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From the renowned founder of The Bail Project, an eye-opening book about why we allow money to play any role in the administration of justice
“When bail is set unreasonably high, people are behind bars only because they are poor. . . . They don’t have money to get out of jail and they certainly don’t have money to flee anywhere.” —Loretta Lynch, former United States Attorney General
Every night in America, nearly half a million people go to sleep in jail cells without having been convicted of a crime. They are there for one reason: they cannot afford to pay the price of their freedom. That price is bail. For those with money, freedom is immediate. For those without it, weeks, months, or even years in jail can follow.
Cash bail has created two systems of justice: one for people with wealth and one for people without. It undermines the presumption of innocence, drives overcrowding in jails, fuels racial disparities, and exerts enormous pressure on people to plead guilty, whether they committed a crime or not, simply so that they can go home. Few parts of our legal system are so deeply entrenched, so widely accepted, and so profoundly broken.
In The Bail Trap, Robin Steinberg, founder of the Bail Project, and Camilo Ramirez bring readers inside the realities of pretrial detention through the true stories of people jailed by poverty. They explain how a centuries-old practice meant to ensure court appearance transformed into a powerful, profit-driven engine of detention, how cash bail falls hardest on vulnerable communities, and some of the steps we can take to create a fairer and safer pretrial system, reducing unnecessary incarceration and ending the use of money as a stand-in for public safety.
An eye-opening, urgent, and accessible examination of a little-understood phenomenon, The Bail Trap invites readers not just to understand how we got here, but to imagine and help build a justice system where freedom and the presumption of innocence are not reserved for those who can afford them.
“The Bail Trap should be read by everyone concerned about the efficacy of our criminal punishment system and its aspiration to achieve justice. The history of bail’s transformation from its inception as a method for pretrial release to a mechanism for detention and its pernicious consequences is explained and examined clearly.”—Judge George C. Eskin (Ret.), Superior Court of California, County of Santa Barbara
“Within the U.S. criminal justice system there is no other policy that so dramatically illustrates the gap in obtaining justice between the wealthy and the poor as the widespread imposition of money bail. The Bail Trap makes a compelling case for a broad challenge to this shameful practice.”—Marc Mauer, former executive director, The Sentencing Project, and author of Race to Incarcerate
“A critical analysis of a terrible injustice that keeps many innocent people in jail.”—Stephen B. Bright, former director of the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta and co-author of The Fear of Too Much Justice
“A clear and concise primer on a destructive but widely misunderstood part of the criminal process. The Bail Trap corrects misconceptions, and provides a much-needed education on how the bail system operates, how it fails, and the powerful interests who profit from keeping it in place. Most importantly, it lays out a plan for a better system.”—Radley Balko, author of The Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces
Robin Steinberg is the founder and former CEO of the Bail Project, a national nonprofit launched in 2018 that pays bail for thousands of incarcerated people every year and works toward systemic change. She is a TED speaker, the author of The Courage of Compassion, and the co-author of The Bail Trap, with Camilo Ramirez.
Camilo Ramirez is the Bail Project’s former chief strategy officer. He is the co-author of The Bail Trap, with Robin Steinberg.