In the ongoing struggle to reform Alabama’s jails and prisons, a handful of state legislators are taking a major step backward.

On Wednesday, the Alabama Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on SB 60. The bill, introduced by Senator Cam Ward, would prohibit judges from issuing bail for a range of non-capital offenses. Because the Alabama Constitution guarantees the right to bail for all but capital offenses, the legislation would ultimately take the form of a constitutional amendment to be voted on by the people of Alabama in November.

Ward’s bill is one of two introduced in the state legislature this session, the other originating with Representative Chip Brown in the House. Brown’s proposal is similar to SB 60, although it does not require a categorical denial of bail for certain offenses. Instead, it expands the categories of people to whom judges can deny bail to include people accused of offenses carrying a punishment of life imprisonment.

Brown’s bill also eliminates the right to bail for any accused person if the court finds that there are no conditions that can ensure the person’s appearance, ensure the integrity of the judicial process, or address a risk of harm to the person accused or the community at large.

In other words, both bills strip Alabamians of rights in the service of expanding the carceral state. Sound familiar?

The presumption of innocence until proven guilty is a cornerstone principle of American government. Pretrial detention obliterates this principle, however, by stripping the accused of her freedom before being convicted and making it exceedingly difficult to formulate a defense. Sitting in jail not only costs people their jobs, homes, and families, it’s also fundamentally traumatic. Expanding this abuse of state power is both unethical and inconsistent with constitutional values. After all, the accused are just that: accused—not convicted.

In the past few years, Alabama has taken difficult but necessary steps to reduce its prison population. Even as a lawsuit by the U.S. Department of Justice over the state’s prison system potentially looms, Alabama has unquestionably made progress reducing its prison overcrowding problems through sentencing reform and other measures.

But Alabama’s jails are another question. Jails house people who have been arrested but not yet convicted of a crime, and people can stay in jail anywhere from a few hours to several years. Jails often get overlooked in debates over criminal legal reform because they rarely house as many people as prisons at any one time; yet, in a given year, far more people interact with jails than they do prisons.

While Alabama’s prison population has decreased significantly, its jail population has moved comparatively little. In many rural counties, in fact, jail populations have skyrocketed. And since jail largely consists of pretrial detainees—people simply awaiting their day in court—this discrepancy is even more concerning. The two bills introduced in the legislature will only aggravate this problem at the precise moment when Alabama was starting to make progress taking on mass incarceration.

Senator Ward’s bill—SB 60—is most likely unconstitutional on due process grounds, having been modeled on an Arizona bill that was struck down by that state’s Supreme Court. Representative Brown’s bill, however, has a better chance of surviving constitutional muster, since it does not mandate a categorical denial of bail for certain offenses, which makes it all the more dangerous.

Relying on pretrial detention will not make Alabama safer. Instead, it will divert more of the state’s strained budget toward locking up more of its people. This is the wrong direction. Alabama’s legislators must recognize—as they have begun to recognize—that increasing public safety means investing in our communities, not incarcerating them. We cannot jail our way to a better Alabama.

Chisolm Allenlundy Juris Doctor Candidate | Class of 2020 Acquisitions Editor, Alabama Law Review, Vol. 71 The University of Alabama.