Voters chose to reject SB 10, giving life to the bail industry. Some civil liberties and racial justice groups also did not support SB 10 because of concerns about whether the new risk assessment tools used to determine whether a person is let out of jail reproduce or worsen existing racial disparities in the criminal justice system. It also delayed the law from going into effect until after the November 2020 election. But the $2 billion bail industry acted fast and qualified a veto referendum, which put the issue to the voters. Had the law gone into effect, starting 2019 people arrested on most misdemeanor charges would have been released without bail, and judges would use a risk assessment system to determine whether to release others charged with more serious crimes. Jerry Brown signed SB 10, a law that would have eliminated cash bail in California.
The bail industry has defended the use of bail as a means of ensuring defendants appear for trial while allowing people a means of getting out of jail. Critics view bail as a financially burdensome institution that exploits the most vulnerable and impoverished communities while allowing the wealthy to buy their freedom.
In the 1960s and 1970s, judges, attorneys, and criminal law experts began to debate the purpose of bail, and over the past 20 years the practice has come under increasing scrutiny. Caldwell filed a counter-lawsuit a year later, alleging that the company knowingly misled her and numerous other low-income people about the financial contracts they were signing. In October 2019, Bad Boys filed a lawsuit against Caldwell, alleging she breached her contract with the company by not repaying the debt. Concerned about Bad Boys jeopardizing her job and inflicting further stress on her parents, she sought help from the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, a non-profit legal assistance group. Shortly after changing her number, Caldwell says that Bad Boys representatives started coming to her parents’ home in an attempt to serve a lawsuit against her for the debt.
The calls became so frequent that she changed her phone number in the hopes that it would deter them from contacting her. For nearly three months, Bad Boys repeatedly called her, her mother, and her employer. “I told them, ‘I’m not making a lot of money,’” she said.Ĭaldwell had trouble paying the monthly installments and missed some.
According to Caldwell, when she signed a small stack of contracts, at no point did the bail bond agent inform her that she would owe $4,500, due in monthly installments, and that she was now liable for the full bail bond amount if her friend didn’t appear in court-a sum that amounted to $50,000.Īt the time, she was attending Chabot College in Hayward and scraping by as a security guard. The interaction, which Caldwell described as “rushed and pressured,” lasted only a few minutes, but it put her in a tough financial situation that has lasted several years. Well aware that Chambers had few friends or family members to rely on, Caldwell withdrew $500 in cash from an ATM, drove to Bad Boys’ Oakland office, and handed it over. The man said he was from Bad Boys Bail Bonds, and that his company could put up the full bail amount if she paid them $1,000.Ĭaldwell didn’t have access to that much money, so the man told her that for half that amount, Bad Boys would finance the rest if she signed some paperwork. When Kiara Caldwell answered her phone on June 21, 2018, an unfamiliar man’s voice told her that her best friend, Dareauna Chambers, had been arrested on a shoplifting charge and needed to be bailed out of jail.