Mayor Bill de Blasio announced last week his plan for the allocation of $17.8 million to reduce unwarranted jail time for defendants awaiting trial. This initiative will keep roughly 3,000 people from unnecessarily being imprisoned who can't afford bail, leaving them under court supervision, according to NYC.gov.
Avoiding nonessential imprisonment of low-risk offenders may seem like a step forward in the overwhelming issue of mass incarceration in America, but it's not enough, Alec Karakatsanis, the co-founder of Equal Justice Under Law, told HuffPost Live on July 9.
"As de Blasio made clear in his statement [last week], he's only increasing a small pretrial release program by a couple of thousand spots," Karakatsanis told host Marc Lamont Hill. "There's still 40,000 human beings in New York every year held in a cage solely because they can't afford money bail."
And for those people, any amount of time behind bars before they can make bail can have irreparable consequences, according to Robyn Mar, director of Early Advocacy for the Bronx Defenders.
"Even a short amount of pretrial detention can be extremely destabilizing to peoples' lives," Mar said. "Missing days of work, losing jobs, ... missing days of school. People are at risk of child protective services coming in and trying to take their kids away from them. There can be immigration consequences. It's really devastating to people, and when they come out they have less than when they went in."
Watch the full HuffPost Live conversation about New York's bail reform here.
Sign up here for Live Today, HuffPost Live's new morning email that will let you know the newsmakers, celebrities and politicians joining us that day and give you the best clips from the day before!
Related
Before You Go
