Texas continues to use a cash bail system-penalizing poor people

Like most states, Texas uses a cash bail system that lets defendants pay to get released from jail while they wait for ​​adjudication. But the price of bail is often an insurmountable hurdle, reported the Texas Tribune.

Civil rights groups and inmates have unsuccessfully challenged Texas’ use of a cash bail system for years. Lawsuits targeting Dallas and Harris county jails alleged the practice was unconstitutional because it discriminates against poorer defendants. A federal appeals court ruled against the Dallas plaintiffs and the Supreme Court declined to take the case. 

In 2021, Texas lawmakers changed the state’s bail system, but didn’t forbid a cash bail system. Instead, they required all defendants accused of violent crimes to pay cash for release from jail before their trials. Critics said requiring cash to get out of jail would continue to penalize low-income people and benefit the bail bonds industry.

About three in every four Texans in county jails are awaiting the resolution of their cases, according to data from the Texas Commission on Jail Standards, the state agency that oversees local jails. That number has surpassed pre-pandemic levels and is 14% higher than in January 2017.

For women, the wait can be harder than for men. County jails, meant for short stays, commonly lack resources women need — like pregnancy care and mental health treatment. Women in county jails are also more likely to have mental health needs. And many are mothers separated from their children.

Angel Collier worked at Buc-ee’s, but in 2014 became a stay-at-home mom for several years before breaking up with her child’s father. At the time of her 2020 arrest, Collier was living with her father while she was a full-time student pursuing an online psychology degree from Houston Christian University.

Following her arrest, Collier’s combined bond for the two misdemeanor charges was set at $8,000. When she couldn’t afford that, a friend loaned her over $700 to pay a bonds company so she could get out of jail. But two years later, while still awaiting her trial, she missed a required court hearing because she was receiving emergency care for pregnancy complications. A warrant was issued for her arrest in Walker County.

In June 2022, officers from Madison County were sent to her home in Midway for a welfare check because someone reported she was having a miscarriage. When Collier came outside, she told police she was OK, but that she may go to the doctor the next day, according to video obtained by KFF Health News. Because of the Walker County warrants, police arrested her.

Collier said she could not afford to pay thousands of dollars to bail out. Stuck in Walker County jail again, she says she experienced a miscarriage and received little medical attention while she waited a day for another friend to loan her money to pay a bonds company for her release.

Collier later filed a formal complaint with The Texas Commission on Jail Standards about her miscarriage. In a September 2022 letter, the agency told Collier that Walker County Jail had not violated minimum jail standards. According to the commission, records from Walker County Jail show that Collier only submitted one medical request and did not advise jail staff of any other medical issues. Collier claims she asked for help multiple times.

“We haven’t yet gone far enough to meet the needs of women who are in jail at the county level,” said Alycia Welch, associate director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at The University of Texas at Austin, a research center dedicated to incarceration in Texas.

Texas law requires the Texas Commission on Jail Standards to collect and report data on incarcerated women. But the Commission cannot provide the total number of women behind bars and waiting for their cases to be resolved in Texas county jails right now — or any time in the last two years.

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In some Mississippi counties criminal defendants are on their own

The right to an attorney is fundamental to the U.S. justice system. Yet, in a small Mississippi court off the interstate between Jackson and Memphis, that right is tenuous, reported ProPublica and The Marshall Project.

The two judges in Yalobusha County Justice Court appointed lawyers for just 20% of the five dozen felony defendants who came before them in 2022, according to a review of court records; nationally, experts estimate that lawyers are appointed to at least 80% of felony defendants at some point in the legal process because they’re deemed poor. In this court, the way these two judges decide who gets a court-appointed attorney appears to violate state rules meant to protect defendants’ rights. A few defendants have even been forced to represent themselves in key hearings.

This article was produced in partnership with the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, formerly a member of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, and ProPublica.

Despite the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee that everyone gets a lawyer even if they’re too poor to pay for one, most felony defendants in this court went without any representation at all before their cases were forwarded to a grand jury, according to a review of one full year of court files by the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, The Marshall Project and ProPublica. (Read more about how we analyzed the court’s appointment rate in our methodology.)

“That is a huge problem,” said André de Gruy, who leads a state office that handles death penalty cases and felony appeals but has no power over local public defense. “I believe almost every one of those people would like a lawyer and is unable to afford one.”

