one: build a new jail.

Maine officials commissioned a report suggesting a new jail could address safety failures. Washington, D.C.’s auditor declared the city desperate for a new facility after finding that the jail’s death rate was three times the national average. 

But buildings do not determine who enters a jail, how long they stay, or whether they receive care. New jails do not fix bail systems that detain people for poverty. They do not create clinicians where none exist. They do not resolve staffing shortages driven by low pay and high burnout. Capital projects absorb blame that properly belongs to policy. They offer visible action without addressing intake, oversight, or accountability.

The people most at risk in jails are not those convicted of serious crimes. They are people charged with misdemeanors, people awaiting hearings, and people too poor to post bail.

The people most at risk in jails are not those convicted of serious crimes. They are people charged with misdemeanors, people awaiting hearings, and people too poor to post bail. Many face bond amounts in the hundreds or low thousands of dollars – sums that are relatively minor in policy debates but insurmountable for someone living paycheck to paycheck.

This pattern appears in state after state, and client after client at The Bail Project. 

Oklahoma County Detention Center in Oklahoma City, OK

Reducing Pretrial Detention in Jails Is a Matter of Survival

In Kentucky, most jail deaths involved people awaiting trial. In Duval County, Florida, local reporting linked recent deaths to long-standing problems that disproportionately affected people held pretrial. In Milwaukee County, an external audit found dangerous suicide-watch practices affecting people who had not been convicted.

They are legally innocent. Yet pretrial detention routinely functions as punishment for poverty, separating people from housing, employment, and medical care before any determination of guilt. The state’s obligation to them is not punishment; it is custody with care. Instead, pretrial detention functions as punishment in practice. Time stretches. Court dates are delayed. Conditions worsen.  Deaths are often treated as administrative matters rather than the constitutional failures they represent.

In this context, freedom is not an abstraction. It is a concrete intervention against the conditions that make local jails so deadly.

This is why efforts to reduce pretrial detention matter not only as questions of fairness, but of survival. Data from charitable bail funds like The Bail Project consistently show high court-appearance rates and improved stability for people released pretrial – particularly those with medical, mental health, or substance-use needs – challenging the assumption that detention is necessary for compliance or safety. In this context, freedom is not an abstraction. It is a concrete intervention against the conditions that make local jails so deadly.

Accountability would require more than outrage after the fact. It would begin with mandatory, public reporting of all deaths in custody, as urged by the Vera Institute and civil rights groups. It would require independent medical oversight rather than voluntary inspections. It would demand staffing minimums tied to population caps, along with the political will to jail fewer people when those caps are exceeded.

Fewer people in jails means fewer deaths. That is not a radical claim; it is an empirical one.

Most of all, it would require a rethinking of pretrial detention itself. Fewer people in jails means fewer deaths. That is not a radical claim; it is an empirical one.

Bail Reform Means Fewer People Cycling through Dangerous Local Jail Environments

As policy reporting on bail reform has documented, jurisdictions that reduce reliance on cash bail while investing in court reminders and voluntary pretrial supports have not seen the catastrophic public-safety outcomes often predicted. What they have seen is fewer people cycling through unstable jail environments.

America has spent decades debating prisons: sentencing, mass incarceration, and reform. Meanwhile, its jails have quietly become sites of routine, preventable death. Temporary facilities have taken on permanent risk. Administrative detention has acquired mortal consequence. What happens in jails happens quickly, out of sight, and often without record. But it happens in our name.

Once a correctional officer, later jailed, Dasia experienced the system from both sides. Her story is a testament to growth, accountability, and the power of a second chance.

When Dasia describes the night she went to jail, her voice is steady but layered with reflection. “It was just a thoughtless night,” she says. “I was under the influence and heavily triggered.” She had just finished a shift at work and was riding with a friend when police pulled them over. Officers approached the passenger side – her side – and ran her name. A warrant appeared in their system: driving under suspension and a missed court date she says she never knew about because the notice went to the wrong address.

