May 1, 2021

"Of 70 people bailed out of jail since last May by six social-justice activists, 25 have been charged with 108 felonies and 49 misdemeanors or municipal code violations alleged to have occurred after they were freed..."

"... a far higher re-arrest rate than typically seen among people released on bail nationally," The Wisconsin State Journal reports

“I don’t know of any research that examines the issue of who posts a defendant’s bail on the likelihood of committing new crimes,” said Danielle M. Romain Dagenhardt, an assistant professor of criminal justice at UW-Milwaukee. “I would imagine that it could be the case that an individual who posts bail from an outside source’s money would have less-vested stake in continuing to appear or comply with release conditions, however, I’m not sure how often that actually occurs.”

[Pilar Weiss, director of the Community Justice Exchange, which administers the National Bail Fund Network] rejected the notion that the source of bail money has any relation to the likelihood of re-arrest. “People aren’t like, ‘Oh, great, somebody else got me out of jail’” and subsequently feel the need to go out and put their lives at risk, she said....

Local bail funds are... encouraged not to identify which inmates are most “worthy” of release based on their past criminal records, Pilar said, since she and other incarceration- and bail-abolition activists see defendants as having been “targeted and criminalized by police” and the victims of a “racist criminal legal system.” 

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