Second Saturday Documentary Series - The Bail Trap: American Ransom

Money bail in the United States is one of the major causes of mass incarceration and disproportionately targets the poor and communities of color. There are well over 2 million people in prison at any given time, more per capita than any other country. We spend over $80 billion in tax dollars on prisons and lock up hundreds of thousands of people for nonviolent offenses.

California will become the first state to eliminate money bail for suspects awaiting trial, replacing it with a controversial pre-trial risk-assessment system that could increase incarceration rather than reduce it. Senate Bill 10, signed by former Governor Jerry Brown, will go into effect in October 2019.

In California alone "fifty thousand people sit inside jails for no other reason than that they cannot afford to pay their high money bail," says Raj Jayadev, co-founder of Silicon Valley De-Bug.

While most Americans know very little about the current for-profit money bail system, the documentary film “The Bail Trap: American Ransom” (2017, 40 minutes) provides an inside look at how it works and how it can be reformed.

The Second Saturday Documentary Series will screen the film at 1`:30 p.m. on Saturday, March 9, at Niles Discovery Church, 36600 Niles Blvd., Fremont. Discussion after the film will be led by a member of Silicon Valley De-Bug, a grassroots organization that has been actively advocating for bail reform for many years. The monthly series is sponsored by Niles Discovery Church and the San José Peace and Justice Center. Admission to the film is free.

“Nowhere are these inequities in our criminal justice system more apparent than in our broken money bail system,” says Mehak Anwar of Brave New Films, the non-profit producer of the film.

The United States is one of only two countries in the world that has a for-profit money bail system controlled by large insurance companies that issue billions of dollars in bonds every year.

Together, let’s end money bail and unfair mass incarceration!