For decades, civil rights advocates and legal reformers have complained that Mississippi is among the worst states in the country in providing attorneys for poor criminal defendants. It’s one of a handful of states where public defense is managed and funded almost entirely by local governments, and the way they do so varies greatly from county to county. Defendants in some places see appointed lawyers quickly and remain represented thereafter; elsewhere, sometimes right over the county line, defendants can wait months just to see a lawyer or can go long periods without having one at all.

The Mississippi Supreme Court, which oversees how state courts operate, has issued several rules in recent years that were intended to drive improvements. But it is up to locally elected judges to carry out those mandates, and there’s no oversight to make sure they’re doing it right.

Much like Mississippi, Texas places primary responsibility for public defense on counties. A state commission in Texas investigates the counties with low appointment rates; a felony appointment rate below 50% would raise serious questions about a county’s compliance with state law, according to current and former officials there. In Mississippi, state officials don’t even know how often judges appoint attorneys.

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Some Chicago and Philadelphia neighbors literally worse than war zones

For some young black men, it can be safer to be in the U.S. military at war than living at home in the most violent neighborhoods of Philadelphia and Chicago

Alex Knorre is a postdoctoral research fellow at Boston College writing in the Chicago Sun-Times:

Mass shootings tend to dominate the debate over gun violence, but they accounted for just 3% of all firearm homicides in the United States in 2021.

The vast majority of gun homicides are murders that happen in an extremely concentrated number of neighborhoods, places where the rate of gun deaths rivals war zones.

As a scholar of gun violence and victimization in the U.S., I study and publish research on the geographic and demographic concentration of shootings. I’m always searching for new perspectives to help people understand this crisis.

Shootings happen over and over in the same locations. About half take place in just 1% to 5% of the land area in U.S. cities — in other words, in a tiny percentage of the nation’s homes, stores, parks and street corners.

These same neighborhoods tend to suffer from what criminologists call concentrated disadvantage — an unsavory mix of high crime rates, illegal drug markets, poverty, limited educational and economic opportunities and residential instability. Cumulatively, these factors decrease residents’ ability to maintain public order and safety in the ways that safer neighborhoods do informally by confronting violent behavior or supervising teenagers.

Kids who grow up in these neighborhoods suffer the long-lasting repercussions of exposure to violence, such as high levels of stress and trauma that dampen educational attainment and result in decreased cognitive ability.

The demographics of these neighborhoods means that both victims and perpetrators of shootings are disproportionately young Black men, who are 93.9% of firearm-related homicide victims in Chicago and 79.3% of gun homicides in Philadelphia (where young Hispanic men make up another 12.9%). Homicides disproportionately affect the young largely because boys and men ages 15 to 25 are more likely to engage in delinquent and criminal behavior, a phenomenon known as the age-crime curve.

For some young men, it can be safer to be in the U.S. military at war than living at home in the most violent neighborhoods of Philadelphia and Chicago.

How we did our study

This finding comes from a study my co-authors, Brandon Del Pozo and Aaron Chalfin, and I did to compare shooting rates in Philadelphia, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles with casualty rates of U.S. military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Our paper is published in JAMA Network Open, an open-source medical journal, and is free to read.

We collected all publicly available city-level data on shooting deaths, including the time, exact place and information about the victim. Our study focused on Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago because they were the largest American cities with public data available. However, gun homicides happen everywhere, with notable rates of gun homicides in St. Louis, Baltimore, New Orleans, Detroit and Cleveland.

For military casualties, we relied on the estimates from studies of the mortality of U.S. soldiers at war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Afghan War was deadlier, with 395 deaths of U.S. combatants per 100,000 people per year, compared with 330 in Iraq. We used the higher rate from the Afghan War as our reference, expressing the homicide rate in other places in relationship to this benchmark.

Deadliest ZIP codes in North Philly, Garfield Park

The most violent ZIP code in Philadelphia is 19132 in North Philadelphia. That ZIP code includes parts of Strawberry Mansion and the blocks further north and east. The violence of these city streets was captured by sociologist Elijah Anderson in his ethnographic study “Code of the Street,” published in 2000.

A young man living in this ZIP code had 1.91 times more annual risk of getting killed with a firearm than a U.S. soldier deployed to Afghanistan for a comparable amount of time.

During 2020 and 2021, this ZIP code was home to about 2,500 young men. Thirty-seven were killed in gun homicides.

A similar calculation for the most violent neighborhood of Chicago, an area around Garfield Park with the ZIP code 60624, yields statistics that are even grimmer. Young men living there were 3.23 times more likely to die from a bullet than U.S. service members deployed to Afghanistan. Sixty-six young men were shot dead during 2020 and 2021.

