Bail is Not Just

Guest: Shima Baradaran Baughman, JD, Professor of Law at the University of Utah, Author of “The Bail Book: A Comprehensive Look at Bail in America’s Criminal Justice System” Nearly two-thirds of the people sitting in jail around the country right now have not been convicted of a crime. So why are they behind bars? Mostly because they either couldn’t come up with the money to make bail or a judge deemed them too risky to go free while they wait for trial. "And so what?" you may be thinking. These people obviously did something to get themselves arrested. But what about “innocent until proven guilty”? As legal scholar Shima Baradaran Baughman sees it, America’s bail system is racist, unfair to people who are poor, unnecessarily expensive to tax payers and maybe even unconstitutional.