The Daily Agenda: Tucsonans take on cash bail system
They’re gearing up for the legislative session … It might not be an easy sell … Pima County schools earn good grades.
Congress abolished debtors’ prisons in 1833, but in Arizona, we’re still jailing people for being poor.
In 2020, it took an average of 22 days before a person incarcerated in the Pima County jail got his or her day in court.
That might not sound like a long time, but it’s enough to lose your job. And depending on the time of the month, it might also be enough time to lose your home.
There are countless examples of nonviolent offenders arrested for misdemeanors who spend days, weeks and months in Pima County’s jail without ever being convicted of a crime, simply because they can’t afford to pay their bail.
In some cases, the amount required to get out is only a few hundred or a thousand dollars, but a recent study showed that 57% of Americans can’t afford to pay a $1,000 emergency expense and 22% of U.S. adults say they have no emergency savings at all.
The same cash bail system that allows people to languish in jail simply because they’re poor is also set up to reward the affluent, as violent offenders with deep pockets or connections to money can buy their way out of jail.
There have been attempts to overhaul Arizona’s bail system over the years, but like many criminal justice reform efforts, they’ve died in the Legislature, often without even receiving a hearing.
Despite a lack of success during last year’s legislative session, one local group is already planning for 2024, with a proposed bill ready to go and local support lined up.
The NAACP Tucson Branch presented their plan Friday during a well-attended Community Safety and Pretrial Justice Forum, hosted in partnership with the YWCA of Southern Arizona.
The bill is called the Safer Communities, Secure Families, Pretrial Justice for All Act and was introduced last year as HB 2398. At the time, it was sponsored by Tucson Rep. Alma Hernandez and had bipartisan co-sponsors, including Republican Reps. David Cook and Justin Wilmeth.
The plan is to reintroduce the same bill during the January 2024 legislative session, said Tucson NAACP Vice President and former Pima County Chief Deputy Attorney Amelia Cramer, who helped draft HB 2398.
The bill isn’t seeking a constitutional amendment to eliminate cash bail entirely, but it’s an “important and significant incremental step that we believe is achievable and attainable in the upcoming legislative session,” Cramer said during the event Friday.
If adopted, it will do three things:
Ensure that people arrested for a violent felony whose behavior poses a continued danger to the community (as demonstrated by evidence) can be held in jail until trial.
Ensure that poverty is not the reason that people arrested for low-level misdemeanors are staying in jail during the time leading up to their trial when they are presumed innocent. This means using home detention as an alternative to pretrial incarceration, which will allow people to keep their jobs and help support their families while also protecting public safety and ensuring their appearance in court.
Require that the magistrates who set conditions of release assess a person’s ability to pay before imposing cash bail and try to avoid bias by being aware of the racial and ethnic disparities that have negatively affected communities of color.
Those disparities are well-represented in the Pima County jail right now, Sheriff Chris Nanos said Friday.
Sixteen percent of the people being held in Pima County jail are African American, Nanos said, despite the fact that Black people represent just 4% of Tucson’s population. Hispanics and Native Americans are also overrepresented in the jail, whereas white people are underrepresented.
Nanos is on-record supporting the NAACP’s proposed legislation, not just because of the racial disparities exacerbated by the current system, but also because of the overrepresentation of people with substance use or mental health issues in the jail.
Fifty-two percent of people in Pima County’s jail right now have some sort of underlying mental illness, Nanos said, a sharp increase from last year’s 45%.
The plan is for Hernandez to sponsor the bill again this time around, but the NAACP encouraged attendees to be prepared to contact their state legislator after its introduction and ask for their support.
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Pima County has also been proactive over the years in creating programs and services designed to help people get and stay out of jail, including the June opening of its transition center, which helps connect people coming out of jail with resources.
But with community pressure to address crime in Pima County and around the state, any effort to change the current bail system may not be an easy sell. Public safety has been a hotly debated issue in this year’s city election and community groups have formed to draw attention to the issue and demand action.
Panelist Tony Ruffin, co-founder of the local nonprofit Pillars and Bridges, was quick to point out that the current system has winners and losers, but the winners often aren’t the people meant to benefit from said system.
The obvious winners include bail bondsmen, prosecutors and the wealthy, but other winners include guilty people, who know they can refuse bail and begin receiving credit for time served, as well as career criminals who have learned that they can sit back and wait for the best plea deal.
The losers? People who can’t afford to post bail and usually lose everything, including jobs, homes and in many cases, their families. The families also suffer, Ruffin said, since usually the person in jail is the main source of income.
But the biggest loser of all, according to Ruffin, is the innocent person who sits in jail because of an inability to pay bail and experiences all that comes with being incarcerated.
He pointed to the old adage, saying, “it’s better to let 10 guilty people go free than to incarcerate one innocent person.”
Getting good grades: Schools in Pima County did really well in the Arizona Department of Education’s letter grading system, the Star’s Jessica Votipka reports. More than 80 schools earned A’s, and none failed. Last year, one school had a failing grade, but they pulled a C this year. In all, local schools earned 83 A’s, 77 B's, 47 C's and 18 D's.
Coming home to roost: Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes is investigating election shenanigans by two Cochise County supervisors, Votebeat Arizona’s Jen Fifield reports. Republican Supervisors Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd must appear before a grand jury on Nov. 13 to answer questions about their refusal to certify the 2022 election results and then their push for a hand count of votes in the post-election audit.
Too high: Councilman Steve Kozachik explains his opposition to Prop 413 in a guest opinion in the Star. The mayor and council make too little money, but the salaries they’d get if Prop 413 were approved would be too much, he wrote. Plus, he doesn’t like tying their salaries to the county supervisors, which are set by state law, instead of voters.
Fast bus line: The City of Tucson is asking for public comment on a plan for the city’s first bus rapid transit system. The five-mile corridor will connect riders between Tohono T’adai Transit Center/Tucson Mall and the downtown Ronstadt Transit Center. You can fill out a survey or attend upcoming meetings with city officials on Nov. 14, 15, and 16.
Back to the drawing board: The state Water Infrastructure Finance Authority isn’t going to seek an agreement with an Israel-based IDE Technologies to build a water desalination plant in Puerto Peñasco and a pipeline to move water across the Arizona-Mexico border and into central Arizona, the Arizona Daily Star’s Tony Davis reports. The WIFA board members voted in December to pursue the idea and then backed off after public criticism of the rushed decision. But they’re not scrapping the idea of building a desalination plant. They’re just going to start a competitive bidding process.
Water money: While we’re talking about WIFA, they’re holding a public meeting on Thursday where they plan to vote on about $30 million in loans for water projects, including $7 million for a project in Marana.
868: The number of people per 100,000 who are incarcerated in Arizona’s jails, prisons, immigration detention centers and juvenile justice facilities. Arizona’s incarceration rate is higher than any democracy on earth, according to the Prison Policy Initiative’s most recent report.
We want to report back on the progress of the Safer Communities, Secure Families, Pretrial Justice for All Act and other proposed legislation in 2024 Help us stick around and do that.