Moreover, survivors of this violence bear the burden of it for the whole time they live in these neighborhoods. In contrast, the average deployment is less than 12 months.

Research papers like ours can raise many “Yeah but” questions. Answering them can better help us understand the limitations of our study.

For example, many service members do not engage in active combat. This fact made our research team wonder if the inclusion of data from personnel in safer support roles was skewing our data, so we specifically looked at the casualties of one U.S. brigade combat team that was heavily engaged during the Iraq War.

The brigade had a casualty rate 1.71 times higher than our benchmark. That means that members of the brigade were still safer than male youth in the most violent area of Philadelphia (with a casualty rate of 1.91 times higher) and Chicago (3.23 times higher).

It is also worth noting that we studied two particularly violent years in U.S. cities. 2020 saw a record increase in homicide rates. That number stayed high in 2021, before decreasing slightly in 2022.

Lastly, on a more positive note, gun mortality in New York and Los Angeles was significantly lower than in Philadelphia and Chicago, and much lower than the risks faced in war.

Our research also showed that soldiers who are injured on the battlefield are less likely to die from their wounds than people shot in the American cities we studied.

Surviving a wound is more likely if medical help is immediate. This suggests two ideas to decrease shooting deaths: Train more police officers to provide urgent basic medical treatment to the victims of gun violence and add capacity to trauma centers near violent neighborhoods.

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"Gun violence is a symptom, not the overarching problem"

The Russian author Leo Tolstoy famously noted that “happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” wrote John L. Micek of the Pennsylvania Capital-Star.

It’s not a bad way to think about the gun violence epidemic that’s wracked some of America’s largest cities, including Philadelphia, even as the COVID-19 pandemic has exacted its own deadly toll.

Every city has its own problems, and challenges, but the causes behind gun violence — actual poverty and a poverty of opportunity — are remarkably the same.

That analogy rushed to mind as I read the comments of Erica Atwood, the senior director of Philadelphia’s Office of Policy and Strategic Initiatives for Criminal Justice and Public Safety.

“Gun violence is a symptom; it is not the overarching problem,” Atwood told Stateline.org, as part of a broader examination of how cities are reacting to the deadly explosions of violence within their borders.

“If we do not look at the issues of poverty, poor access to mental and behavioral health, poor access to quality education and training and economic mobility, we are going to continue to have these conversations every 15 to 20 years,” Atwood continued.

Philadelphia marked its deadliest year in recent memory in 2021, with 562 homicides and 2,332 total shootings, our partners at the Philadelphia Tribune reported last month.

The City of Brotherly Love was one of 16 major U.S. cities that logged a rise in homicides in 2021, Stateline reported, citing data compiled by the Council on Criminal Justice.

All told, homicides rose by 5% last year, compared to 2020 tallies in the nearly two dozen cities the council analyzed, Stateline reported. The majority were shootings.

 Last year, Philadelphia released a roadmap aimed at addressing its gun violence challenges, Stateline reported. It provided specific neighborhoods and high-risk individuals with access to social services and conflict mediation intended to prevent future violence.

The city’s plan also calls for trimming the ranks of blighted properties. City officials also are working with the state to investigate and stop illegal gun trafficking. The plan further directs city police to target “hotspots” where gun violence is more frequent.

Atwood told Stateline that she expects the city’s homicide rate to drop as more of those policies are brought online — potentially reaching pre-pandemic levels by 2023. If there’s a bright spot, it’s that homicides are down slightly from this time last year at 53—a 15% reduction, Stateline reported.

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Cleveland struggles with the pandemic, poverty and violence

According to The New York Times, here are plenty of numbers that quantify the combined impact of the pandemic and the recession that have battered the country: At least 7.8 million people have fallen into poverty, the biggest plunge in six decades; 85 million Americans say they have had trouble paying basic household expenses, including food and rent; there are roughly 10 million fewer jobs now than there were in February and more violence.

As in Cincinnati, Wichita, Kan., and several other U.S. cities, 2020 was the worst year for murders in Cleveland in decades. The police reports corroborate this: more violence, more harrowing details about the way people are now surviving. A man living with his son in an abandoned house was beaten and shot by thieves; an Amazon delivery truck was carjacked and abandoned. House burglaries are down across the city while the number of shootings has exploded.

