Mother Jones
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If Sandra Bland indeed committed suicide after spending three days in a Texas jail, as the Harris county medical examiner determined last week, her death fits a pattern: Half of all suicides behind bars occur within the first 14 days of custody. Twenty-three percent happen within the first 24 hours following an arrest. And like two-thirds of the 750,000 people in US jails, Bland had not yet been convicted of any crime.
Bland had two options to get out of jail. The court set a $5,000 bond. If she had the money, which she didn’t, she could have posted it and gotten it back when she appeared for trial. Alternately, she could have paid a bail bondsman a 10 percent fee to post bond for her—$500 that she or her family would not get back. Her family’s attorney has said that they were working on trying to secure the fee to have her released.
This system, in which people either stay locked up or pay money to a private company to get out, is almost entirely unique to the United States. The Philippines is the only other country with something similar. In Canada, acting as a bail bondsman can earn you two years in prison on a charge equivalent to bribing a juror. “We don’t have a system currently that does a decent job of separating who is dangerous and who isn’t,” Tim Murray, director of the Pretrial Justice Institute, told me when I wrote about the commercial bail industry. “We only have a system that separates those who have cash and those who don’t.”
Link to article –
Here’s What Sandra Bland’s Death Says About Our Broken Bail System
