Pilar Weiss, founder and director of the Community Justice Exchange, shares with host Rafa Kidvai how the bail process robs entire families and communities of freedom and safety–particularly in the immigration detention system. Also founder of the National Bail Fund Network, Pilar challenges listeners to imagine a world beyond reform–and towards abolition of the prison industrial complex.
Visit Repro Legal Defense Fund to learn more. Follow Pilar's work on Twitter @bailfundnetwork.
If you have questions about your legal rights or access to abortion, go to the Repro Legal Helpline or call 844-868-2812. If you are being criminalized for something that happened during a pregnancy, go to reprolegaldefensefund.org.
Rafa Kidvai: This is Nobody Criminalized, how the state controls our bodies, families, and communities. I'm Rafa Kidvai, Director of the Repro Legal Defense Fund and If/When/How. On our podcast, we talk with experts, activists, and advocates whose daily work intersects with reproductive justice and the state's targeting of marginalized communities.
Sister Song, a Reproductive Justice Collective led by women of color, defines reproductive justice as the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities. You will hear us restate this shared commitment throughout our interviews, because regardless of the particular issue a guest focuses on, that is ultimately the world we all want to create.
Our guest today is Pilar Weiss. Pilar is the founder and director of the Community Justice Exchange. In 2016, she launched the National Bail Fund Network, a collaborative partnership for community bail funds across the country.
Pilar Weiss: Our demand is freedom, and in the immigration space and immigration detention, getting rid of immigration bond and immigration context wouldn't do anything. That's not our victory, our victory is get rid of detention.
Kidvai: Pilar has been an organizer for more than 25 years. Her work to end pretrial detention sits at the intersection of the criminal and immigration detention systems. These systems work together to ravage our families, communities, and violently limit our control over our own bodies. Here's our conversation.
Hi, Pilar. Thank you for being here. I'm super, super excited we're going to get to have this conversation. How are you doing today?
Weiss: Doing well, thanks. Glad to be here.
Kidvai: Let's start with the National Bail Fund Network. What is it? How has it grown since you launched in 2016?
Weiss: It's a collaborative network of about 97 community-based grassroots organizations that post money bail and bond to free people from jails across the country as well as immigration detention centers.
Community bail funds have been around forever. People have always collectively put their money together to pay the ransom needed to free people from incarceration, but it was starting to be used more and more as a tactic in organizing to try to end the practice of using money bail, to try to end pretrial detention and immigration detention. A group of us thought that there was a lot of commonality in the organizing going around, and that we were all using this tactic, and we should learn from each other.
Kidvai: Thank you for that laying of the landscape. It makes me want to step back a little bit and ask you some definitional questions. Let's start with immigration detention and bond. You talked about that. Can you describe what that looks like?
Weiss: I use the word bond and bail interchangeably. Bail doesn't have to be money. Bail just means that there's some condition or thing given to release somebody from detention or incarceration. In the immigration system, it's referred to as immigration bond. And in the Federal immigration detention and deportation system in the US, a small percentage of people are allowed to be released during the proceedings of their immigration asylum case, which can take many years, if they pay a money bond. There's a very small number of bail bond companies that will pay an immigration bond. There's a moment where bail may be set in the immigration detention system.
In that case, people have been collectively pooling money for as long as that has existed, to get people out. And so it might be that 10 different people in a family have to sign to prove that, collectively, they have enough salary, that if they had to pay the entire amount, they would be able to, if the bond was actually a hundred thousand dollars. And so we see this all the time, it's very cumbersome for folks that are chronically insecure, for folks that have mixed status families. If you have to have many, many people now being surveilled by the state because they had to turn over all of their financial information and prove. Or you might have to give the title to your car, or the deed to your grandma's house. A lot of families get devastated because of the requirements of a bail bond company.
Kidvai: We're going to talk about numbers a little bit and how they relate to how people are charged, and how high bail and bond can be. Maybe you can give us a sense of what you've experienced as the range of immigration bond usually for different cases. I know those things are buried, but.
