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criminal justice
Trump Order to Kill Cashless Bail Will Exacerbate Inequality While Doing Nothing to Fight Crime, Experts Say
"Cash bail is a system that preys on poor people," Wanda Bertram, of the Prison Policy Initiative, told Common Dreams.
Aug 25, 2025
US President Donald Trump signed a pair of executive orders on Monday aimed at ending the policy of cashless bail for people accused of crimes, a move criminal justice reform advocates say will heighten the already massive inequality within the system while doing little to stop lawbreaking.
One order requires Washington, DC, which the president currently controls under "emergency authority," to end its cashless bail program. The other directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to identify other jurisdictions around the country with cashless bail so that they can have their federal funds restricted or suspended.
Several states, including Illinois, New York, California, and New Jersey, have moved to significantly reduce or eliminate the use of cash requirements for those accused of crimes to be released pretrial. DC, meanwhile, was one of the first cities to implement the policy.
Jeremy Cherson, communications director for the Bail Project, told Common Dreams that cash bail creates a "two-tiered system of justice—one where people with money, regardless of risk, can pay bail and be released, whereas people without money will be detained, maybe unnecessarily, just because they can't afford to pay a bail amount."
More than 70% of the people currently held in jails—over 400,000 people—have not been convicted of a crime and are instead awaiting trial, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. In 2022, a report by the US Commission on Civil Rights found that 60% of them were there because they could not afford to pay bail.
People in pretrial detention are disproportionately racial minorities and those in poverty. A 2021 study by the Brookings Institution found that the average person in pretrial detention loses $30,000 on average during the process.
"Cash bail is a system that preys on poor people," Wanda Bertram of the Prison Policy Initiative, told Common Dreams. "They can lose their jobs and their housing. They can get disconnected from critical medical care that they might need. It's a very destabilizing experience."
Trump has claimed that cashless bail allows criminals to get out of jail without punishment and has caused cities to become cesspools of criminality.
"Somebody kills somebody, they go and don't worry about it," Trump told reporters on Monday as he signed the order. "No cash. Come back in a couple of months. We'll give you a trial. You never see the person again."
In a press conference earlier this month, Trump claimed that "every place in the country where you have no cash bail is a disaster."
"That's what started the problem in New York, and they don't change it," he said. "That's what started it in Chicago. I mean, bad politicians started it, bad leadership started it. But that was the one thing that's central, no cash bail."
But as Cherson explained, cashless bail policies are not a "get-out-of-jail-free card."
"They are often measured, calculated approaches that create a system and processes where people are evaluated for risks of flight or risks to other individuals if they're released, and a series of conditions are set against them, or they're detained pretrial," he says. "They're not all let out. So that's often misunderstood about what bail reform is."
Instead of using financial means, judges determine who will remain in detention based on an individual's flight risk or the danger they may pose to the community.
The key, Cherson says, is that "they need to have individualized hearings where we are making determinations about what happens if we release somebody based on more than a hunch."
According to an investigation by FactCheck.org, across all the states that have ended or limited cash bail, only one person charged with murder has ever been released without bail. A Rockville, Illinois, judge released the defendant in 2024 because the case against him was exceptionally weak, and the judge still required him to meet "fairly strict requirements" while awaiting trial.
"There is nothing to suggest that cashless bail makes cities less safe," Bertram said.
In 2023, PPI examined four states and nine cities and counties that had ended cashless bail. They found that every single one of these jurisdictions had "decreases or negligible increases in crime or rearrest rates after implementing reforms."
Many of the other major cities Trump has threatened with a federal military takeover, including Chicago and New York, have experienced massive drops in crime over the past year, contrary to Trump's claims.
Bertram said that in Washington, DC, where Trump has directly ended cashless bail, the program had been "extremely effective."
In 2022, the last year for which data is available, 93% of those released without bail were not rearrested. In 2019, the most recent year with data, 99% of those who were released for violent crimes were not rearrested.
According to its website, the Bail Project has provided free bail to 34,000 people across the country. Despite the lack of financial incentive, in 2024, 95% of its clients still returned to court, and 64% of them had their cases dismissed.
"Absent our intervention," Cherson says, "many of those people would have likely taken a guilty plea just to go home. They would have been overwhelmed by the circumstances that they're in."
"Crime is something that's very complicated," Bertram said. "It's caused by a lot of different things, including a lot of social determinants."