“Sometimes the first impression is all you get with somebody, and they get stuck with that.”

That was the beginning of twelve days in jail, on a $250 bail, that changed her life.

“I kind of felt violated,” she recalls. Two male correctional officers searched her, unzipping her hoodie despite her protests. Later, in custody, angry and intoxicated, she flooded the toilet in her pod. “It was like an out of body situation,” she says. “I was so mad they wouldn’t let me make a phone call. I could’ve bonded out that night.” Instead, she stayed in jail nearly two weeks – days that, she says, became a humbling experience and a turning point.

It wasn’t her first time in a jail. At 21, she’d worked as a correctional officer in the same facility. “When you’re a CO, you’re honored,” she says. “You’re important. But being an inmate – you go from feeling righteous to feeling like a peasant.”

Still, she refused to let that experience define her. “I spoke life into the other inmates,” she says. “We’d talk, and I’d try to broaden people’s perspective about what we were going through. It wasn’t just for them – it was for me, too.”

Dasia has lived with mental health challenges most of her life. “What people don’t know,” she says, “is that without being under a substance, sometimes it feels like you are anyway.” She recognizes that her behavior that night came from a place of pain and confusion, not malice. Still, she takes responsibility. “Even with mental health, you’ve got to present yourself in a way people can honor.”

“Broken crayons still color.”

Inside, she also saw how unevenly people were treated. “I got into it with one of the COs,” she recalls. “She was calling inmates out their name, cussing at them. I had to remind her, that’s not part of your job description. You don’t get paid for that.” Her interaction with the correctional officer, she says, helped shift the tone in the pod. “She told me, ‘You won.’ I said, no, I’m behind this cage. I didn’t win anything. I just need you to stop treating people like that.”

She remembers feeling lost, without anyone to call – until a counselor referred her to The Bail Project. “When I got to talk to them, it was a breath of fresh air,” she says. “She told me she was working to get me out. And sure enough, I got released that day.”

Freedom didn’t erase the damage. The case kept her from working for nearly a year, and the stigma of incarceration has followed her, making it hard to get a job. “I’m a hard worker,” she says. “All I’ve ever known is to work. But God’s been telling me this is a season to be still, to listen, to recenter.”

Through it all, she says, The Bail Project has been a lifeline. “They’ve helped me with resources and given me advice when I’m in error. They challenge me to grow. That’s how you become the best version of yourself – by having people who really care.”

“I’m excited to be restarting life and getting a second chance to be free again.”

Dasia wants to return that care someday. “If I could, I’d do what they do,” she says. “It takes patience and purpose. They’re selfless. They help people restart.”

She pauses before adding, softly, “It helps me remember who I am – and that it’s never too late to start over.”

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The Bail Project is a national nonprofit working to transform America’s pretrial system by eliminating reliance on cash bail and proving that a more humane, equitable, and effective pretrial system is possible. We provide free bail assistance and pretrial support to thousands of low-income people each year while advancing policy change at the local, state, and national levels. Since our founding, The Bail Project has supported over 40,000 people navigating the pretrial system, which includes nearly 35,000 individuals whose release we secured by posting bail and providing supportive services such as court reminders and transportation assistance. With this support, those clients returned to court 92% of the time, proving that support – not wealth – is what makes the system work. We have also provided supportive services through pilot programs to more than 6,000 people, ensuring that both wealth and access to support are never barriers to fairness in the pretrial process. Learn more at bailproject.org.

More About the Pretrial Procedures Modernization Act (SB 1381)

SB 1381 proposes reforms to Oklahoma’s pretrial system that would improve due process protections and court appearance rates. Specifically, SB 1381 would: 

• Ensure Access to Counsel: SB 1381 establishes that defendants have the right to counsel at an initial criminal hearing and the right to consult privately with their counsel prior to and during the hearing. 
• Require Timely Bail Hearings: SB 1381 requires initial hearings to be held within 48 hours of arrest on weekdays and 72 hours on weekends or holidays. 
• Increasing Awareness of Court Reminders: SB 1381 requires courts to inform defendants of the availability of court reminders and provide support in signing up for these reminders.

