The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap Highlight

No, almost all these people come from nonwhite or poor New York, and they’re all people who don’t have eight hundred dollars in cash in a bank account. Lawyers at the courts on Schermerhorn Street, where many of Brooklyn’s cases play out, have a word for bail set just high enough so that people can’t pay, but low enough so that bail bondsmen won’t take the business. “They call it ‘nuisance bail,’ ” says Jane Fox, a public defender. The courts didn’t spend most of their time on this kind of stuff twenty or thirty years ago.