Making Freedom Less Free

August 26, 2025

The point of President Trump’s attack on “cashless bail” is to make it easier to lock up more people for longer periods with a less fair process. Cash bail will continue to favor the wealthy as it always has.

Dear friends,

Among the relentless attacks on people’s basic rights and freedoms, and in the midst of the federal takeover of DC, this week President Trump released new executive orders aimed at reinstating cash bail in the capital and across the country.

These orders are chilling. Cash bail is a sum of money the government sets as a condition for releasing you before trial. If you can’t afford it, you await your trial from behind bars. Cash bail criminalizes poverty without protecting public safety, perverting both safety and justice into commodities for the wealthy to buy rather than rights for all.

Over 450,000 people languish in jail who haven’t been convicted of a crime. Many more each year opt to take guilty pleas on charges they would otherwise fight just to get home to their families. In recent years, Americans began to reckon with the harmful absurdity of our country’s pretrial system, spurred by stories like that of Kalief Browder, who was 16 years old when he was sent to Rikers Island for three years because he was accused of stealing a backpack. As a result of this experience, Kalief Browder killed himself ten years ago last June.

Out of this reckoning a bail reform movement was born, safely and effectively reducing pretrial detention in jurisdictions across the country. But the backlash to bail reform by defenders of a failed status quo–many of them its profiteers–was swift even as it was baseless. Politicians and pundits were swept up in a moral panic despite the clear evidence that bail reform was safely advancing freedom and increasing justice across the country. Fear-mongering headlines and campaign slogans abounded, from Democratic candidates in New York City to Republican ones in Minnesota, and undermined a genuine and deeply studied effort to root out and rectify illegitimacy in the criminal justice system.

This week’s horrifying executive orders seek to condemn more and more people to unnecessary pretrial detention. They are the tragic conclusion of a politics where the fear of salacious stories sent both parties on a downward spiral of ever-worsening positions on basic rights and freedoms.

Here are some of the cases in court this week following the federal takeover in DC: a delivery driver in a parked van with an open container. Someone who had a drunken outburst following an alleged incident of vandalism. It’s clear as day that we are not talking about increasing public safety. We are talking about creating fear and showing force.

The point of bail reform is that our country’s incarceration rates were and still are indefensibly high, driven significantly by the existence of cash bail, and that many, many people can and should be safely at home when they are accused of breaking the law. That being held in jail before trial is a big deal, and should not be based on your wealth or on whims.

The point of President Trump’s attack on “cashless bail” is to make it harder for everyday people to get out of custody after they are arrested, regardless of fairness or safety.

As the President threatens to send the National Guard to more cities, and the Pentagon creates a “reaction force” to deploy when there are protests…I don’t know about you, but making it easier to keep people who haven’t been convicted of a crime in custody doesn’t sound great to me.

Let this be a lesson: We must speak with clarity on matters of justice. Trying to avoid conversations about what is wrong–or what is working!–in our criminal justice system simply sows the seeds for the kind of power abuses unfolding in front of us.

Read on for five things to keep in mind about bail as these orders move forward.

Zoë Towns

Executive Director, FWD.us

5 things you should know about bail

1) Studies from New Jersey to Houston show that efforts to reduce the use of cash bail and expand pretrial release accomplished their goals: people showed up for their court dates, rearrest rates declined or remained unchanged, and more people were safely at home as they navigated the charges against them. A study of 22 jurisdictions that implemented bail reform concluded that it had no negative impact on crime rates. For more examples, check out this primer on the impact of bail reform in six jurisdictions.

2) In New York, despite nonsense reporting and much political theater, bail reform spared 24,000 people from having to pay bail or be stuck in jail if they could not pay in just the first two years. These individuals saved an average of nearly $4,300 that they would have otherwise spent on bail had the reform not gone into effect–that’s more than the cost of a year and a half of groceries. Rearrest rates remained the same, and people showed up for court. Multiple studies have dug into whether bail reform drove short-term increases in crime and violence in New York during the pandemic and found no correlation.

3) Across the country, safe and effective criminal justice reforms such as bail reform have reduced incarceration by 21% in the past fifteen years. The Black imprisonment rate has dropped by nearly half. We achieved this alongside massive gains in public safety. In the past decade, 45 states saw reductions in crime rates while imprisoning fewer people–with crime falling faster in states that reduced imprisonment than in states that increased it. That’s a lot of progress we stand to lose.

4) Incarcerating people pretrial can increase the likelihood that they’ll be rearrested or return to incarceration in the future. Even short periods of pretrial detention can be profoundly destabilizing to people’s lives. In fact, the authors of another recent study on the impact of bail reform across multiple jurisdictions stated that “Once the adverse effects of pretrial detention are taken into consideration, these reforms may, on balance, improve the well-being of communities most impacted by crime.”

5) Despite all the fear-mongering, the public gets it: 3 in 4 voters–including nearly 7 in 10 Republicans–support ending the practice of keeping people in jail before their trial if they’ve been charged with a nonviolent offense.

Navigating conversations on crime, safety, and justice can be challenging in the simplest of times. This political season is not a simple time. Defend Justice is our attempt to get you the facts and messages you need to defend the progress America has made advancing safe and effective criminal justice reforms. You can see our past newsletters here.

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