Mary Akdemir

Last summer, a group of 13 youth organizers approached the anti-gun violence organization Youth Organizing to Save Our Streets (YO S.O.S.) with a proposal. The high school students wanted to arrange an event that would attract both the black and Jewish communities of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, two communities at the center of the infamous 1991 Crown Heights riot. The students created a kosher menu, facilitated workshops, and led a discussion to bring the communities together.

A dollar doesn’t buy you much in New York City — but it can sometimes be the price of your freedom. Across the five boroughs, hundreds of people have been held in jail for a bail priced at just one dollar. The challenge posed by dollar bail is not generally affordability but the bail system itself — once someone is in jail, the process of bailing them out is extremely difficult, involving time-consuming travel, capricious security checks, and complicated paperwork.