She noted that the Trump administration has instituted dramatic cuts to programs to reduce gun violence, investigate crimes, and provide services to victims, and to "all of the things that we know to be related to the social determinants of crime"—social safety net programs like Medicaid, investments in affordable housing, and services for those dealing with homelessness, addiction, and mental health issues.
Bertram said, "It is a useful distraction from the president's disinvestment in all those things to put this order in place about cash bail as if it's going to make any difference, which it's not."
"All these states, localities, and jurisdictions that have pursued efforts to minimize or eliminate the use of cash bail have done that in service of the core principles of our justice system," Cherson said. "Principles of equity and fairness and safety and the presumption of innocence."
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We Don’t Throw People Away: Why I Support a Harm Reduction Approach in LA
We have a moral responsibility to set an example for the rest of the nation: one that’s rooted in compassion, humanity, and data-driven approaches.
May 07, 2025
If you were drowning, I wouldn’t ask how you got there before throwing you a lifeline.
I wouldn’t tell you to swim harder.
I wouldn’t tell you to make better choices, I wouldn’t hope you sink, and I wouldn’t put you in a cage.
If you were drowning, I would reach for you, pull you up, and do everything in my power to keep you alive.
That’s what harm reduction is: keeping people alive.
We don’t criminalize someone for losing a limb to the effects of diabetes. We don’t arrest them for not taking their insulin or for struggling to manage their blood sugar. We surround them with medical care, support systems, and resources to help them live healthier lives.
The first step isn’t forcing someone into a system they aren’t ready for. The first step is keeping them alive long enough to say yes.
Problematic substance use—a chronic, relapsing disease—is no different. And harm reduction is one of the many courses of medical action we’re taking to address this in MacArthur Park, Los Angeles, where the opioid crisis and homelessness collide in painful, visible ways.
I understand the frustration. I hear the anger. Lock them up, people say—oblivious to the harrowing truth that this crisis is made profoundly worse in our jails.
I want a healthy, accessible, thriving MacArthur Park just as much as my neighbors; a MacArthur Park where hardworking families aren’t forced to live amid trauma and visible substance use. But let me be clear: I don’t throw people away—and I don’t invest in failed solutions.
People don’t wake up one day and decide to become homeless or addicted. They end up there because they’ve been failed by an economic system that keeps people in poverty, by a housing system that makes rent impossible to afford, by a criminal justice system that treats problematic substance use like a crime instead of a disease, by a political system that chronically underfunds mental health, and by a for-profit healthcare system that allowed big pharmaceutical companies to manufacture the opioid epidemic and knowingly steal thousands of lives in exchange for billions of dollars.
We’ve spent over a trillion dollars on the failed War on Drugs, and the availability and potency of illicit drugs have only increased—along with our prison population.
It’s time for a different approach.
Decades of research have shown that harm reduction strategies provide significant public health benefits, including preventing deaths from overdoses and preventing transmission of infectious diseases. That’s why our office partnered with the LA County Department of Health Services and Homeless Healthcare Los Angeles (HHCLA) to deploy an overdose response team in the park seven days a week. Every day, they provide wound care, hygiene kits, naloxone, methadone, and harm reduction tools to people experiencing problematic substance use. They clean up biohazardous waste, picking up and safely disposing of left-behind needles and pipes that put our families in danger. They do the work that Recreation and Parks and LAPD can’t while reducing call volume to emergency responders, and we are all safer for it.
Since launching in late 2024, this team has collected over 14,000 hazardous items and distributed more than 3,600 naloxone kits—totaling over 11,000 doses of life-saving medication—and saved 52 lives. Those 52 people have names and faces and stories and hopes and dreams. They are someone’s child, someone’s friend, someone who now has a shot at accepting treatment, because we know that recovery isn’t a straight path—it takes multiple touchpoints. The first step isn’t forcing someone into a system they aren’t ready for. The first step is keeping them alive long enough to say yes.
I also want to be clear about what our office can and cannot do. The City Council cannot make arrests. What we can do is invest in solutions. We can choose to fund the strategies that actually reduce harm, that save lives, that address the root causes of these crises. Or, we can choose to push people out of sight and throw them away.
