The Presumption of Innocence or Presumption that No Blacks are Innocent: Safe McNegro DC Mayor Wants More Cops and More People Detained PreTrial to Please Her White Liberal Masters [dc jail 95% Black]
/Strawboss D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser is hinting that she will soon introduce legislation that would keep more people charged with violent crimes behind bars pending trial, which she said would address concerns that people with histories of violence are too easily allowed back into the community and could be contributing to the spike in certain crimes in the city.
Bowser’s announcement came during a four-hour-long Public Safety Summit she hosted Wednesday. She touted the event as an opportunity for dozens of law enforcement and public safety agencies, civic organizations, and business groups to put their heads together and engage in “critical introspection about what is working and what is not working and what needs to change” to address the increase in certain crimes like homicide, carjackings, and gun-related offenses in recent years. (Earlier this year she hosted a similar summit with Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners.) [MORE]
Despite the fact that tough-on-crime rhetoric may have cost them votes in the midterms, prominent Democrats continue to double down on calls to roll back bail reform. Earlier this month, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) doubled down on her calls for bail reform efforts to be walked back, urging legislators to expand judges’ ability to lock up the accused while awaiting trial.
She’s not alone. New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) has been beating the drum against bail reform for months — and New Jersey lawmakers recently introduced a bill to scale back the state’s landmark bail reforms. Amid growing concerns about violent crime, politicians have seized on the idea that locking people up before trial leads to safer streets.
The problem is that decades of research show that mass pretrial incarceration actually undermines public safety. And a new study from Professor Siegler’s Federal Justice Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School suggests that judges are making the problem worse.
According to one well-known study, locking even low-risk arrestees in jail for just two or three days increased the likelihood that they are arrested for a new crime by 40 percent. What’s worse, people jailed pretrial often lose their jobs, homes, and custody of their children.
This is nothing new. Policymakers across the political spectrum have long acknowledged the cascading, harmful effects of pretrial jailing. Ironically, the perils of pretrial detention led to the passage of federal bail reform signed by President Reagan in the ’80s, an era most liberals consider the modern epicenter of mass incarceration. Still on the books, the Bail Reform Act of 1984 flatly prohibits judges from jailing people who are too poor to pay for their freedom. [MORE]