California’s harsh bail policies swell the state’s jails and disrupt poor people’s lives to achieve an outcome — getting those charged with crimes to show up for court hearings — that can be achieved in ways that are less costly to taxpayers and less likely to cause job loss and family suffering.

That’s why The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board has supported major changes in state policies, such as those proposed by Assemblyman Rob Bonta, D-Oakland, and state Sen. Bob Hertzberg, D-Van Nuys. It’s why we now offer our enthusiastic endorsement of a proposal for national bail reform being championed by Sens. Kamala Harris, D-California, and Rand Paul, R-Kentucky. Their Pretrial Integrity and Safety Act would encourage states to improve or replace their bail systems.

Writing in The New York Times, Harris and Paul make two points that can’t be made enough.

The first is that bail “disproportionately harms” African-Americans and Latinos, who often face higher bail requirements than white defendants. A May study by three Princeton academics is only the latest to find racial disparities in bail setting.


The second is that a federal law passed in 1833 banned “debtor prisons.” In 1983, in the Bearden v. Georgia case, the U.S. Supreme Court said that in deciding whom to jail or imprison for unpaid fines, judges needed to make a distinction between people who had the means to pay but refused and those who didn’t have the means to pay.

The 1833 law and the 1983 ruling are not ambiguous. Yet in 2014, a comprehensive NPR report found that in state after state not only were people routinely jailed for unpaid fines, there have been sharp increases in the size of fines and related court fees. Given that one 2016 survey found 69 percent of Americans had less than $1,000 in savings, the NPR report makes it seem as if creating debtor prisons is an unofficial national policy.

Harris and Paul would counter this insanity by having the Justice Department give grants to states — up to $10 million over three years — to develop more effective and humane bail policies and setting up a “best practices” information center detailing the effective reforms developed in Kentucky, New Jersey, Colorado, West Virginia and local governments. Imagine personalized risk assessments that allow for better judgments about who should be detained and automatic phone reminders of court appearances as a matter of course.

The senators’ reform also stresses accountability and information sharing, requiring grant winners to report on results they achieved from policy changes and encouraging them to collect and report data on how defendants deal with the pretrial process.


The problem for Harris and Paul, alas, is that their bill may face a veto from President Donald Trump. As this editorial page noted recently, Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions oppose criminal justice reform, preferring the tough-on-crime policies of the 1980s and early 1990s. But the senators’ bipartisan legislation still helps by raising the profile of the bail reform issue. That matters — because the more attention current bail practices get, the more Americans will realize they are costly and destructive and deserve replacement.

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