The Bail Project

Our goal is to secure freedom for as many people as possible and fuel momentum for equal justice for people awaiting their trials. In this work, we address the historical mass incarceration of people of color and people living in poverty who are being detained pretrial and prove that the cash bail system is not a tool for justice.

What We Aim to Accomplish

The Bail Project combats mass incarceration by disrupting the money bail system—one person at a time. We post bail for clients who can’t afford it, and when they return to court, the money is returned to the fund to post bail for someone else.

We aim to pay bail for tens of thousands of low-income individuals—who are also disproportionately people of color—who are legally presumed innocent and whom a judge has deemed eligible for release from jail before trial contingent on paying bail. In addition, through our Community Release with Support model, we connect our clients to voluntary services and resources and provide them with court reminders and transportation assistance for the duration of their case. Through these efforts, our clients are released to the safety of their loved ones and have fairer and more positive court case outcomes.

Through the delivery of our services, The Bail Project will create a nationally representative set of proof points to show that cash bail is not required to ensure appearance in court. These efforts will motivate replacing cash bail with broad adoption of the Community Release with Support model. Additional outcomes will include reducing racial/ethnic disparities, divesting funds from the criminal legal system, and reinvesting into community-based services and organizations.

Our clients’ case outcomes demonstrate that cash bail is unnecessary and unjust. Nationally, about one in three of The Bail Project’s clients have all their cases dismissed. Overall, of our clients whose cases have closed, about 90% are not required to spend any additional time in jail.

We post bail for clients, and then we support them as they await their court dates. Community Release with Support uses a case management approach to help people access care, assistance, and return to court. We often find that what is required is a simple court reminder to help someone make their court date.

Although bail funds are powerful tools to end the immediate human suffering of people locked in jail cells, our ultimate goal is to put ourselves out of business by igniting and moving forward long-term policy change and eliminating cash bail.

Our nation has created a two-tier system of justice: one for those living comfortably and one for those living in poverty. Jail doesn’t just impact the person right now—being detained decreases lifetime earnings and makes it more likely that that person will return to jail in the future. Hundreds of thousands of Americans, mostly those living in poverty and people of color, are caught in a flawed system that cycles them in and out of jail. The Bail Project is fighting this injustice.

The Bail Project is committed to achieving justice for all. Since January 2018, The Bail Project has grown to serve30 jurisdictions across the U.S. Our staff of Bail Disruptors has freed over 20,000 people while providing them with court reminders, transportation assistance, and referrals to social services as needed using our model of Community Release with Support. We have prevented the harm of more than 100,000 days in jail for our clients through these efforts—stopping the disruption incarceration brings to families, communities, and the labor market.

The work we are doing is providing a roadmap for our nation to operate the legal system in a more humane, dignified, and equitable way. To learn more about our policy vision, visit AfterCashBail.org.

The Bail Project consists of a central “Support Hub” and a growing network of local staff advocates—Bail Disruptors and Client Advocates—working in their communities. We are scaling nationally to build a representative portfolio of sites that includes jurisdictions with diverse demographics, sizes, and geographies. Our staff is now more than 100 people strong, making a difference in local communities and advocating nationwide bail reform. We are committed to having a staff that is inclusive, diverse, and able to work effectively across cultures, and we seek the candidacy of people of color, women, people who are LGBTQ+, and directly impacted individuals.

A key element of our Community Release with Support model is removing the most common barriers to court date appearance through court reminders and free or subsidized transportation to court. An additional critical element of our model is to provide a reproducible, holistic, and client-centric approach that assures our clients receive the services they identify as needing to succeed outside of jail. Bail Disruptors conduct outreach, identify quality service providers, and offer voluntary referrals to these organizations.

Data is at the center of how The Bail Project learns, adapts, and improves. We track our clients' court experiences and supportive services in a central database and collect additional administrative data to understand the context of the legal systems in the jurisdictions where we work. To ensure equity, we conduct analyses of key demographics to determine service delivery disparities and the overrepresentation of people of color in jails or other harmful pretrial detention contexts. We gather client feedback and conduct regular community asset mapping to gather information from stakeholders on the local networks that are key for building advocacy partnerships.

The Bail Project conducts strategic communications work—including message framing, media relations, multimedia storytelling, and social media—to communicate our impact and build public support for our policy recommendations. In addition, we work carefully across the nation to disseminate our findings and raise awareness around this issue of pretrial mass incarceration.

Our model is sustainable. We raise donations to bring people home, connect them with services based on their needs, and provide them with court reminders and transportation assistance for the duration of their case. As cases are resolved, bail payments are returned to us and can be reused to help more people. Our track record demonstrates that money is not necessary to ensure people come back to court. Our clients have no obligation to us. Along with providing bail assistance, we use the power of human stories and data to make the public case for ending cash bail and investing in communities.

Since launching in 2018, we’ve already posted bail for more than 20,000 people in 30 locations! All the while, we track data and court appearance rates to show that cash bail is not serving its intended purpose. Our clients have a court appearance rate of about 90% even though they have no financial obligation to us.

To date we have supported thousands of clients to resolve their cases in court. We are also advocating for bail reform locally and nationally, and have seen movement in bail reform. Here are some examples:

- In New York, we made the strategic decision to stop posting bail for new clients through The Bronx Freedom Fund after the passage of historic pretrial reform in 2019, which eliminated cash bail in New York for the vast majority of cases—including nearly all of the misdemeanor charges for which The Bronx Freedom Fund could post. We use this as a successful model for what a revolving bail fund could be.

- Illinois recently passed the Pretrial Fairness Act, which will completely eliminate the use of cash bail in the state. As we wait for this bill to go into effect in 2023, our team will continue doing bailouts in Chicago while also working to shape what bail reform's implementation looks like, advocating for a more humane, equitable pretrial system. We look forward to winding down our operations in Illinois once bailouts are no longer necessary.

- In St. Louis, The Bail Project advocated to close the Workhouse jail, a notorious institution for pretrial detention that has ensnared generations of Black and low-income people in St. Louis into a cycle of incarceration, trauma, and poverty. Finally, after countless hours of organizing, bailing people out of the facility, and applying pressure, the decision was made to close the Workhouse jail at the end of 2020. This victory is due to the hard work of the Black-led Close The Workhouse campaign, of which The Bail Project – St. Louis is a primary partner, and creates the opportunity for investment in community-based resources to help St. Louis’ most marginalized. The Bail Project continues to provide court notifications and support for existing clients.

In February 2020, The Bail Project published “After Cash Bail: A Framework for Reimagining Pretrial Justice” (see AfterCashBail.org). Developed in collaboration with staff across all levels of the organization, this white paper outlines our vision for the policies that we want jurisdictions to adopt and implement instead of cash bail and offers guidelines for implementing meaningful bail reform.

As part of our advocacy efforts to approach justice in a more humane way, we are raising awareness for the health threats of COVID in jails and advocating for decreasing jail populations and improving pretrial systems during the pandemic. To this end, The Bail Project has supported mass releases in different sites by offering The Bail Project’s Community Release with Support model to individuals who were released even without bail.