A new non-profit is helping to change unjust bail practices in Orange County through providing assistance to those who may have difficulty paying their bail.

Orange County Bail/Bond Justice has a goal to help stop defendants from being held in jail before being convicted, which Chair of the organization Kimberly Brewer points out happens disproportionally to marginalized communities.

“We like to think about our community as being very progressive, but we have a system that perversely penalizes poor people, and particularly people of color, just because they can’t afford to pay their bail,” she says. “They haven’t been convicted of a crime.”

An estimated 1,000 people spent time in jail while awaiting trial in Orange County alone last year. It is this issue that brought local NAACP and Binkly Baptist Church together to form Orange County Bail/Bond Justice. As a recent study shows, the most damage can be done to someone who has been detained pretrial in the first two to three days.

“That’s when your whole life can fall apart in terms of losing your job, losing your home, losing custody of your children,” says Brewer. “We’re really hoping to help folks within that two to three days and try to minimize that kind of impact.”

The organization has two main goals: first, to identify and observe unjust bail/bold practices, and second, to provide direct support for those being negatively impacted by that system. Brewer says the first of which is being tackled with a court observation program, which will attempt to determine how to improve upon these practices. The latter includes a $50,000 revolving Bail Fund to help post low-cost bail for people living in Orange County who cannot afford to pay it.

“We would accept a referral for someone who needs bail assistance, and that might be from a family member, or friend, or public defenders office,” says Brewer. “Then if that person meets our criteria for the bail fund, we would pay the full bail in cash. That person would be able to go home, wait for their trial and go about their lives.”

Orange County Bail/Bond Justice launched a GoFundMe with a goal to raise $25,000 by January 2020. For more information, visit its website.

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