S.J. Quinney College of Law Professor Shima Baradaran Baughman commented on pretrial detention for a March 24, 2016 story in NextCity titled, “U.S. Cities Are Looking for Alternatives to Cash Bail.” In March the Department of Justice set its sights on what Attorney General Loretta Lynch calls the “consequences of the criminalization of poverty.”
“Until about the 1960s, judges were really hesitant to impose monetary bail because there was this strong presumption of innocence and there was a hesitancy to put someone in jail that hadn’t been convicted yet,” she (Baughman) says. “With bail reform, what people were trying to do was to make a more methodological system, but what they wound up doing was creating a lot of factors that judges must look at to see if you’re eligible for release.”