Weiss: No, no, no, but it's helpful. In immigration detention, only about 30% of those people end up being eligible for immigration bond, so it's pretty small number. There's a minimum set by the Federal government of $1,500. Immigration bond is usually in the 10 to $20,000 range. On the one hand, compared to criminal legal system bail where sometimes you hear people having bail of like $25, or a hundred dollars, the minimum in the immigration system has to be 1500. And in the criminal legal system you can often hear of bails that are a hundred thousand, 200,000, a million dollars, particularly for felony charges. In the immigration detention system, you rarely would see a six figure bond. It's more in the 10, 20, 30, which is still unattainable if you've just traveled for many months across many countries with your child and all of your belongings, you do not currently have $20,000.
Kidvai: Totally, or maybe community resources, or relationships, or people that can show up. And so obviously it's important for there to be funds that can pay for folks. How does a court determine how much bail or bond they're going to set?
Weiss: In some places there's what's called a bond schedule that actually says, if you are charged with this misdemeanor, this is how much the bail is if you were charged with this. So in those places there's some transparency. There's also less flexibility, and there's been lots of lawsuits around bond schedules.
In a lot of places, there might be kind of a matrix that guides. Some places it's judges, some places it's called a magistrate, it's like a judge, that handles a bail hearing that sort of gives them a formula to think about. If it's this kind of charge, if there was a gun involved, if there was violence involved, then there should be bond, or there should be bond plus electronic monitoring, or they're released with these conditions and this amount of money.
In other places, it's just the racist imagination of a judge, and the bias, where if they feel freaked out by the charge being presented, they can come up in their mind with, I think that should be $50,000. And we've seen this across the country where bail was never supposed to be punitive, but that's what it's used as. It's like a pre-punishment when somebody's supposedly still only been charged. So, there's many places, and we work cross the country all the time, where people just know, oh, the average bail is X amount in that courtroom. It's not because that's written down anywhere, or it's the law, it's just that that's what the practice has been. And it might be like, oh, well that judge will release people without bail or will give a lower amount.
So it's really, it's all over the map, but a lot of it, there's always a huge amount of discretion by the judge or the magistrate, as well as the DA because they can change the charges. If they know that a judge is going to set bail higher for certain charges, they will use the charges as a way, knowing that it's going to be harder for the person to get out the higher the bail is.
Kidvai: Prosecutors obviously charge people with the sort of most, quote/unquote, serious charge, so then they can request the highest possible bail or use it as a form of punishment and incarceration. We see this in the Repro space all the time where someone has been charged with a homicide, for instance, for a self-managed abortion. So I'm wondering if you have examples of when you've worked on a case where overcharging has impacted the case outcome?
Weiss: This is the day-to-day experience that we see in the land of community bail funds, which is almost all cases that we see. The charge is always skewing up. The scarier it sounds, then that's going to trigger whatever the biases, racism, classism, punitiveness by the judge, it'll also affect the outcome of the case. So I've seen, for years, cases in which people are being charged, the DA is asking for charges around violence because somebody maybe struggled a little bit when they had handcuffs being put on. We had a number of cases during the 2020 uprising in which young people who were carrying a flag that said Black Lives Matter were charged with domestic terrorism because they were protesting. When the police tried to stop their protests, they stood still for a few minutes. When you hear the word domestic terrorism, you're not thinking of teenagers holding a banner, walking down the street peacefully in the middle of the day in the sunshine in their community, with people of all ages walking with them.
Kidvai: Right.
Weiss: In Repro cases, we've seen two where we've seen cases in which the charge is tampering with a corpse, or endangering a child, or attempted homicide. It's somebody who drank a tea, or supposedly took some medications. We've always seen that in our work where if you just were doing a survey and you've said some of the charges that are used, they always plant the seeds of the most or worst case scenario and the most violence.
Kidvai: So bail is financially costly, we've talked about that. I guess I would love to hear what you've seen in terms of what other costs are, emotionally to people? Their family, their jobs, just over the years of doing this work?
Weiss: The domino effects of how pretrial incarceration and bail, whether you can pay it or not, are immense. I think that quite often because of the difficulty of paying bail, even if a community bail fund or even if a family can pull the money together, there's usually days that pass, sometimes even weeks, sometimes even months, particularly if somebody has to petition through their lawyers to get bail set. Any of those periods, you can lose access to medication that could cause very long-term health consequences. We see lots of cases in which people are going to lose custody of their children because the family regulation system will get involved or they're the sole caretaker, and so they are now incarcerated and so the kids are going to have to go stay with the family or are going to be taken by the system.
