During the Texas Legislature’s upcoming special session, some lawmakers will seek to restrict such bail funds
By Kalley Huang
Last year, Pamela Young spent Juneteenth bailing people out of jail. She and other organizers were waiting for releases in Fort Worth when they heard the sirens. As an ambulance approached, they learned someone had died in Tarrant County Jail.
“That really just made it clear — how important this work is. It’s a matter, literally, of life and death, getting people out of this cage,” said Young, a criminal justice organizer with United Fort Worth. “It’s killing them.”
Since then, the Tarrant County Community Bail Fund, which is run by United Fort Worth, has bailed out 29 people. But Young hasn’t forgotten the group’s first mass bailout or shaken the feeling that she could have bailed out the detained person before he died.
In Texas, most people charged with crimes can be released if they provide some amount of money set by a judge, as an assurance they will appear for trial. If that person can’t pay, they are detained in jail until their trial. The bail is returned only after a case is concluded or dismissed.
Community bail funds post monetary bail for those who cannot afford it — not only to give them a fair shot in the criminal justice system, organizers say, but also to reunite them with their families and communities.
Over the past year, sparked by protests following George Floyd’s murder, bail funds have experienced a surge of attention and fundraising. But there has been backlash. Some Texas lawmakers have renewed efforts to push through legislation to restrict certain types of bail and limit whom community bail funds can post bail for.
Statewide, about 70% of those in jail have not been convicted of a crime. People in jail often remain detained because they can’t pay bail, according to a 2016 report by the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonpartisan criminal justice research nonprofit. Bail can be as low as $100 and as high as hundreds of thousands of dollars. Offenses range from violating parole without committing a new crime to murder.
In 2018, a federal judge found Dallas County’s bail policies were unfair to poor defendants because they did not consider ability to pay. That ruling was upheld by a federal appeals court in 2020.
“You sit there for months on end waiting for your trial. That can ricochet across your life,” said Joe Swanson, a lead community organizer at Faith in Texas, which runs the Luke 4:18 Bail Fund. “Incarceration affects not just that person but all the people they’re deeply connected with — their family, their kids, their grandkids, anybody who relies on them.”
Organizations that run bail funds pay the full amount of a cash bail, so individuals don’t assume the financial burden of bail by themselves. The funds are an alternative to the for-profit bail bonds industry, where a bondsperson charges and keeps a portion of the full amount — often about 10% — to post bail.
Protests led to uptick
Bail funds have a long history — from a fund started by the American Civil Liberties Union in the 1920s, to one by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the civil rights movement, to one by AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power in the 1980s.
“As long as people have been incarcerated and as long as money bail has been used, people have collectively figured out ways to pull resources to get other people free,” said Pilar Weiss, the director of the National Bail Fund Network, which assists and coordinates independent local bail funds.
Last summer, bail funds received over $90 million in donations. Some of those donations were by nonprofits. For example, United Fort Worth received $20,000 from a partnership between Colin Kaepernick’s Know Your Rights Camp and Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights. But many of those donations were by community members. The fund has raised over $50,000 in individual — and often recurring — donations.
Some community bail funds started to post bail for pretrial detainees when Gov. Greg Abbott resisted early releases as COVID-19 spread in jails and prisons. Other funds started due to last summer’s protests and continued to bail out anybody in pretrial detention.
The Denton Bail Fund, for example, has raised over $25,000 and bailed out 26 people. Organizer Cindy Spoon said that bailouts help community members avoid choosing between paying bail and buying groceries — or not paying bail and losing a job while in jail.
“When I’m paying bail for someone, I am not looking at that as an act of charity, but actually as a material way that I’m trying to resist the cash bail system,” Spoon said.
Bail reform
This work may face legislative repercussions. During the most recent regular session, Republicans prioritized House Bill 20, an overarching bail reform bill that would have prevented “charitable bail organizations” from posting bail for people charged with — or previously convicted of — a violent crime.
HB 20 also would have required community bail funds to report their beneficiaries to local sheriffs. These restrictions did not apply to religious organizations and groups that posted bail for less than three people every six months.
“This new reporting system is intended to increase both transparency and accountability, which is always a good thing in the criminal justice arena,” said Sen. Joan Huffman (R-Houston) in a press release when she filed Senate Bill 21, the Senate version of HB 20.
Huffman’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
But in April, she told The Texas Tribune, “The purpose of this language is to collect information that would allow us to better understand how these organizations work and to make sure they are not bailing out violent criminals or misleading donors.”
“It’s an extraordinary expansion of pretrial detention,” said Gabriela Barahona, a program associate at the Texas Jail Project, which runs a bail fund in Tyler. “Removing a judge or magistrate’s ability or a community bail fund’s ability to get somebody away from a jail setting is eroding the idea that you’re presumed innocent.”
Under the bill, the Texas Jail Project would not have been able to post bail for Glenn Hayes. The 20-year-old was driving through Tyler, on his way home from Dallas to Louisiana, when he was charged with felony possession of a controlled substance less than one gram.
He could not afford the $1,500 bail, so he spent 115 days in Smith County Jail. “I really felt abandoned,” he said. “Nobody [in the jail] really helped me.”
After the Texas Jail Project bailed Hayes out, he returned to Texas in March — this time, to testify in Austin before the Senate Committee on Jurisprudence against SB 21.
HB 20 failed in the regular session, but Abbott tweeted on May 30 that bail reform “must pass” in the special session, which has been set for July 8.
That has left community bail funds preparing for yet another legislative fight, but it has also thrown into sharp focus that their work is meant to be temporary — until money bail and pretrial detention no longer exist.
Hayes said that if he had been pulled over in Austin or Dallas, he would have been given a verbal warning or ticket, instead of detained for almost four months. He is still awaiting trial.
“A lot of people are just like me, too, with similar cases,” he said. “But they have no help and nobody in their corner.”