Oklahomans, Your Voice Will Make a Difference 

You elect legislators to be the voice of your community, which means your voice matters. Lawmakers pay attention when they hear directly from their constituents. 

This bill is a vital step towards creating a pretrial system where all Oklahomans are treated fairly. The time to act is now.

How to Take Action 

If you’re a constituent of one of the following state senators, click this link to email them:  

• State Senator Brent Howard (District 38)
• State Senator Todd Gollihare (District 12)
• State Senator Mary Boren (District 16)
• State Senator Michael Brooks (District 44)
• State Senator Darcy Jech (District 26)
• State Senator Paul Rosino (District 45)
• State Senator Shane Jett (District 17)
• State Senator Lisa Standridge (District 15)

Oklahomans deserve a pretrial system that treats everyone with dignity – one that honors the presumption of innocence, upholds individual rights, and improves community safety. Email your Oklahoma lawmakers today, and urge them to vote YES on SB 1381.

If you are unsure who your state senator is, visit this website to search for them by zip code.

A new report from the ACLU of Georgia delivers yet another grim snapshot of Fulton County Jail and the ongoing crisis of Atlanta’s pretrial system. Despite years of warnings and repeated calls for reform, the jail remains dangerously overcrowded. Those warnings have included a federal civil rights investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice, which found conditions inside the jail violated constitutional rights and federal law, citing pest infestations, malnourishment, and a serious risk of violence for people in custody.

The consequences have been deadly. Since 2021, 32 people have died in Fulton County Jail, including four in the first seven months of 2025 alone. The racial disparities are impossible to ignore. Nearly 90% of those incarcerated are Black, though Black residents make up just 43% of the county’s population.

So what’s driving this crisis, and why hasn’t it improved? The answer is cash bail. By tying pretrial release to money, Georgia keeps legally innocent people needlessly locked up for months, swells the jail population, and fuels court delay, health crises, and violence. Far from protecting public safety, cash bail is steadily eroding the legitimacy of Atlanta’s justice system.

Cash Bail, Not Public Safety, Drives Fulton County Jail Overcrowding

The ACLU’s data show that reductions in overcrowding at the Fulton County Jail were short-lived. After increased scrutiny and reform efforts, the jail population fell to 2,470 people in January 2025. By July, it had rebounded by nearly 20%, once again rising far above capacity. As the population swells, the Sheriff’s Office struggles to maintain staffing levels or make long-needed improvements to the jail’s deteriorating facilities.

Cash bail sits at the center of this population problem. Many people remain jailed not because they pose a risk, but because they cannot afford to pay for their release. As of July 1, 2025, more than a third of those in custody faced bonds below $5,000, requiring an upfront payment of $750 or less. Unable to afford this payment, many people spent 90 days or more behind bars. These are not high-risk cases or high-dollar bonds reserved for serious offenses; they are relatively low amounts that nonetheless function as insurmountable barriers for people living paycheck to paycheck.

Seventy percent of those in custody faced cash bail under $20,000, requiring $3,000 or less upfront for release – an excessive amount surpassing a month of rent and basic expenses for the average low-income household. 

In practice, this means two people accused of the same conduct can face radically different outcomes: one buys their freedom, while the other remains jailed simply because they can’t pay the price tag for release. This has nothing to do with risk or guilt, yet the person who remains behind bars faces a substantially higher likelihood of losing their job, housing, family stability, and more. 

In Fulton County, it also means that poverty alone can expose legally innocent people to the daily risks of living inside a deadly, dangerous jail.