The fight for humanity goes far beyond MacArthur Park. We see it happening across the country. We see it in how President Donald Trump treats immigrants like pawns, willing to let families suffer for cheap political points. We see it in how he attacks the LGBTQ+ community, stripping away protections and treatment, denying their very existence. We see marginalized communities degraded and vilified and sacrificed at the altar of power, and we see misinformation peddled at every turn to satiate a hungry, desperate base. It is easy to dehumanize. It is easy to discard people. It is easy to think of human lives as inconvenient. But we have to resist that urge. We are better than that in Los Angeles. We have a moral responsibility to set an example for the rest of the nation: one that’s rooted in compassion, humanity, and data-driven approaches. And since my very first day in office, that’s what I’ve always done, no matter how uphill the battle may be.
MacArthur Park is struggling. Yes, we are frustrated, scared, and sometimes, angry. But I refuse to abandon the people suffering in front of us.
We don’t throw people away. We fight for them.
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4/20 Is No Celebration for Thousands—Trump Can Change That
The time for incremental change is over. The cannabis industry is booming, generating billions in revenue and creating jobs. Yet, thousands remain imprisoned for actions that are now considered perfectly legal.
Apr 20, 2025
Across the country, cannabis users today will celebrate 4/20, a day synonymous with the plant's consumption and a symbol of its growing acceptance.
But for thousands of people still incarcerated for cannabis-related offenses, 4/20 is not a day of celebration; it’s a reminder of an unjust system that has yet to make amends.
The legal landscape around cannabis has evolved dramatically. Forty-one states now have some form of legal cannabis. Cannabis companies are going public on Wall Street, dispensaries are opening in high-end shopping districts, and tax revenues from legal sales are funding schools and infrastructure.
Nevertheless, tens of thousands of people remain imprisoned for the very substance that is now a billion-dollar industry. Millions of individuals are also still coping with the life-long burden of having a cannabis conviction on their record.
This is a moral and economic outrage that demands an immediate solution.
President Donal Trump and his administration have a chance to go further than President Joe Biden ever did on cannabis by pardoning every individual imprisoned for cannabis at the federal level.
That’s not as unlikely as some might think.
On the campaign trail, Trump said he was starting to “agree a lot more” that individuals should not be criminalized for cannabis when it’s being legalized across the country. He even posted, “I believe it is time to end needless arrests and incarcerations of adults for small amounts of marijuana for personal use.”
In his first term, President Trump commuted the sentences of 16 people and pardoned 6 individuals for cannabis offenses. He also championed the bipartisan sentencing reform bill, the First Step Act, which was designed to promote rehabilitation, lower recidivism, and reduce excessive sentences for certain federal drug offenses.
He’s not alone in his administration. J.D. Vance told Joe Rogan that his overall philosophy on marijuana and psychedelics is to “live and let live,” and reaffirmed that he feels people should not be criminalized over cannabis. Elon Musk, the de facto head of DOGE, famously smoked a blunt on Rogan’s podcast.
Clemency isn’t the only place where President Trump can go further than his predecessor. He could also significantly boost America's budding cannabis industry by rescheduling cannabis. This would both reduce tax burdens and help the United States tap into an industry projected to reach over $100 billion by 2030, while also easing the burden on law enforcement and the judicial system.
Rescheduling is also an opportunity for Trump to deliver for Black and Brown communities, who suffer the most from outdated cannabis policies and supported the president in record numbers in 2024. On average, Black individuals are more than three times more likely than white Americans to be arrested for cannabis despite similar consumption rates. President Trump can help right an injustice that has gone on far too long.
Both granting clemency for people convicted of cannabis-related crimes and rescheduling cannabis would be immensely popular decisions for President Trump. A YouGov poll found that 70 percent of Americans support clearing criminal records for past non-violent marijuana-related convictions. According to an American Civil Liberties Union poll, 84% of registered voters support the release of people serving time for crimes that are no longer considered illegal.
Only one in 10 Americans believe marijuana should not be legal at all, according to the Pew Research Center.
The time for incremental change is over. The cannabis industry is booming, generating billions in revenue and creating jobs. Yet, thousands remain imprisoned for actions that are now considered perfectly legal.
This is a moral and economic outrage that demands an immediate solution. President Trump has a penchant for bold action and the power to turn 4/20 into a day for real celebration through cannabis clemency and rescheduling.
He should seize this moment and right the wrongs that every president this century has kicked down the road.
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