We're About Getting People Free, Period

As surely as a public health crisis shakes the  foundation of a society, incarceration demolishes the infrastructure of a  life. Housing is lost and jobs dry up. The relationships and encounters  that formed the basis of an essential network of support are disrupted.  The impossible tradeoffs faced by coronavirus-stricken cities — between  the long-term damage of a stalled economy and the human costs of  “opening up” — also echo. When judges set bail, people awaiting trial  and their loved ones must choose whether to purchase freedom at a steep  price or face confinement for months, even years. In New York, where  bail can reach into the tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars,  this choice is often only nominal for the poor, Black and brown men who  largely populate pretrial detention. (A law reforming New York’s cash  bail system went into effect in January, but a subsequent amendment in  April restricted the reform’s effects.) During the coronavirus  pandemic, more than analogy has come to link those touched by “the  system” and those outside its grasp. Though incarceration operates  through removal and isolation, the virus is undeterred by barbed wire.  As the case rate in the rest of New York City has declined, the pandemic  churns on inside city jails. Infections cycle between prisoners and  guards, who cycle in turn between the jails and the neighborhoods they  call home. Meanwhile, as revenue streams dry up, local governments  across the US are faced with a stark zero-sum reality that has  policymakers and communities clamoring to defund law enforcement on the  basis of its balance sheet, let alone its manifold abuses. Rising  awareness of these crises-within-a-crisis converges with the raised  profile of prison abolitionists and the collectivist energy of the  protest movement. The result is a proliferation of bail-out efforts:  mutual aid networks that use crowd-sourced funds to put abolitionist  principles into literal practice, freeing as many people from pretrial  detention as they can. In New York City, the money comes from the  pockets of individual donors throughout the US, Canada, Europe, and  Australia and is hand-delivered by local volunteers to Department of  Correction facilities across the city. The act of paying bail for a  stranger is quietly radical, refusing the system’s punitive logic and  forging community from cashier’s checks and electronic transfers. But  for COVID Bail Out NYC, simply getting people out of prison isn’t  enough. With a focus on breaking the medically vulnerable out of jail,  this local group extends an abolitionist ethic of “Care Not Cops” to  provide not only cash bail, but also housing, food, cell-phones, medical  attention, and even job connections to people caught in detention’s  net. In July, I shadowed volunteer Brian Lee as he went to pay bail at  the Brooklyn Detention Complex, and spoke with organizers M.J. Williams  and Gabriella Ferrara about what securing someone else’s freedom really  means.  https://urbanomnibus.net/2020/09/were-about-getting-people-free-period/