Cash Bail Fuels Court Delays, Turning Backlogs into Punishment

Cash bail doesn’t just fill jails; it clogs courts. When judges jail people who could safely remain at home, the jail population swells, court dockets grow, and cases move even more slowly. What should be a short wait for trial turns into months behind bars for people who simply cannot afford release. 

In 2025, the average stay in the Fulton County Jail reached 218 days, more than seven times the national average. That is seven months in jail for people who have not been convicted of a crime. During that time, people’s lives can unravel. Facing that pressure, many plead guilty just to go home, regardless of actual guilt. 

The numbers grow even more troubling. Thirty-four percent of people in Fulton County Jail remain unindicted, meaning prosecutors have not formally charged them. Nearly a quarter of those individuals have spent more than 90 days in jail without ever being officially accused of a crime. 

Prosecutors control when they bring charges. Judges determine whether someone waits at home or in a cell. When both allow months to pass while someone sits in jail without being charged, they turn pretrial detention into punishment before conviction. Holding someone for months without formally accusing them of a crime violates the most basic promise of due process and the presumption of innocence.

These delays don’t protect the public; they deny justice and strip away a person’s dignity.

The System Works When Money Isn’t Tied to Release

The ACLU report shows the harms of tying pretrial release to money. The Bail Project’s work in Atlanta shows what happens when it doesn’t.

Since December 2020, The Bail Project has helped secure the release of over 800 people in Fulton County who could not afford bail. We pay bail at no cost to families and provide simple support, such as court reminders and transportation, to help people return to court.

Our clients move through the same court system described in the ACLU report. They face the same delays and backlogs. The difference is that they wait at home, not in jail. Despite long case processing times, our Atlanta clients appear for 80% of their court dates, a rate that exceeds national averages. Over half ultimately have all of their charges dismissed, meaning their incarceration was entirely unnecessary. After release, many wait more than a year for substantive updates from the courts, only to learn that the state has declined to move forward with prosecution.  

These outcomes are evidence that a fairer pretrial system is possible. Jail is not what drives court appearance. Money is not what ensures accountability. When people have support and stability, they return to court. When the system removes money from the equation, public safety does not collapse. Instead, fairness improves and unnecessary incarceration declines.

Alternatives to Cash Bail Exist, But Aren’t Used

A hopeful finding by the ACLU is that Fulton County has invested in pretrial services, diversion programs, and pretrial assessments that could reduce reliance on cash bail. The findings indicate that the solution is less one of build it and they will come or the lack of solutions – it’s that judges and prosecutors haven’t fully adopted them. Unlearning the reliance on cash bail requires updating policies, reviewing data, and educating court stakeholders on how to utilize alternatives effectively.

Until this advocacy takes hold, Fulton County is stuck in a loop that defaults to wealth-based detention, wasting both resources and human potential. Detaining Bail Project clients whose cases were later dropped cost an estimated $1.7 million in jail expenses alone. That money could have improved jail conditions, expanded pretrial services, or supported housing, treatment, and employment programs that stabilize people upon release.

Moving Toward a Fairer, Safer Pretrial System

Fulton County doesn’t need more jails, bigger budgets, or tougher policies. It needs a system that works to prevent justice system involvement in the first place, not one that punishes poverty. Evidence-based alternatives exist, and organizations like The Bail Project show that people return to court when money isn’t the gatekeeper.

The steps to progress are clear: stop relying on cash bail, fully implement and expand the alternatives already in place, and hold judges and prosecutors accountable to ensure pretrial detention remains temporary – not punishment. Cash bail isn’t making us safer; it’s weakening our justice system and eroding public trust in it.

Timmie’s story is not merely one of addiction and recovery. It is a testament to how small, seemingly banal procedural mechanisms can pile up to manufacture a profound despair. It is a story about how a missed check-in or a denied bail bond application can feel less like administrative hurdles and more like a death sentence.

Timmie is a man who speaks with the rhythmic, laid-back cadence of the West Coast. He spent his childhood shuttling between San Bernardino and Phoenix, eventually settling in the desert. He describes himself as a “go-getter,” a trait he is currently applying to the final stages of the hiring process for a new job. But for several years, that energy was siphoned away by a severe fentanyl addiction.