But the numbers do not capture the feeling of growing desperation in neighborhoods like some on Cleveland’s east side — communities that had already been struggling before the pandemic. These days people who have long lived and worked in these neighborhoods talk of a steady unraveling.

Gunfire echoes almost nightly, they say. The Cleveland police reported six homicides in one 24-hour period in November. Everyone talks about the driving — over the past few months in the Cleveland neighborhood of Slavic Village, cars have crashed into a corner grocery store, a home and a beloved local diner. In Cuyahoga County, 19 people recently died of drug overdoses in one week. All as the virus continues its lethal spread.

“Sometimes,” said the Rev. Richard Gibson, whose 101-year-old church stands in Slavic Village, “it feels like we’re losing our grip on civilization.”

The relief measures signed recently by President Trump — $600 stimulus checks, an extra $300 per week to unemployment benefits, a one-month extension to a federal moratorium on evictions, $25 billion in rental assistance — offer some help, though there is no direct state or local aid. And from the ground, the whole system can feel impossibly opaque.

Legal Aid lawyers in Cleveland say many of their clients had not even heard about the eviction moratorium, some only learning of it after being evicted. One client, a 30-year-old mother of four, showed up to plead her case at rent court only to be turned away because new pandemic protocols, which she had never heard about, forbade children on courtroom floors. The places where many would ordinarily have gone to learn about new benefits and new rules — where they might have access to a decent internet connection, for example — are now closed.

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Clean Slate Law won't let poverty stand in the way of sealing criminal records

Pennsylvanians whose ancient, minor criminal records have continued to haunt them are getting a break that could help them land a better job and find better housing, reported The Morning Call.

The state’s Clean Slate Law, which blocks many criminal records from public view, was amended recently to allow records to be sealed even if fines and court fees remain unpaid.

All court costs previously had to be paid to qualify.

That left many convicts unable to escape their past and put them in a cycle they couldn’t break. To be able to pay their fines and fees, they needed a good job. But they often couldn’t get one because they couldn’t pass a background check.

It was sort of a debtor’s prison without bars.

“The whole point of this is to find a job,” the bill’s lead sponsor, Rep. Sheryl Delozier, R-Cumberland, told me Wednesday.

Fines and fees still will be owed, and counties will continue trying to collect them. But that debt won’t preclude cases from automatically being removed from public access if they meet the other criteria under the Clean Slate Law.

“It’s important and it’s common sense public policy,” Delozier said.

It’s also a rare example of bipartisanship by the Pennsylvania Legislature, which passed the bill unanimously. The final vote occurred Oct. 21. Gov. Tom Wolf will sign the bill, his spokeswoman said.

This is the kind of criminal justice reform the state should be pursuing. Removing barriers that allow people to find good-paying jobs is a victory for everyone.

The poverty rate could be reduced, lowering the burden on government assistance programs and social services. Higher wages mean higher tax collections for governments. Higher wages also make it more likely that people will be able to pay off any fines or fees they owe the courts, completely satisfying their debt to society.

The change also could open doors for people to move into better housing, as landlords often run background checks.

Once Wolf signs the bill, the state would have one year to seal the eligible cases. But individuals can petition their county court to seal their records sooner, 60 days after the bill is signed. There is a cost to file a petition, but low-income people may qualify for a waiver of that fee.

The Clean Slate Law, passed in 2018, was the first of its kind in the nation. It resulted in about 35 million criminal records being blocked from public view, with a few exceptions, as of this summer.

They include records of arrests that did not result in conviction and records of summary convictions that are more than 10 years old. Records of second- and third-degree misdemeanor convictions with maximum sentences of two years are sealed if they are more than 10 years old and the person has not had other misdemeanor or felony convictions since.

The law requires restitution to crime victims to be paid in full to qualify. That should not change, as criminals should not get a break until their victims have been compensated, no matter how long ago the offense occurred.

Records sealed from public view under the Clean Slate Law still can be accessed by employers who are required by federal law to consider criminal records during the hiring process and those who use FBI background checks such as schools, hospitals, law enforcement and banks.

So far, the law has been more likely to benefit white people than Black people. The amendment that will be made through House Bill 440 could change that.

Only 12% of those who had misdemeanor convictions sealed automatically were Black while 86% were white, according to Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, which cited state police data.

Half of people with misdemeanor convictions statewide would have been eligible to have their records sealed automatically if it hadn’t been for unpaid fines and fees, according to Community Legal Services, which cited data from the Philadelphia district attorney’s office.

