Bernie Sanders introduced legislation on Wednesday that seeks to end the practice of cash bail, a system that has resulted in thousands of people being sent to jail only because they cannot afford to pay for their release.

Criminal justice advocates have said that the system, which relies on defendants using for-profit bail bondsmen, relegates those who cannot pay to “modern day debtors’ prisons” despite the fact that they have not been convicted of any crime. They argue that people who do not pose a risk should not be kept in jail but instead should be released with GPS monitors, or pre-trial supervision.

“As part of this broken criminal justice system we have an outrageous cash bail process, which if you can believe it results in 400,000 people being in jail today for the crime of being poor,” Sanders said in an interview. “This brings us almost back to Charles Dickens’s era of the debtor jails where people were in jail because they were poor. That’s what we’re looking at now.”

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Sanders’ No Money Bail Act is a companion to a measure introduced in the House by the California congressman Ted Lieu last year. The proposal would forbid the “payment of money as a condition of pre-trial release with respect to a criminal case”. The proposal would strip federal anti-crime funding from states that fail to replace their money bail system with risk-assessment alternatives.

The House bill currently has 33 co-sponsors. Sanders’ plan was introduced on Wednesday and does not yet have any co-sponsors.

A growing national movement to eliminate cash bail from the criminal justice system has attracted support from a wide range of political power brokers, including Google, Facebook and even the Koch brothers, the billionaire Republican donors whom Sanders routinely bashes on the campaign trail.

The push for pre-trial release has gained traction at the state level. New Jersey has almost entirely abandoned cash bail while states like Maine and Maryland have taken significant steps to rein in the practice. In June, the New York state assembly voted to eliminate it in most cases though it faces uncertain prospects in the state senate. Meanwhile, four states – Illinois, Kentucky, Oregon and Wisconsin – have long forbidden the practice.

New York City to end cash bail for non-felony cases in win for reform advocates Read more

In recent years, high-profile cases have spotlighted the inequities in the cash bail system, including the $500,000 bail set for the Baltimore protester Allen Bullock after the death of Freddie Gray and the death of Kalief Browder, an African American teenager who was held at Rikers Island in New York for three years without a trial and eventually took his own life.

Sanders’ bill follows a more limited bipartisan Senate bill introduced by Democrat Kamala Harris of California and Republican Rand Paul of Kentucky in 2017. The bill, which was also introduced on a bipartisan basis in the House, would provide grants for states to move beyond cash bail and create a federal program to track progress. In particular, Paul had long been eloquent on criminal justice reform and spent years calling attention to Browder’s case.

Sanders said his bill was “undeniably the most comprehensive” and set a “gold standard” through its combination of incentives and disincentives to prod states to drop the cash-bail system. However, the senator acknowledged the uphill battle such legislation faces in a Republican-controlled Congress and with Donald Trump in the White House.

The United States has long been an outlier internationally with its use of commercial bail bondsmen. According to a report by the Prison Policy Initiative, 34% of all defendants in 2009 were detained pre-trial as a result of their inability to post bail.

Often, a court will set bail for a defendant to be released before trial, which may take place months or even years after the arraignment. If the accused cannot afford to pay bail, they can go to a bail bondsman who will post that payment on behalf of the defendant, typically for a 10% fee. If the defendant shows up for the court, the bail is refunded to the bondsman who keeps the fee as profit. And, in the cases where the defendant does not show up, the bondsman is entitled to send bounty hunters after them.