Sen. Kamala Harris’ bipartisan push for bail reform

WASHINGTON — Fresh off a visit to the nation’s largest women’s prison at Chowchilla, in the prison-dotted San Joaquin Valley, Sen. Kamala Harris on Thursday tacked another piece onto what is becoming her signature issue, criminal justice reform — and reached across the aisle for help.

Teaming up with Republican maverick Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky in her first bipartisan legislative venture, the California Democrat introduced a bill that takes aim at what’s called money bail, a system she says lets high-rolling gangsters go free to await court dates while leaving poor women and men to sit in jail for months, often losing their jobs, their homes and even their children along the way.

The United States is the only nation besides the Philippines to use a person’s ability to pay as the sole reason to avoid jail while awaiting trial, said Margaret Dooley-Sammuli, director of criminal justice and drug policy for the American Civil Liberties Union of California, one of numerous civil justice groups backing the legislation.

Photo: STEPHEN CROWLEY, NYT Sen. Kamala Harris, a Democrat from California, and Sen. Rand Paul,...

“The current system works against working people, people who don’t have a bunch of cash on hand to write a check to be able to get out,” Harris said in an interview. “This is really nonpartisan. It is not confined to any one geographical area of this country. It is overall a flaw in our system that needs to be corrected.”

Paul posed the issue as one of Americans expecting “fair and equal treatment under the law regardless of how much money is in their pockets or how many connections they have.” He said the bill would allow states to reform their systems based on their specific needs, and provide more equal treatment to minorities.

The legislation starts small with a $10 million, three-year grant, awarded to six states that can show an intent to replace their cash-bail system with pretrial assessments that consider the danger an arrested person poses to the community and the likelihood of flight. The programs in the six states would serve as pilots to see what works and what doesn’t. Another $5 million would go toward collecting data nationwide on exactly how many people are in jail awaiting trial because they can’t afford bail.

No one knows what that number is, or how many people remain in jail awaiting trial because they are potentially dangerous criminals or simply can’t afford to post bail. But estimates in California are that 63 percent of inmates in county jails are awaiting trial or sentencing. That’s about 46,000 people on any given day, at an average cost each of more than $100 a day, according to the office of state Sen. Robert Hertzberg, D-Van Nuys, who has a bail reform bill pending in the state Legislature.

The bail issue has flown under the radar of bipartisan scrutiny of the broader criminal justice system, its overflowing prisons and the explosive growth of female incarceration nationwide.

Harris, the former California attorney general and San Francisco district attorney who joined the Senate in January, earlier this month visited the Central California Women’s Facility at Chowchilla, in Madera County. She became one of the few national politicians, if not the only one, to visit the prison.

Shortly after the visit, Harris co-sponsored the Dignity for Incarcerated Women Act, a Democrat-only bill with Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Richard Durbin of Illinois. That legislation would require the federal Bureau of Prisons to place imprisoned women closer to their families, prohibit the solitary confinement of pregnant women, expand visitation for primary child caretakers and provide parenting classes, among other things.

Harris said part of her motivation is to get what she calls a better return on investment for taxpayers for women serving prison time based on crimes directly related to such issues as drug abuse or trauma. “It costs, for example, $75,000 a year to imprison an inmate,” Harris said, referring to the prison system, which houses more serious criminals than the jails. “It costs about $4,700 to give them drug addiction treatment and about $10,000 to give community mental health services.”

The legislation comes as the Justice Department under Attorney General Jeff Sessions has pushed to reverse his department’s policies toward reduced sentencing and sought to crack down on drug-related crimes.

Bail reform has received far less attention than other prison issues, said Barry Pollack, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, which supports the Harris-Paul bill.

“What many people don’t understand is that a large percentage of the people who are in jails in this country have never been convicted of anything,” Pollack said. “They are people who are simply awaiting trial.”

That’s because most states, including California, make payment of bail the one condition of pretrial release. The median bail set in California is $50,000, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. Bail bond companies typically charge 10 percent of the the bail set by a judge, or $5,000 in the median case, an amount many people can’t afford.

“So literally what we have are debtors prisons across the country,” Pollack said. “It is bad public policy in just about every way that public policy can be bad. People aren’t being locked up based on their dangerousness to their community or their risk of flight, but rather simply their inability to make money bail.”

Conversely, he said, people are released if they can pay bail, regardless of their risk of flight or danger to others.

Harris said many people, even if arrested for minor crimes that are unlikely to lead to jail time, simply stay in jail because they can’t afford to get out. The stays can last for days, months, and even, at least in one Los Angeles case that lawyers cited, more than a year.

“This happens in courthouses around our country every day,” said Harris. “Cases get continued, there’s a backlog of cases, there aren’t courtrooms available, and they sit around waiting for trial.”

The ACLU’s Dooley-Sammuli said for people in low-wage jobs, not being able to pay bail or incurring big fees to bail bond companies can be disastrous, both for them and for taxpayers.

“How many days can you call in sick before you lose your job?” she asked.

She said people get their cars towed, and have their children taken away and placed in foster care. If they lose their jobs, they can’t pay their rent, and that can cascade into other problems, she said.

“This is not a small problem,” Dooley-Sammuli said.

Carolyn Lochhead is the San Francisco Chronicle’s Washington correspondent. Email: clochhead@sfchronicle.com