The people qualifying for Clean Slate aren’t career criminals or big-time offenders. Felons and people who endangered others, those convicted of gun crimes or sex crimes and those with multiple serious convictions are not eligible.

And if people who are in Clean Slate break the law again, their history still can be held against them by the legal system.

While Clean Slate blocks their records from public view through the state’s online case docket and online public searches, the record remains available to be considered during prosecution of future crimes. It is not expunged, just sealed with limited access.

House Bill 440 automatically expunges some records, in cases where all charges are acquitted and cases where pardons are received.

I’m all for locking up the worst offenders and throwing away the key. But a run-in with the law for a minor crime a long time ago shouldn’t be the burden it has been for many people. This is a big step toward solving that problem.

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GateHouse: Pandemic exposes country fraught with economic disparity

Matthew T. Mangino

GateHouse Media

April 24, 2020

Every day Andrew Cuomo, the Governor of New York, is a fixture on cable television providing detailed updates on the impact of COVID-19 on his state and more particularly New York City. His updates are chock-full of scientific data, insightful opinions and personal reflections.

The pandemic he talks about every day has had an enormous impact on every man, woman and child in this country and around the world. The pain and sorrow for those personally touched by the virus is beyond comprehension.

Americans are agonizingly coming to terms with the breadth of the destruction caused by this health emergency. The impact on workers and businesses is dire. As social distancing regulations have tightened, people are being forced to choose between the risk of bringing the virus into their homes or going without food, medication or other basic necessities.

The virus has revealed a stark divide in this country. Sure, we know about the ideological divide - “Keep America Great” versus “Never Trump;” right versus left; conservative versus progressive - but the split is even more profound.

There is a class divide in the country - the have and have nots. The divide is not new, but the pandemic has brought it into clear focus. More than 35 years ago another New York Governor named Cuomo gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. Governor Mario Cuomo said, in reference to President Ronald Reagan’s remark that the United States is a “Shining City on a Hill,” - “Mr. President you ought to know that this nation is more about a ‘Tale of Two Cities’ that it is just a ‘Shining City on a Hill.’”

People wait for hours at food banks across the country to get food for their families. Men and women living from paycheck to paycheck had jobs only weeks ago and when the money stopped, so did the food. A woman wearing a protective mask holding her children’s hands told a reporter on the nightly news, “I’m a waitress, I don’t have food for my kids.”

Many parents who lost their jobs as a result of the pandemic have, in turn, lost their medical insurance. So now the medicine they, or their children, need is unaffordable.

Schools are closed to protect our children, but many of those parents who must work are forced to leave their children without supervision. They can’t afford childcare, even if they could find it. They can’t ask for help from elderly or infirm friends or relatives because of their increased vulnerability to the virus.

Today, poverty puts people at a higher risk of exposure to COVID 19 - whether it’s working in a service industry with inadequate protection; ongoing health problems because of a lifetime without adequate medical care; a lack of medical insurance; or being in jail - poverty is a factor.

Imagine being accused of a crime during a pandemic. One month ago, I wrote, “There are 3,163 local jails across the country. According to the Prison Policy Institute, within those walls are 612,000 inmates, of which 462,000 have not been convicted of a crime.”

If a defendant has money for bail, no matter the underlying charges or the level of risk, he or she is free while awaiting trial. If a person accused of a crime is without money he or she sits in jail until trial. But for poverty one person is locked up and the other is free.

The Marion Correctional Institution is the site of the largest coronavirus outbreak in Ohio. According to the Marion Star, at least 78%, or 1,950, inmates at Marion have tested positive for COVID-19. A total of 154 staff members have been infected, and a guard and inmate have died.

When it comes to the have and have nots, I’m reminded of something else Gov. Mario Cuomo said on that summer evening in San Francisco, “It’s the same shining city for those relative few who are lucky enough to live in its good neighborhoods. But for the people who are excluded - but for the people who are locked out - all they can do is stare from a distance at that city’s glimmering towers.”

When Gov. Cuomo delivered his keynote address, 36 years ago, he wasn’t thinking about America in the midst of a pandemic, but his words are befitting these troubling and frightening times.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book “The Executioner’s Toll, 2010” was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter at @MatthewTMangino.

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GateHouse: Electronic monitoring the illusion of safety

Matthew T. Mangino

GateHouse Media

October 18, 2019

The criminal justice system is in the midst of a seismic shift in priorities. Ideas that not so long ago would have been considered radical are now mainstream.

