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

This suggests that when judges set bail in these nuisance cases, they’re carefully picking numbers just high enough to keep people in jail. A study by Human Rights Watch from 2008 bore this out. They looked at 117,064 nonfelony cases in New York that year and found that more than three-fourths of the defendants were released on their own recognizance. But 19,137 of the defendants were given bail of $1,000 or less, and an incredible 87 percent of those still couldn’t post bail. Those people who couldn’t make bail spent an average of fifteen days in jail awaiting trial. Think about that. That’s more than 16,500 people a year who did an average of two weeks in jail for misdemeanors.