the associate vice president of policy at the david rothenberg center for public policy at the fortune society and welcome to both sides of the bars a discussion driven show that examines the criminal justice system from various perspectives including those most impacted by the criminal justice system we discussed critical questions about how the current system works its intersections with social justice and highlight the efforts that are being made to improve the lives of everyone that is affected by it we ask you the viewers to spread the word about both sides of the bars and share your comments with us on twitter at the fortune as today show is titled state level reforms where we need to focus post midterm elections we are seeing an unprecedented increase attention by many states to implement state level reforms as it relates to the criminal justice system advocates both directly impacted and not from across the country are helping to shape and lead and guide those efforts and my guest today is katie schaefer new york state organizer for just leadership u s c an organization that aims to build power with directly impacted leaders and partner organizations across new york state to de carcer e jails and challenge the fundamental workings of the new york state criminal justice system katie thank you for joining us so tell us about the state level campaign that you run and this jails and address mass pretrial incarceration that across new york state there are about twenty five thousand people incarcerated in local jails every day and the vast majority are there pretrial so that means that a for going to reduce the number of people incarcerated in jails if we're going to have any possibility of shuttering jails like rikers island that we need to address the issue of pretrial incarceration and so we launched the campaign a year ago well it was two goals one is a movement building goal to build the leadership of directly impacted people and of partner organizations across the state the other is a sed as a set of legislative priorities and the three that we're working on are bailed discovery and speedy trial and what's discovery and and i speedy trial i got you so so let's sort of start with the issue of pretrial incarceration f when people are incarcerated pretrial and in new york state that is overwhelmingly and across the country because folks can't afford bail that has tremendous consequences for their lives and also for the outcomes of their cases so if somebody is incarcerated pretrial they can lose their job their apartment the custody of their children people also have worst case outcomes so people are much more likely to take plea deals and folks end up with harsher and more sentences and then sort of on the most basic level this is a violation of the presumption of innocence that means that for people who cannot afford bail or who are incarcerated pretrial are treated as guilty until proven innocent and so to get to your question bail is money that get set on somebodies case and that is supposed to be a mechanism for release to ensure a return to court so the same way that you leave your credit card with the bartender when you open a tab that's how he knows you're going to come back to pay your tab you're supposed to pay it and you then get to go home and it's just collateral to make sure you come back to court the problem is that in new york state and across the country bail has actually become a mechanism of incarceration and that it is set at levels that the vast majority of people can afford and it means that people with access to resources are able to pay bail their presumption of innocence is protected and they go home to fight their cases from home but for low income people or for other people who can't afford bail they end up sitting in jail pretrial and so when we look to overhaul bail laws we're looking to end  system of wealth based incarceration but we're also looking to fundamentally and pretrial incarceration and the we're looking for the dea curser ration of jails so that the vast majority of people have their liberty guaranteed pre trial and have their presumption of innocence protected just a quick question because we have viewers who are across the country some a more nuanced and others when when when folks here bill and hear of  set i think that all too often folks think of a six figure number one hundred fifty thousand dollars three hundred thousand dollars a million dollars but bill amounts are actually said much more frequently and much lower amounts correct so can you speak a little bit about that to hope clarify what that actually means so bail amounts very drastically place to place and judge to judge that they're deeply arbitrary  so and they can have terrible consequences for people regardless of the amount that's set so there are people sitting on records right now on dollar bail there was a one dollar one dollar bail so their bail amount based on their charge their court unquote risk and threat to society all of that stuff there in bail is set at one dollar and we can talk more about why that is in new york state the only thing the bail is supposed to be is to ensure a return to court so it's not it's not a mechanism for public safety it is just to ensure a return to court and service was a sufficient problem at riker's the bronx freedom fund started something called the dollar bail brigade took a dollar bails but if you look across the state there are people who have spent time in jail pretrial on two hundred fifty dollars bails on five hundred dollar bills on a thousand dollar bales that some bails are really high in new york's bales though are tend to be lower than in california for example where million dollar bills are really common or had to have been really common but the reality is if you don't have five hundred dollars it could be fifty thousand dollars it doesn't actually make make any difference so so that's the piece around bail and i think it's really important that we emphasize the injustice of money bail but we also need to emphasize that ending money bail by itself is not sufficient that we need to ensure that the vast majority of people have their freedom pretrial that there is real protection of the presumption of innocence that there's real due process  anybody in the really really narrow subset of cases where somebody might be eligible for pretrial incarceration and then the second issue that we're that we're working on new york state is discovery law overhaul and discovery just relates to the evidence in your case and new york has one of the most progressive discovery statutes in the country which means that prosecutors don't have to turn over evidence literally until you get to trial and told the jury is selected and that means that people can't adequately prepare for their own defense but it also means new york is one of only four states where there is no discovery turnover before a plea deal and just so you get the sense of who else new york is in a category with and for folks listening the other the other states are louisiana wyoming and south carolina are the states where there is no kind of discovery turnover preplan and what