Chicago is poised to stop incarcerating people just because they can’t pay their way out. (Photo: Marilyn Nieves / iStock / Getty Images Plus)
As of July 17, 2017, Cook County, which includes Chicago and the surrounding suburbs, is poised to become the largest jurisdiction in the country to stop incarcerating people pretrial, solely because they cannot post money bail. Thanks in large part to a sustained push by activists over the past several years, the Cook County Circuit Court’s Chief Judge has announced a new order that instructs judges making bail decisions to impose monetary bail only in amounts that people can pay. If judges follow the order, it could lead to the end of money bail in Cook County, setting a historic precedent on an issue that impacts hundreds of thousands of people around the country.
Right now, more than 4,000 people are incarcerated in Chicago’s Cook County Jail because they cannot post monetary bail. They have been granted release by a judge, but remain in cages because they cannot pay a certain amount of money to secure their freedom. This is the pretrial justice system wrought by money bail, and it is mirrored across the country: 443,000 people are incarcerated before trial in the US, 90 percent of them because they cannot afford to post a monetary bail. In fact, there are more people in US jails pretrial than there are total incarcerated people in most other countries.
Like the number of people in prisons, the number of people in local jails has more than tripled since the 1980s. In the last 15 years, 99 percent of that jail population growth has come from locking up people who are awaiting trial.
In theory, monetary bail is supposed to be used as an incentive to encourage people to return to court. If people show up to their court dates in Cook County, they will, in most cases, eventually get back almost all of the money that they paid for bail. Despite the idea that people are more likely to appear in court if they have money on the line,…