Change can be positive, but it can also have unintended consequences. Electronic monitoring is a prime example. Electronic monitoring was introduced in the 1960s. Ralph Gable, a student at Harvard University patented a device derived from surplus military tracking equipment to verify his teacher’s theory of positive reinforcement.

Ironically, Gable’s foray into electronic monitoring was intended to do the opposite of what it does today. Gable used monitoring to reward probationers who followed the rules, as opposed to today’s focus of penalizing noncompliance.

Politicians on both sides of the aisle have joined in the condemnation of incarceration rates. America incarcerates more people for longer periods of time than nearly every other country in the world. Lawmakers have looked to electronic monitoring as a safe and cost-effective alternative to prison and jail. The use of monitors increased dramatically between 1980 and 2016. According to the Pew Charitable Trusts, probation and parole populations grew by 239% during that period.

Ralph Gable’s brother Paul Gable wrote, “Monitoring provides a convenient sentencing alternative because it is a punishment less harsh than incarceration but more strict than minimally supervised probation.”

The “reform” brought about by electronic monitoring has brought about new problems.

For instance, using electronic monitoring to supervise people while awaiting trial. Many criminal justice practitioners malign the cash bail system as unjust and particularly harmful to the economically disadvantaged.

A defendant is faced with posting bond in the amount of $5,000. He may have to choose between paying a surety bond of $350 or pay for installation and monthly rental of an electronic monitor.

The initial monitoring fee is $100, plus $50 per month to rent the monitor. After six months, the monitoring cost has exceeded the bond amount. If a defendant fails to pay one month, she may have her bond revoked ending up where she started - in jail. She may also have her bond revoked for drinking, or not working - things that wouldn’t otherwise affect someone on a straight monetary bond.

When it comes to bail, judges are a little gun-shy. Bail is not a big deal until a case goes bad. A defendant on bail awaiting trial harms another person. Electronic monitoring is a convenient fall back for judges. If a defendant harms an innocent person while awaiting trial, a judge can point the finger at the probation office or private vendor who is “supervising” the defendant.

The concern doesn’t stop pretrial. After sentencing, an offender may be put on electronic monitoring in lieu of incarceration. Those costs will be added to the court cost and fines, often burying a parolee in debt. Samantha Malamed of the Philadelphia Inquirer recently wrote about a Philadelphia woman on her 15th year of probation for a 2003 theft - her only criminal conviction.

Malamed wrote, ”‘Case to close once restitution is paid in full,’ the docket noted, ordering payments at a rate of $75 per month toward a total of $40,939. If she continues paying at that rate, she will remain on probation for an additional 45 years, until she’s 104 years old.”

The criminal justice system itself creates a cycle of poverty that is nearly impossible to overcome.

What’s worse is who is monitoring the electric monitor? A monitor can be used to recreate an offender’s location or even alert someone when the offender goes to a forbidden location, but it would literally take a workforce of thousands to monitor offenders in real time, in any meaningful way.

According to Ava Kofman writing in ProPublica, “Critics of monitors contend that their public-safety appeal is illusory: If defendants are intent on harming someone or skipping town, the bracelet, which can be easily removed with a pair of scissors, would not stop them.”

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner’s Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino.

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Robert F. Kennedy laments King's murder and the 'mindless menace of violence'

Kerry Kennedy  the daughter of former Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, who was shot to death in June 1968, two months after Rev. Martin Luther King's assassination wrote in the Cleveland Plain Dealer this week:

The front page of the April 5, 1968 Plain Dealer after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated reports Sen. Robert F. Kennedy would eulogize King in Cleveland.

Robert F. Kennedy minced no words in Cleveland: "There is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night," my father said. "This is the violence of institutions - indifference, inaction, and decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is a slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books, and homes without heat in the winter. This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man amongst other men."

My father's "Mindless Menace of Violence" speech in Cleveland laid responsibility for reform at the feet of all Americans. It called not only for a rethinking of state policy, but also for a moral "cleansing" to remove the "sickness" of racism and prejudice "from our souls."

Nearly 50 years later, Robert F. Kennedy's words remain a powerful summation of what ails our society.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than 187,000 people were incarcerated in state and federal prisons when King visited Ohio in 1968. Fifty years later, more than 2 million people are incarcerated on any given day in the United States. Disproportionately those of color, including children, they sit in jail cells awaiting trial - many simply because they can't afford bail or a simple fine.

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