“Drug addiction is not picky and choosy. It could happen to anybody.”

“Drug addiction is not picky and choosy,” Timmie explains. “It could happen to anybody. I thought it couldn’t happen to me. I was like, ‘I’m too strong for addiction.’ But my situation happened due to depression. Breakups with relationships. Most importantly, my daughters. I couldn’t provide for them the way I wanted to.”

The slide into homelessness was gradual and then sudden. He found himself on the streets of Phoenix where fentanyl was “so easily accessible” it seemed to be part of the pavement. He recalls standing up and falling asleep at bus stops, his knees buckling under the weight of the high. He went to detox nearly fifty times. He tried. He failed. He tried again. But the cycle of poverty and addiction is a trap that is difficult to escape without a hand to pull you out.

That trap snapped shut on October 12, 2024. Timmie was arrested for selling pills to an undercover officer. It was a transaction born of his own sickness. He was “hurting” and needed to support his own habit. The arrest landed him in a Maricopa County jail cell, a place designed to strip a person of agency.

This is where the procedural violence began. Timmie had family who loved him. His mother was willing to put up her car, her savings, and her stability to bring him home. She gathered collateral and approached a commercial bail bonds agent. In the American criminal justice system, freedom is a commodity, and those without cash are often left to rot. But even with collateral, the bail bonds agent rejected her application. They viewed Timmie as a bad investment.

“They got all those bail bond company names and information on that wall in jail for what? A lot of people can’t afford that.”

“It’s like they become careless when it comes to certain people and their situations,” Timmie says, reflecting on the industry. “They got all those bail bond company names and information on that wall in jail for what? A lot of people can’t afford that.”

The rejection devastated him. He sat in his cell and watched as other men lost hope. He listened to the jailhouse lawyers who predicted he would serve six months to a year. He resigned himself to the cage.

That’s when The Bail Project stepped in. A bail disruptor interviewed him. It was a simple conversation conducted over a video screen, but it reintroduced humanity into a situation that usually deals only in inmate numbers. Timmie was skeptical. He had been burned before. In a previous case, he had actually shown up to court, but he arrived late. The clerk at the front desk refused to let the court know he was in the building. Because of that single bureaucratic refusal, a warrant was issued for his arrest. That memory lingered.

“I still didn’t believe that I was gonna get out. I was like, ‘Yeah, I might have an interview, but I don’t feel like I’m really going to get out.’”

“I still didn’t believe that I was gonna get out,” he admits. “I was like, ‘Yeah, I might have an interview, but I don’t feel like I’m really going to get out.'”

But the bail was posted. He was released.

The freedom allowed him to return to his family, but the criminal justice system was not done with him yet. This is where the power of the state to manufacture despair is most potent. Despite his sobriety, despite his release, and despite his compliance, the prosecutors offered him a plea deal that felt like a physical blow.

Five years in prison.

That was the offer. Timmie had been fighting to rebuild his life, staying sober by what he calls the “strong will of God,” but the paperwork on the table said his efforts didn’t matter. The weight of that number crushed him. He walked out of the courtroom and didn’t go home. He walked the streets of Phoenix, his mind spiraling into a dark logic. If the state was going to take five years of his life, perhaps it was better to take the rest of it himself.

“I didn’t care about life anymore, to be honest,” Timmie says, his voice serious. “The first thing I thought about was overdosing. I knew I had been sober for a while. I was like, maybe if I go buy some drugs, go find some pills somewhere, and then smoke them, maybe that’ll help me end it all.”

He spent the day and night walking. He managed to buy pills. He held the means of his own destruction in his hand. This was the despair the system had engineered. It had stripped him of hope so thoroughly that death seemed like a viable alternative to prison.

