Bail reform advocates discuss policy changes on eve of rules committee meeting

Maryland Public Defender Paul B. DeWolfe said Thursday during the “Money Bail and its Role in Mass Incarceration” symposium that the state’s rules on setting bail and other pretrial conditions are relatively liberal but are not applied that way, as pretrial detainees make up roughly 20 percent of the state’s prison population.

“In practice, amounts of money are (selected) randomly,” he said. “Setting of bail is really all over the map in Maryland.”

University of Baltimore professor Colin Starger, co-director of the school’s Pretrial Justice Clinic, said the network of laws and customs in place supporting the money bond system is not easily undone.

“Mass incarceration is not one thing with one cause,” he said, citing the war on drugs and severe sentencing as contributors in addition to high pretrial detention rates.

Tara Huffman, director of the Criminal and Juvenile Justice Program at OSI-Baltimore, said there are people who are invested in keeping the system as it is but states around the country are changing that.

“Just because something’s culture and tradition doesn’t mean that’s right,” she said.

Del. Erek Barron, D-Prince George’s and leading advocate of bail reform in the General Assembly, said advocates need to be spreading the word with people who may not have a personal connection to the issue and “quit preaching to the choir.”

Barron also noted the bail bond lobby has significant resources and opposes changes to the system.

“It’s going to be very difficult if not impossible to match [their efforts],” he said. “If it’s this important, you’ve got to do the hard work to organize the people on the ground.”

Other opponents are concerned about the safety of crime victims and the community when defendants are released pretrial, according to Barron, so proponents must address those concerns.

Looking for solutions

Maryland Attorney General Brian E. Frosh sent letters last month to a group of Maryland legislators, including Barron, who inquired about the constitutionality of Maryland’s bail system, as well as the rules committee, seeking to reform the system. Both letters criticized setting bail to detain or punish a defendant, which goes beyond the intended purposes of bail.

At the symposium, Tiffany Harvey, a deputy attorney general, referred to the letters and said reform advocates are ready for a fight. The proposed rule changes being discussed Friday clarify the prohibition on using bail as a proxy for detention.

“It’s our hope than an amendment to this rule will ultimately cause a uniform practice of how bail is set throughout the state,” she said.

Throughout the day, panelists also referred to the inclusion of risk assessment tools to create a more objective pretrial release process.

“We’re looking to replace a money-based system with a risk-based system,” said Cherise Fanno Burdeen, CEO of the Pretrial Justice Institute.

Burdeen cautioned that “risk assessment” means different things in different jurisdictions and contexts. In Kentucky, it is one resource for judges but the state has also outlawed commercial bail bonds, according to Tara Boh Blair, executive officer of the Kentucky Department of Pretrial Services.

“Basically, what the bail bondsmen [in Maryland] are making is the cost of an entire court system,” Blair said. “It’s just wrong on every level and thank god it’s criminal in Kentucky.”

Role of data

Compiling massive amounts of data for analysis has revealed patterns and trends in how money bail impacts certain communities.

Seema Iyer, a business professor at University of Baltimore who oversees the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance, said policies are continually hitting Baltimore’s poorest neighborhoods where there are the most unemployed people, vacant homes and individuals serving jail sentences. Iyer pointed to the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood as one continually among the most severely impacted.

“How many things need to happen to the people in this neighborhood?” she asked.

A report from the public defender’s office, “The High Cost of Bail,” broke down the millions of dollars spent in Maryland getting people out of jail and found the most money was spent in those same neighborhoods.

“Corporate bonds extract millions of dollars from Maryland’s poorest neighborhoods,” DeWolfe said.

Barron said data analysis was a key part of the Justice Reinvestment Act, passed during the last legislative session, because it allowed legislators to see whether policy goals were actually being met in practice.