Trump targets pretrial fairness law that only helps bondsmen get rich (Opinion)

This week, President Donald Trump took aim at Illinois’ Pretrial Fairness Act, which ended cash bail in the state in 2023. Trump pledged to repeal the Act and deploy the national guard as an occupying police force in Chicago.

It’s no surprise that Trump used false claims and fearmongering to vilify the thoughtful pretrial reform law in Illinois. After all, the early success of this reform threatens a key deception Trump relies on for coalescing his power – that more people in cages will make us safer.

For some context, most people jailed in the United States, including in Colorado, are accused and not convicted of a crime and are in jail only because they cannot pay the money bail required for their freedom. Cash bail is a poverty test with dire consequences: poor people remain jailed pretrial, often losing their jobs, their housing, custody of children, and connections with services. People with money buy their freedom, keep their jobs and housing, take care of their families and see far better case outcomes.

Our cash bail system, where wealth determines freedom, is a scourge on the moral fabric of this country and this state. It does nothing to increase community safety, and it further destabilizes and impoverishes our most vulnerable communities.

But in Illinois, because of the Pretrial Fairness Act, money no longer determines pretrial freedom — judges now decide about pretrial release or detention through transparent hearings. While facts may not matter to the Trump administration, Coloradans should know Illinois has ended cash bail with strong results: jail populations are down, crime is down, court appearance rates are steady, and poor families no longer must pool scarce resources and forego rent and food to buy freedom for their kin.

The results in Illinois are positive, but not surprising. Cash bail has never kept our communities safe, because money is a terrible proxy for safety. People who are jailed pretrial on cash bail are not more dangerous, they are simply more poor.

Likewise, more than a decade of data from across the nation, including in Denver and Jefferson County, show that the vast majority of people released on pretrial bond (regardless of whether released with or without payment of money) come to their court dates, resolve their cases, and are not rearrested.

Accusations of violent crime while on pretrial release are rare, although those incidents play an outsized role in the media. The extraordinarily commonplace story of pretrial “success” doesn’t qualify as clickbait and is rarely reported.

The only “beneficiaries” of our cash bond system are the commercial bail bond industry and the Wall Street insurance companies that underwrite them. This multi-billion dollar industry preys on the poorest families in their most desperate times while spending millions of dollars lobbying against commonsense pretrial reform that might impact the industry’s bottomline. This kind of profiteering has no place in a fair or effective criminal legal system. It doesn’t have to be this way – the United States and the Philippines are the only two countries in the world that rely on a commercial money bond system to determine pretrial freedom. Illinois shows another path.

The success of Illinois’ Pretrial Fairness Act may well be exactly why it has come under Trump’s gaze. His extreme politics of fear rely on Americans buying into the notion that the only way to be safe and prosperous in this country is to increase federal executive and police power and massively expand the number of people we cage. Illinois’ pretrial reforms affirm that we can be safe and fair.

We can choose to fundamentally reorient away from jailing people for poverty, have fewer people incarcerated, and instead spend our resources building toward true community safety: good schools, affordable housing, meaningful work opportunities, clean water, green spaces, and accessible healthcare for all.

Rebecca Wallace is the policy director of the Colorado Freedom Fund, and she is a board member of the Pretrial Justice Institute.

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