“It leaves you outraged,” he said. “Even with $50 or $60 million, we’re only going to put a dent in things and hopefully change attitudes about cash bail. It’s a monster problem.”

The Bail Project plans to deploy two experts called “bail disrupters” to each of the cities it will work in and have them serve in a partnership with local public defenders and criminal justice reform advocates to interview and discover potential clients. Aside from paying bail on behalf of the poor, the national fund, Ms. Steinberg said, will also seek to address a lack of data on the issue by collecting information on what sorts of defendants end up held on bail, as well as on the socioeconomic costs of pretrial detention.

According to one report released last month by the Prison Policy Initiative, which advocates for inmates, women who could not make bail had a median annual income of slightly more than $11,000. This month, the Pretrial Justice Institute, which studies bail and works to reform the system, released a national report card grading states on their bail programs: 17 states received F’s; only one state, New Jersey, received an A.

New Jersey is indeed among a handful of states, like Georgia, Texas and New Mexico, that have recently sought to curtail — and in some cases end — the practice of imposing money bail. But these separate efforts at reform have occasioned a coordinated pushback from the bail industry, which fears its profits are in jeopardy.

Ms. Steinberg said that 96 percent of the people in the Bronx whose bail was paid by her local fund in the last 10 years returned to court for all of their appearances. If that statistic could be replicated nationwide, she added, the national fund could exist in perpetuity as the money given to help clients close their cases returns to the kitty for future use.

Ms. Steinberg also noted that remaining in jail without paying bail can affect the results of criminal proceedings. In New York, she said, more than 90 percent of those who cannot pay bail and stay locked up until their cases are concluded end up pleading guilty. But more than half of her clients in the Bronx who were freed on bail, she said, had their cases dismissed by prosecutors once they were released.

“What we know from operating the Bronx Freedom Fund is that bail is an incredibly coercive lever, mostly on low-income people and communities of color,” Ms. Steinberg said. “But we can avoid those problems before they happen by getting people out of jail.”