This Mother’s Day, Give the Gift of Bail
For the fourth Mother’s Day in a row, mothers and caregivers are coming home thanks to the #FreeBlackMamas campaign – an effort organized by National Bail Out to free people in pre-trial detention. The women being held on money bail have not been convicted of a crime and are jailed away from their children because they are too poor to pay. Over the past three years, the campaign has bailed out over 450 people.
Arissa Hall, a co-founder and project director at National Bail Out, told me that the bailout has taken on added urgency this year. ”You can’t social distance inside of a cage, so jails and prisons are hotbeds,” she said. Meanwhile, children are out of school, requiring care and education at home. I spoke with Hall about this year’s campaign and what we should all understand about bail.
Anyone can organize a bailout
Organizing for bailouts has actually increased during the pandemic, as people realize that crowded jails can become death sentences. “We've seen people organizing their communities and releasing hundreds of people from local county jails,” Hall told me.
There are no unworthy people
Hall describes the “dichotomy between people that seem worthy or unworthy of relief” as a major obstacle to change. “The people that are left behind are all the people on the margins,” she says. “It’s easy to be punished if you’re Black, poor or trans.” And even though no one in pre-trial detention has actually been convicted, they are often treated differently based on the nature of the crime of which they’re accused. For example, Los Angeles generally has a $0 bail for a misdemeanor, “but we have a Black mama in jail right now who we’re trying to get out who’s being held on $200,000 bail because of the nature of her charge.”
Center Black women and families
The bailout doesn’t just focus on biological mothers. “We know that in Black communities it’s not just our birth and biological mother who raised us, but that we have aunties and cousins and grandmamas and neighbors responsible for our being,” says Hall. National Bail Out has also done Pride and Father’s Day bailouts and a recent COVID-19 bailout. “But we’re very intentional on centering Black women and families because we know they’re historically marginalized and left out.”
Bailouts are just one tactic
National Bail Out was started in 2017 because activists recognized that the money bail system is one of the primary drivers of incarceration. “The next year, we realized that the state is hella agile and flexible,” says Hall. “We saw an increase in pre-trial detention based on risk assessments.” Now, says Hall, National Bail Out activists are expanding their fight to include new carceral innovations like electronic monitoring and ankle shackles that “make prisons out of people’s homes.”
“We see any time we have a victory, the system pivots and there are different and new ways to punish our people,” says Hall. So far, National Bail Out has raised $217K of their $350K goal. Follow their progress here.
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