On this edition of Your Call's Media Roundtable, award-winning independent journalist Bryce Covert joins us to discuss the success of Illinois' ban on cash bail.
She writes: the Pretrial Fairness Act, signed into law by Governor JB Pritzker in February 2021, stems the tide of legally innocent people in jail by abolishing bail. It also puts in place a number of sweeping changes to replace it with a fairer system—a system that doesn’t penalize people for being poor and has a mechanism for determining whether people who have been charged with crimes are actually dangerous or likely to run away. Illinois’s law mandates that for the least serious crimes, such as traffic violations, police can ticket people but not arrest them.
Guest:
Bryce Covert, award-winning independent journalist
Resources:
The Nation: Illinois Has Put an End to the Injustice of Cash Bail
