Editor's note: Story corrected to give the proper attribution for a statistic presented in the sixth paragraph.

People accused of minor offenses in Wisconsin typically can be released from jail for a few hundred dollars. But that's not the reality for thousands of defendants, who stay in jail for months because they can't pay their way out.

It's a problem that many in Wisconsin's criminal justice system say needs to be addressed, as jails across the state are crowded partly with people unable to afford cash bail.

"The system burns the poor," said defense attorney Peter Rotter of Wausau, who's served as an appointed lawyer for people who can't post bail or hire their own attorney. "If you can't come up with $250 to $500, you can't get a lawyer, and you just sit there."

WHO'S IN JAIL: A one-day snapshot

If someone is broke, Rotter said, even the lowest cash bail will be too much for them. If they have jobs, they'll lose them because they can't show up for work. If they have apartments, they can't pay rent. They can't move their stuff out when they're evicted because they're locked up. If it's considered junk by the landlord, it's dumped in the garbage.

That can all happen, he said, before a judge or jury has decided if the person is guilty.

In Wisconsin, one-third of all county jail inmates from 2009 to 2013 were locked up because they couldn't pay low-cash bail, according to a report this year from Measures for Justice, a nonpartisan national group that tracks incarceration statistics.

Deon Maurice Smith Courtesy Marathon County Jail

There were 41,000 inmates in Wisconsin, with 13,000 of them in local jails, according to the report. The fastest growing population in Wisconsin jails are people incarcerated without a conviction, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit, bipartisan national organization that studies the effects of mass incarceration on society.

Deon Maurice Smith, an inmate in the Marathon County Jail. I've seen people come in with crimes that may have been worse than mine and they get a signature bond. Quote icon

Local jails hold about 612,000 people nationally, but only about 149,000 of them are serving time on convictions, according to the group's report, released in March. About 75 percent of people in local jails in the United States have not yet been convicted of the crimes that got them locked up.

The amount set for bail seems arbitrary, said Deon Maurice Smith, 37, who is being held in the Marathon County Jail in Wausau. A judge set a $5,000 cash bail for Smith, who is charged with using a computer to facilitate a child sex crime, felony bail jumping and misdemeanor bail jumping.

"I've seen people come in with crimes that may have been worse than mine and they get a signature bond," Smith said, in reference to defendants who can be released by signing a document promising to abide by specific rules.

Proponents of cash bail point out that the money gets people to show up for court appearances and prevents them from intimidating victims or witnesses, so they avoid forfeiting their bail. Judges also can set a bail so high it's unlikely a defendant can pay, in order to keep them locked up and protect the public from further danger.

The problem is that people without money can sit in jail for weeks on charges as minor as stealing a small item from a store, while those with wealth can pay for their release after they've been accused of heinous offenses, said state Rep. Evan Goyke, D-Milwaukee, a former public defender who served on a legislative committee that studied bail in Wisconsin.

Manishkumar M. Patel of Kaukauna was among the latter. He paid a $750,000 cash bail in Outagamie County in 2007 and was released while charged with attempted homicide of an unborn child. Patel, who owned gas stations in the Appleton area, was accused of poisoning his girlfriend's drink with an abortion-inducing drug to force a miscarriage.

Preliminary hearing for Manishkumar Patel on Thursday at the Outagamie County Justice Center in Appleton. Patel is accused of spiking his girlfriend's drink with an abortion-inducing drug. Wm. Glasheen/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin

He walked out of the Outagamie County Jail, failed to make a required check-in 17 days later and fled to India. Patel remained free for nearly 10 years until police arrested him in New York in January 2017. He's now serving a 22-year prison sentence for the Wisconsin crime.

More recently, a New Richmond man accused of shooting and killing his 19-year-old son during an argument was released on a $500,000 cash bail in May 2018. Kayle Fleischauer, a 43-year-old former IT worker who maintained his son shot himself, remained free for more than a year until he was convicted in June of second-degree reckless homicide.

For every defendant with those kinds of assets, there are many more who languish in Wisconsin county jails more because they're poor than because they're considered dangerous.

"It was not uncommon for me, in my personal professional experience as a public defender in Milwaukee, to have clients who could not post low cash bail," Goyke said.

He said he's tried to get state leaders to reform cash bail practices, most recently by proposing that judges be required to review their decision to order a payment in cases where a defendant is unable to come up with the money.

There's a movement across the country away from cash bail systems, said Lance Leonhard, Marathon County deputy administrator and former prosecutor. Marathon County is one of eight Wisconsin counties participating in a nationwide initiative for evidence-based decision making.

The criminal justice system is influenced by a series of decisions made by multiple people at multiple points in the process, Leonhard said. From the initial contact by an officer to the day an inmate is released after finishing a sentence, those decisions affects the inmate's life.

In most counties, the decisions that lead to cash bail aren't based on evidence, said Laura Yarie, who coordinates jail alternatives for Marathon County. When people are arrested, they're held until they can see a judge to set bail, in a hearing expected to happen within 72 hours. The judge sets bail based on the charges and the limited information available during the bail appearance.

The counties in the initiative hope to develop a standardized system, Yarie said. People would be held in jail as they are under the current procedures when they're arrested, but each defendant's case and background would be given a score based on factors such as their prior records and the severity of the crimes. The judge would then receive information on where the defendants fall in the matrix and their likelihood to re-offend or be a danger to the public.

The judge could order electronic monitoring, day reporting or other precautions — depending on the risk defendants pose to the public. The most serious offenders would not be released.

The tool is not meant to tell judges what to do, but to give them an evidence-based way of making decisions on whether to release a defendant and what precautions to take, Yarie said.

Eau Claire and Milwaukee counties were the first two to pilot the new model. Marathon, Outagamie, Chippewa, La Crosse, Rock and Waukesha counties have joined the initiative.

State Representative Evan Goyke, D-Milwaukee, a former public defender in Milwaukee and Member of the 2018 Wisconsin Council Study Committee on Bail and Conditions of Pretrial release Putting people into that kind of chaotic or stressful situation does not reduce crime. Quote icon

If counties focus on the highest-risk people and stop incarcerating people on low- or medium-cash bail, the amount of crowding in county jails would be drastically reduced, Goyke said.

If someone goes into the system with an obvious drug addiction, mental illness or homelessness, the jails don't have the services to solve the root problem, he said. Allowing the person out and requiring programming could keep them in their job and apartments.

Goyke said he's not excusing criminal conduct, but people alleged to have committed a crime and locked up, even for a short amount of time, can live with the effects of the incarceration for the rest of their lives.

Imagine someone accused of a low-level crime spending one week in jail because he can't post bail, the lawmaker said. He can't go to work, so he loses his job. He can't pay is rent, so he loses his apartment. The result is a person getting out of jail with no job and nowhere to go.

"Putting people into that kind of chaotic or stressful situation does not reduce crime," Goyke said.

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