that means is that people are making really high stakes decisions about their lives with not even the most basic facts of the case like the police report and so to overhaul discovery means ensuring actually fair process isn't fair trials and preventing the coersion of plea deals that that come with the withholding of evidence and so we need a discovery system that is early meaning discovery materials evidence get turns over turned over only that is open meaning everything gets turned over and that automatic things get turned over automatic you know because again you know for our viewers i think that folks when they hear of someone being accused of a crime right there is this notion of having your day in court with and i think that that day in court statement comes with the presumption that you would be able to know all of the accusations leveraged against you to know all of the evidence that is being presented against you but according to new york state discovery lawyers and others that's not actually happening and it's not happening on a number of so the vast majority of cases end in plea deals ninety five percent of cases in new york state end in plea deals that so very few pretrial is a misnomer basically nobody goes to trial and the system is both is not designed to facilitate people's right to access trial and couldn't possibly sustain that if everybody exercise their right to trial the system would literally could process the level of cases right the number the vast numbers of people that we arrest and it's the only way that we could process those sort of that number of cases and you can see the ways that it's coercive in of plea deals sort of when you hear particular people stories so there's a new york campaign leader in the county who was in new york city with a couple of friends in a car teenagers he was sixteen they got arrested and accused of possessing drugs he got taken to records island bail was set for four thousand dollars he didn't have four thousand dollars this ingle mom she was raising his siblings she didn't have four thousand dollars so he sat on rikers island for three months and after three months the prosecution came to him and said well offer you a plea deal plead guilty and we'll give you time served and you can go home tomorrow and he said but i'm not guilty  it and the prosecution said well you can spend the next year and a half telling people how you didn't do it so what do you do if you took a plea deal right and that's the intersection of a bail system tha incarcerates preet people pretrial people who are presumptively innocent and the total lack of discovery turnover which might have made it clear sort of that there were that there was that the case was weak that there wasn't evidence that the person who's accused of something didn't do the harm that they were accused of and so a speedy trial so speedy trial and this is both discovery and speedy trial are more unique to new york than bail is so despite a constitutional right to a speedy trial or your sixth amendment constitutional right in new york there is no firm deadline about when you're actually entitle to your day in court instead we've got a system called the readiness that gets referred to as the readiness rule and what that means is that there is a time frame by which prosecutors are required to declare readiness for trial but as soon as they declare readiness for trial the speedy trial the clock stops and then it can take however long it takes for you to actually go to trial that your case can sort of the endlessly adjourned and that is how you get cases like khalif browder like our many members who have been incarcerated pretrial for months or years is that only certain things count towards the speedy trial clock and so it means in practice the people actually don't have a right to a speedy trial in new york state and so that was most salient leo problem in the bronx some very powerful litigation has mitigated some of the urgency of that but it's important for us to get actual legislative change that guarantees people's right to a speedy trial and the only thing that will flag for you is in new york we're prioritizing bail and discovery over speedy trial at the request of partners of ours who have said if you get speedy trial passed before discovery overhaul we will just get railroaded in court faster right that we need to make sure that people have access to the evidence in their case before we ensure a true speedy trial and what are some of the  organizations involved in this state why coalition and you know why have some of those organizations involved as opposed to having just just leadership you know run the campaign so the campaign is composed of grassroots organizations statewide vocal new york new york communities for change as well is civil liberties and civil rights organizations like the new york civil liberties union and then public defender office is like the legal aid society and sort of what we've see here is a really powerful intersection of organizations that build grassroots power of public defenders offices who both can speak to how these issues impact them from their ability to represent clients and then civil liberties and civil rights organizations who can speak to this as an issue connected to issues of policing of people's more basic constitutional rights and so we build out we build out coalitions because they build power that in order to change  we need to have mass movements of people and organizations that can hold elected officials accountable and change what elected officials believe is possible right that there is always that moment when  you know you're winning as a campaign when elected officials start to ask different questions right or when the floor of what is acceptable reform starts to go up that people collectively no longer think oh we would be willing to accept this but you know this is this is the up here is the bar and we can see this over the organizing that's happened around discovery over the past couple of years  that the strength of the discovery bills has really increased and that is because we have collectively organized and that has meant that what was considered acceptable five years ago is no longer can sider acceptable and so what of some of the other state level campaigns or just leadership is involved in and again speaking to the question of why on a state level right there is a tremendous amount of attention around federal legislation as it relates to the criminal justice system particularly around prisons and so folks who may not be who may not be readily apparent on why the issue is so important to state level can you speak to that so if we're really looking to reduce the number of people who are incarcerated we have to look at state level reforms because the vast majority of people are incarcerated in state and local jails that if we were to just address people incarcerated in federal prisons that would barely scrape the surface of the of the mass incarceration crisis i in the country and if we look sort of thinking not to only about the numbers of people who are incarcerated but also about how criminalization works that the vast