He found a bus stop. He sat there, holding the pills, a war raging in his mind between the addiction that wanted to claim him and the faith that had sustained him.

“I ended up throwing them in the trash,” Timmie says. “I got up and walked home and I said, ‘Man, I’m good. I’m just gonna face this.'”

He called the bail disruptor who bonded him out. This is another moment that matters. In a system of cold statutes, a human connection is a lifeline. The disruptor didn’t just offer platitudes. He offered resources. He offered a listening ear. Most importantly, he offered a ride to court.

It sounds trivial. A ride to court. But for a man without a car in a sprawling city, a ride is the difference between a “failure to appear” warrant and freedom. It is the difference between being a fugitive and being a citizen standing up for his rights.

Because he could get to court, he could fight. Because he could fight, the narrative changed. The prosecutors began to see the man, not just the charge. They saw his sobriety. They saw his dedication to his daughters. The five-year prison offer evaporated.

The final result was probation.

Timmie has been sober for over a year. He is rebuilding trust with the mother of his children. He is navigating an employment search with the same tenacity he used to survive the streets. He is a free man.

His story is a victory, but it is also a warning. It exposes a criminal justice system where a clerk’s refusal can create a fugitive, where a bondsman’s rejection can destroy a family’s hope, and where a prosecutor’s initial offer can push a man to the brink of suicide.

Timmie, however, chooses to focus on the grace that carried him through. He made it out of the trap. He walked away from the bus stop. He is finally, truly, going home.

My release anniversary isn’t just a milestone, but a reminder of how many people remain trapped in a criminal justice system built to punish, not give a fresh start.

Twenty years ago last month, I stepped out of a Washington State prison with a small plastic bag of belongings and a mind full of questions I did not yet know how to ask. I had served ten years on a twenty year sentence, won my appeal on my own, and walked into a world I was not sure had room for me. I did not have a roadmap or a degree or savings. What I did have was the stubborn belief I had carried since boyhood, the belief that no one else gets to tell me what my life will become.

Looking back now, I understand something I could not have named at the time: what many people call second chances are often the first real chances people like me ever receive.

Looking back now, I understand something I could not have named at the time: what many people call second chances are often the first real chances people like me ever receive. 

My story begins long before the prison gate closed behind me. I grew up between tenderness and instability. One side of my family was large and affectionate, the kind of place where you were always being hugged or fed. The other side was shaped by struggle, addiction, and violence. 

By the time I was eight, life had already left its marks on me. I’d been taken from my mother’s custody and placed in the state’s at five – a jarring separation, police at the door, six months of being cut off from everyone who made me feel safe. I came home changed. Soon after, I survived an accidental overdose of seizure medication that put me in a coma, and later a gunshot in a domestic incident. 

Those experiences left me with injuries that stayed with me into adulthood. They also left emotional wounds that were harder to describe.

I became a father at 16 and was out on my own soon after. I left California for Seattle because it was the only place I had ever heard described as somewhere a young man could get a job and make a life. I worked every shift I could find. I held warehouse jobs, restaurant jobs, and whatever else kept the lights on. Still, nothing I earned covered childcare, rent, and the basic expenses of survival. After an unexpected garnishment of my already meager earnings, my paycheck arrived full of symbols where the numbers should have been. No money for groceries, let alone rent.

When your back is against the wall and you feel that every system around you is designed to keep you there, the choices you make are often desperate.

When your back is against the wall and you feel that every system around you is designed to keep you there, the choices you make are often desperate. At 22, overwhelmed and in need of money, I committed three armed robberies. 

I did not hurt anyone and never intended to, but that does not erase the harm I caused. I turned myself in, was charged, and assigned a bail amount of $200,000, which the judge doubled to $400,000 within a week. I could not afford $20 at the time, much less hundreds of thousands. From that moment forward my freedom was out of reach.

I was told I faced 68 years. Standing in the courtroom with my heart pounding loud enough to drown out the judge, I followed the advice of my attorney and signed the plea deal: 20 years and nine months. I had no idea how a person was supposed to survive that.

