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Danielle Batist is an experienced freelance journalist, founder of Journopreneur and co-founder of the Constructive Journalism Project. She lived and worked all around the globe and covered global and local stories of poverty, exclusion and injustice. Increasingly, she moved beyond ‘problem-reporting’ to include stories about the solutions she found. She witnessed the birth of the new nation of South Sudan and interviewed the Dalai Lama. She reported for Al Jazeera, BBC and the Guardian and regularly advises independent media organisations on innovation and sustainability. She loves bringing stories to the world and finding the appropriate platforms to do so. The transformation of traditional media fascinates rather than scares her. While both the medium and the message are changing, she believes the need for good storytelling remains.
How Community Bail Funds Tackle Prison Injustice
In America, around 450,000 people are in prison awaiting trial at any one time. Five out of six of them are only there because they cannot afford the bail a judge has set.
There are policy change plans appearing, aimed at jurisdictions, to try and reduce the number of people being locked up pre-trial. But this article in the solutions-focused Yes Magazine instead shines a light on another response to the issue: the grassroots campaigns.
Community bail funds like Black Mamas Bail-Out and the Bronx Freedom Fund aim for immediate results: raise the money to bail people out now. And they are starting to see the impact of their work.
Ninety-seven percent of the more than 1,000 people the Bronx Freedom Fund has bailed out have shown up for court, says a spokesperson in the article. When those who have received bail from community bail funds show up for court, it demonstrates the injustice of holding people behind bars before trial simply because they are poor.
“About 50 percent of cases we bail out get dismissed,” Feige said. “They were crap cases. Of the remaining 50 percent, half of those result in noncriminal dispositions, and in the history of the fund, almost no one ever has gone back to jail. We have a radical effect on case outcomes just by posting bail.”
The story goes deeper in explaining how bail has changed over the years, and highlighting what needs to be done to redress the balance.
