Steve Ballmer, a white billionaire with no grasp on reality of the everyday voter, and other proponents of Prop 25 claim that the cash bail system is inherently classist, racist and unfair. People with generational wealth can pay their way out of jail while awaiting trial. Poorer people in the exact same legal circumstances, with the same statistical likelihood to appear — or not appear — for trial cannot afford to pay their way out. This is NOT true! Bail does need to be revised, but Prop 25 does NOT do what it was intended to do, because it was so poorly written by our legislature.
The truth is even Black Live Matter realizes that the way the bill was written will have a horrible impact on minority groups. NAACP, Black Chamber of Commerce, Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and many other minority groups have come out for a NO VOTE on Prop 25!
The Bail Bond Industry works WITH families and loved ones to secure their release from jail and guarantees that the defendant will appear in court. Prop. 25 will not allow many minorities to get released and will over-crowd our jails! And, cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars to do what the bail industry does, at no cost to the tax payer!
If Prop 25 passes, people could remain locked up indefinitely as bureaucrats face backlogs in service. Like other overburdened government bureaucracies such as the DMV, delays in the justice system could keep people locked up for days, if not weeks. Prop 25 eliminates the quickest pretrial release option for every Californian. The 8th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution – part of the Bill of Rights – prohibits the courts from imposing excessive bail, and bail is a fundamental right of the accused and is available to almost everyone.
Prop 25 uses computer algorithms to determine who does and doesn’t get released before trial, leading to more biased outcomes than our current bail system. Working poor and minorities likely will face more discrimination, not less, under this new system.
The ACLU has said that these algorithms neither “provide sufficient due process nor adequately protect against racial biases and disparities,” and that their use “compromises our fundamental values of due process and racial justice.” Even the Pretrial Justice Institute, a longtime advocate for bail reform, recently declared that the algorithms-based system created by Prop 25 “can no longer be a part of our solution for building equitable pretrial justice systems.”
Civil rights organizations like the NAACP oppose the use of algorithms because they create more biased outcomes against people of color, and twenty-seven experts in the fields of statistics, machine learning, artificial intelligence and law from MIT, Harvard, Princeton, NYU, and other leading institutions said that using algorithms to determine pretrial risk raises grave concerns. Even tech leaders like Google, Facebook and Amazon – who use algorithms in their business – have come out against their use to make determinations on risk assessment because they lead to more biased outcomes for poor and minority defendants.
Algorithms might work for recommending songs, movies and other consumer interests but are biased and flawed when it comes to justice, bank loans and other sensitive and personal matters.