“This reform has a natural enemy,” explained Murray, “That’s the very people who profit financially from the current system. The bail-for-profit system is tiny and it’s got deep pockets.”

Bail is intended as a guarantee that an alleged offender will come back to court or forfeit their bail money (and be at risk of an added charge of “failure to appear”).

That very first time an alleged offender appears in court, the judge is required to assess the person and ask: If I let him or her go now, will they come back to court? and will they re-offend?

But does bail work?

In essence it divides people into two groups: those that can afford it and those who cannot. And those who cannot are jailed while they wait for their case to wind its way through the system.

So Murray argues that it’s time to look at risk assessment tools instead. And while there has been interest in bail reform (see today’s New York Times), it has been slow.

“This is the least sexy, the least glamorous of all the criminal justice stuff,” explains Murray. In some parts of the country bail is just a routine part of the system, administered in a basement with little thought of the consequences for the person who can’t pay.

“This is a system where each subsequent alleged crime generates more profit. You cannot justify any of this.”

For more on the impact of bail, listen to this excellent 2010 series by NPR’s Laura Sullivan.

The debate centered around a data-driven report, published earlier this month by Vera Institute of Justice and the Brennan Center for Justice. The report was featured in a recent New York Times article with the reporter coming to the conclusion that there was one primary reason: more policing.

Before the holidays, Marketplace, the public radio business show, aired a shortened version of the story on Philadelphia’s criminal justice debt collection. And the comments were… unexpected.

“Rufus Taylor sounds like he thinks everyone else is to blame, and I hear no remorse for his crimes,” writes “jeepinjoel” on the Marketplace website. This was certainly a concern of mine, that by shortening Rufus Taylor’s story to just a few minutes that I’d eliminate some of the complexity.

Judging by the comments, that must have been the case.

“He put a LOT of people through angst and anguish by stealing their cars,” continues jeepinjoel, “which interrupted their lives and careers while they had to sort it out…” That was without a doubt true.

I spent days trying to track down Rufus Taylor’s victims, and I did indeed find two. Unfortunately, neither were willing to be recorded telling their side of the story. I’m not sure why, and wondered about it a lot, but I came away from my conversations with both of them knowing clearly that when there’s a victim, there’s suffering.

What you’re looking at above is the amount being sought by the courts of Philadelphia in red, and then the smaller amount in purple is the more accurate number, if the courts were to take the trouble to correlate their data.

Almost a third of the people being asked to pay did in fact return to court withing 180 days of their failure to appear date. That should mean that they all owe less. The courts have been responsive when people return and their cases are looked at. But it would save a lot of anxiety and fear if the courts were to ask for what was really owed.

This information was culled by data journalist Amanda Hickman, in consultation with Michael Hollander, a lawyer and former programmer at Community Legal Services in Philadelphia.

It was taken from one of the two databases that track ex-offender’s debts in Philadelphia. The Legacy Bail Judgment Index, tracks forfeited bail up until 2006, and the Debt Collection Name Search does what its name suggests and lists “balance owed” by name.

Listen here: BBC World Service: The Cost of Doing Time

OR download the podcast from iTunes here.
OR download the audio from SoundCloud here.

I was immediately intrigued, and one of the first things I saw was this comprehensive video, produced by former law students (now lawyers) Tom Isler, Sam Saylor and Yiyang Wu for their Documentaries & The Law program at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

Tom and Sam were very helpful when I started researching this topic, and their video was invaluable.

***

Rufus Taylor led a pretty sheltered life growing up in Philadelphia, but he likens his late teen years to a kind of “Rumspringa” (a time when Amish-born teenagers “run around outside the bounds”). Taylor’s “Rumspringa” however, didn’t take him to nightclubs, but rather resulted in multiple counts of car theft and ultimately, a charge for armed robbery. He served a total of 14 years in prison and is on probation. When he completed his sentence in 2008, he thought his time had been served, and his debt – both financial and moral – was settled. Then in 2011, he applied for welfare and was denied because he had apparently not paid off all of his debts – he owed the courts almost $42,000, an amount never mentioned when he was released.

Taylor is one of more than 300,000 people in the city of Philadelphia who owe an estimated $1.5 billion dollars in unpaid bail, fees and fines to the courts that date back to 1971. The debt collection affects one in five people, in a city of 1.5 million.

This documentary examines the complexity of criminal court debt, which is a growing problem in cities and towns across the United States trying to pay for increasingly expensive prison systems.