majority of people are being picked up by local or state police that it is racially biased policing practices of local and state police that are targeting particular communities and then people are being charged in state in state courts and county courts and then sent to a local and state local jails and state prisons and so we only address that crisis when we address the the  laws addle at a local and state level and so talk about some of the other campaigns the level campaigns are just leadership is involved and so one of the one of the places and this is connected to our work in  in milwaukee is that county jails as we were talking about before are mostly comprised of people incarcerated pretrial but the other a growing number of people in local jails are people being held on technical parole violations so somebody is released from prison parole put certain stipulations on them and those stipulations can be incredibly onerous that somebody has an eight or nine pm curfew those restrictions can limit where somebody moves can't leave a certain borough or a certain city that if you have children another place that you need to get permission to visit them and so what we see is that parole rather than being a system that helps people reintegrate that supports people in finding jobs new charge but simply on a violation of the conditions of their poll and so this grows local jail populations it clearly has tremendous impact on individual people's lives that you've come home we have members who have come home who have gotten jobs who are rebuilding their families and then get picked up on some kind of technical violation  and spend months in jail at which point they have lost their job has all kinds of consequences for their families and so they need to restart the process of coming home that they've already that they already started and so that has to get changed at the state level that we need to fundament only abolish parole that we or deeply change how it works such that it's actually  a system that is there to support people rather than tough police and criminalized and so you know for viewers listening all across the country who have an interest in doing some work on a state level you know they hear you talking about all of the reasons in the need to actually focus on the state and local level and they see a more where would you direct folks to kind of have an idea of an entry point into this work so that's going to be state by state so i think the sort of first step is to figure out what in the organization is in your state or in your city or your county that are doing this w and to follow them to get a sense of what their demands are what they're trying to shift to of who they're accountable to who their base is and if you if they are moving forward policies that or policies that promote justice see how you can be involved in their in their work more broadly much of the work that we do is about changing legislation and in order to change legislation you have to you have to convince people who are in elected office that they will suffer consequences if they fail to change those laws right and the consequences that they can suffer is that people don't reelect them and so when you contact elected officials the implicit threat of calling your state assembly member or your senator is if you don't move forward on this issue that i care about i might not vote for you again and so most basically calling skits setting up meetings with your representative who you will acted into office is really powerful and i something you are entitled to do and it's much easier to do then i think many folks realize so so they work for you and they want it for you i think folks don't understand that or don't give much credit to that they work for you call their office try to set up a meeting if you can't get a meeting show up go to their office their addresses are listed online and so that's that's one way to do it another way are various kinds of community accountability mechanisms so for example in new york there's a project called court watch and y c which trains volunteers to sit in a rainman court and watch how bail is being set and to record because the state does not collect data from counties about how the bail is being set to record who is the judge who is the prosecutor what kind of bail was requested what kind of bail was set could the person ma right and then and that way we both communicate to judges and prosecutors or both or at least the da is elected judges are elected that that the community cares it's a way to get some basic information about how these systems work i think sitting in a rain meant for most people is deeply eye opening right they last all of thirty seconds at which point a decision is made that depend determines whether or not somebody loses their freedom but it also allows us to to have some of the community driven data and stories to be able to hold these systems accountable there i've also been movements across the policy is for example they can decline to request bail and so does have incredible power and so there was unbelievably impressive community organizing in  for the free new york campaign what's a win mike what is success for running a massive campaign that is pushing elected officials to do what they said they're going to do which is to listen to the people what success so it's either two kinds of s leadership development and power building right if we can get a thousand people across the state who have been directly impacted by these issues to not only know that they can set up meetings with their elected officials but to lead those meetings to anchor and drive the strategy of how to target and move elected officials that is incredibly powerful not only in what we can get done on this campaign but in what's possible moving forward right because  no the sort of crisis of masculine zation a mass incarceration in the us is such a gigantic beast and the no one campaign addresses all of the elements right and so sort of each campaign needs to build our collective power and our collective leadership for the next fight so that where i would say is one thing the other thing is getting legislation passed that has the outcomes that we want so new york state could pass bail reform and call it bail reform and pat themselves on the back and take a victory lap and that bell reform could still leave tremendous number of people in jail pretrial and that would not be a success so successful bail reform results in the vasty carcer ration of jails across the state and in the prison the protection of the presumption of innocence  and ensuring that if anybody is incarcerated pretrial that there are serious due process protections in place so we're going to have to leave it there kitty we could talk forever about the mazy we're just leadership is doing thank you for joining us thank you to the viewers for tuning in if you're interested in about finding out more about the fortune society please check us out on the web at the fortunes of the a warren g or on facebook by typing in the fortune society this is and i appreciate you joining us as we critically look at both sides of the bars