The Bail Project

When people think about the War on Drugs, they often picture long prison sentences: mandatory minimums, three-strikes laws, federal prosecutions, and decades behind bars. But one of its most devastating impacts happens much earlier—before trial, before conviction, and often before a person has had any meaningful chance to defend themselves. The War on Drugs did not simply change who went to prison.

Thomas was finally back on the road. After years of addiction, homelessness, and instability, he had rebuilt his life one mile at a time. He had his commercial driver’s license (CDL) again. He was working. He was sober. “I was blessed with being able to go back to CDL school and get my CDL back,” he said. “I was gaining jobs and keeping my sobriety.” Driving was more than a job. It was proof that his life was moving forward. The trouble began with what felt like a small thing.

Published in The New York Times, Manager of Communications Devin McMahon writes in this Letter To The Editor (LTE) that the effort to criminalize abortion will disproportionately devastate working-class women, who lack the financial resources of wealthy individuals to bypass abortion bans or pay the cash bail required to avoid pretrial incarceration.

For years, California courts have kept people in jail by setting bail at amounts they could never afford. A judge might say someone was eligible for release, then attach a $50,000 or $100,000 price tag that guaranteed they would remain behind bars. The California Supreme Court has now said that practice violates the state constitution.

Two-thousand five hundred dollars was the price set between Taylor and the rest of her life. For the 32-year-old case manager in Arizona’s East Valley, that number was a lesson in how cash bail works. It decided whether a lapse of judgement would pass or become something larger – whether she would go home or go to jail. Taylor had just signed a lease on a new apartment last October. She went to Walmart to buy what she needed to furnish it. “Just regular household items,” she said.

It was a chilly spring day when Nicole, now a 31-year-old medical social worker in Tulsa, Oklahoma, opened an unsolicited letter from a criminal defense attorney. The letter informed her that she had been charged with a felony and might have a warrant for her arrest. Nicole had never had a run-in with the law. A single mother of three, she had spent her career helping others navigate the very systems she now found herself caught in. An eyewitness to a robbery had identified her as a suspect.

Politicians talk a lot about the cost of living these days. Candidates from both parties reference everyday expenses ‒ the price of rent, the cost of groceries, what it takes just to get by. But while families are making impossible choices to make ends meet, the House of Representatives has voted to protect an entirely different, devastating expense: the cost of liberty.

There is a prevailing narrative surrounding local jails – one that is rarely interrogated but constantly shapes public policy. The assumption is straightforward: jails house dangerous individuals, the system operates to keep the public safe, and its massive scale is simply a reflection of serious crime. These ideas provide a reassuring justification for a sprawling system, allowing the mechanics of detention to escape close scrutiny.

After growing up in what he describes as “rough” conditions, Tyree spent much of his adult life trying to stabilize what he could control. He anchored himself in family – as a father, a husband and an uncle – and worked to rebuild after struggling with addiction. He moved into community work, for a period, earning a peer support certification to help others navigate recovery and the institutional barriers that often come with it. His path has not been linear.

On June 19, 1865, enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, finally learned of their liberation – more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation had been signed. This delay is a reminder of a difficult reality that continues to shape how our legal system operates: in America, legal freedom does not always translate to freedom in practice. On any given night in America, nearly 500,000 people sit in jail cells without having been convicted of a crime.