But the same instinct that once carried me through painful physical therapy after being shot as a child, the same determination that made me get back on a bicycle even when every muscle burned, showed up again. Something felt wrong about my case – more than 20 years for a first-time offender – and I refused to accept that there was no way to challenge it. I did not know the law. I did not know the process. All I knew was how to try.

In the prison law library I wrote a single sentence declaring my intention to appeal. I did not know that sentence would preserve my right to fight for my freedom years later. Over time I earned my GED, took college courses, became the law library clerk, and learned to research and write in ways I had never been taught. I read robbery cases, then constitutional cases, then cases that had nothing to do with mine but revealed the many ways the system fails people every day.

For seven years I fought. I pored over constitutional violations, due process failures, and precedents from every corner of the law. What I uncovered was simple: my charging document was wrong, and that error shaped the wrongful sentencing that followed – the misguided belief I faced 68 years, the pressure to take a plea, and the two decades of life I accepted.

I was responsible for what I did, but I should never have been threatened with decades I didn’t owe.

I was responsible for what I did, but I should never have been threatened with decades I didn’t owe. When the courts finally acknowledged the errors, my sentence was overturned and I came home eleven years early.

On the day of my release I did not feel triumphant. I felt uncertain. Who would I be now? How would I rebuild a life that had never fully begun?

The answer arrived slowly, through work and family and through the quiet belief of people who saw potential in me before I fully saw it in myself. Freedom allowed me to become the father, husband, and community member I had always wanted to be. It allowed me to return to the world not as a cautionary tale but as someone who could help others navigate the same impossible systems I once faced alone.

Today I lead The Bail Project, an organization that meets people in moments of crisis, supporting them through the pretrial process.

Today I lead The Bail Project, an organization that meets people in moments of crisis, supporting them through the pretrial process. I meet thousands of people who remind me of myself at 22. They are scared, overwhelmed, and convinced that one mistake or one bad break defines them forever. I know how wrong that is.

Since our founding, The Bail Project has supported more than 40,000 people across the country. Each of those encounters is both an act of mutual aid and often the first time our clients are given resources, the benefit of the doubt, a vote of confidence – a chance.

We often talk about second chances in the criminal justice system. But when I look at the people we serve, I see something different. I see individuals who never had a first chance to begin with. They never had stable housing or access to healthcare or mental health treatment. They never had a teacher or mentor who believed in them. They never had someone who asked what happened to them instead of what they did. In fact, they’re often further disadvantaged by the system, which is rife with its own triggers, stressors, harms, and a lack of adequate care. 

I have learned, through my own journey and through thousands of encounters at The Bail Project, that people rarely end up in jail because of a single choice. They end up there because of a lifetime of choices made about them – political decisions to underfund schools, cut mental health services, let affordable housing disappear, and allow whole neighborhoods to struggle without stable jobs or consistent support. These are not individual failures; they are policy failures. And they create conditions where desperation becomes predictable, even inevitable.

The question is not whether solutions exist. It’s whether we have the political will to give people their first real chance before it’s too late.

If we want people to have a fighting chance, we must build the world that was missing for me and for so many of the people we serve. That means investing in safe housing, meaningful work, quality education, and real health care, including mental health and addiction treatment. It means replacing punishment with support, and scarcity with opportunity. These are the foundations that prevent justice system involvement in the first place – and the foundations every person deserves before we ever talk about “second chances.” We could do this tomorrow, if we chose to. The question is not whether solutions exist. It’s whether we have the political will to give people their first real chance before it’s too late.

As I mark 20 years of freedom, I am less interested in celebrating the day I walked out of prison and more committed to building a world where fewer people ever walk in. A world where freedom is not something you win back but something you never lose, not because you were lucky or exceptional but because society believed in your potential.

I have lived the difference. Twenty years later I am still fighting to make sure others get to live it too.