Why We Should Eliminate Cash Bail

Over the course of my 18 years in the Pennsylvania legislature, I introduced a lot of legislation. That was sort of my thing. When I awoke from a deep sleep with a start, usually during floor debate, I would invariably have a new, brilliant(ish)idea. Some were completely random, such as “If hats could talk, what would they say?” or “What if we renamed cucumbers?”.

But if these epiphanies (or “evidence of head trauma”, as some called them) were at all related to public policy, they would soon be translated into a bill, complete with a grandiose sounding name, like the “Make Competitive Fishermen who Exaggerate the Size of Their Catch Wish They Were Never Even Freakin’ Born” act of 2018.

One area of policy I really focused on was criminal-justice reform, which I had a deep interest in as a former criminal attorney and a likely future criminal defendant. I’ve always thought our justice system was bloated, ineffective, irrational and sometimes cruel. Too many things are illegal and our approach has become increasingly punitive, focusing on longer and more severe periods of incarceration.

In Pennsylvania, between 1940 and 1980 we had a stable rate of state incarceration of between 5,000 and 7,000 inmates. But starting in the early 80’s we decided to get “tough on crime”. Well, not all crime. We were actually the opposite of tough on a wide…