Those are some of the biggest ones. I think job loss, as well. A lot of times we see the sole economic provider of a family, this happens a lot in the immigration detention system, and I can think of some cases that were really impactful for us where the timeline that it was going to take to have the bond set and to pay the bond, and they were the only source of financial support and rent for a family that was then going to be evicted, and there had to be now layers and layers of how do we raise money for the bond? How do we also raise money to support this family in the immediate? And then the person gets out, and their family might be homeless, they have to get another job. Everything has been destroyed. The system acts like, oh, it's just this little thing, you just have to pay this money, you're going to have some skin in the game to make you return to court, and what we see is just the absolute carnage of what happens to people and their families.
I think the other thing that I often see, particularly with bail bond companies, is it really causes a lot of stress. It can have real long-term effects on a family, an entire family or entire community is having to deal with all of the ricocheting effects of either their own money signing for a bond, or just healing from the period of incarceration.
Kidvai: Yeah, I think you're right. I don't think we do a good job talking about the emotional toll because I think sometimes it's harm reduction. I think we're trying to focus on the thing right in front of us, and it feels too hard to look at the big picture. But then, and I would see this all the time as a public defender, where someone's biggest concern might not be the misdemeanor on their record, but is the subsequent intervention from the state, the family regulation system and around their children, that's the big loss or fear. Or intimate partner violence, the thing that folks are afraid of. But then as a public defender, I'm just focused on the misdemeanor criminal case in front of me, and it's, in fact, obviously much more important to just think about people as whole humans that need support on multiple fronts.
I know that people, in the wake of Dobbs, suddenly wanted to create a gazillion bail funds for everything after it. Of course, it's important to create more resources for people to get them out, that's not the question. But I guess, what do you say to folks who want to suddenly, in the face of a new stressor, create systems like new bail funds?
Weiss: No, I think after Dobbs, and after every crisis, people want to respond, so I appreciate the response, but we need to set up a whole new network of bail funds. Like, no, actually they already exist this, but this happens every crisis. I think Mariame Kaba, our very respected abolitionist organizer and writer and thinker, always says before you decide you have to create something, look around and see what people are already doing and how you can help. I mean, she says it in a much more eloquent, pithy way, but that's the gist.
I think that that's what we really encourage folks to do is that we don't need a whole creation of a new apparatus. We need resources to the folks that are already doing the work. So, learning about criminalization, supporting groups that are posting bail, providing legal support, providing all kinds of services to folks that are being criminalized for pregnancy outcomes is. We just need more support, and that could look like money, it could look like fundraisers, it could look like certain skills people have. It could look like just using people's positions to actually educate other people that there isn't some magical new category of Dobbs' cases that we can all get really mad about, but actually we have to be mad about criminalization.
Kidvai: Totally, as we talk between CJE and the LDF, Dobbs was not the beginning, we named our manual that, so absolutely find it. But I guess this leads me to the question of the Community Justice Exchange in general. A lot of what you do is actually modeling what you just talked about, which is, you support movement spaces that already exist, highlighting their work, telling people about it through manual creation, amplifying the work that's already happening. And I guess I'm wondering, one, how did CJE start? How do you describe what you do?
Weiss: Yeah, so Community Justice Exchange, CJE, we started 2018 to be, I call it a movement scaffold organization. We're not running campaigns. We're not trying to be in front. We support movement organizing formations. Some are nonprofit organizations, some are collectives, some it's individual organizers, but across the country, grassroots groups that are really contesting power and are thinking about, how do we build community power? We do a lot of trainings. We provide a lot of organizing frameworks and resources and guides.
The central theme of our work is ending all forms of incarceration, surveillance and criminalization. Similar to the conversation we've been having about the way that we think about criminalization of self-managed abortion, we see the intersections of these systems. We don't think that the immigration deportation system somehow lives in a totally separate world than the criminal legal system, and we don't think that the family regulation system is unrelated to those. We see the way these systems specifically target and criminalize poor, queer, people of color. So, that's how we do our work.
Kidvai: I guess this goes back a little bit, but feels related to what you're saying in terms of expanding beyond just bail organizing, which is that, of course, we know that we need to organize around ending cash bail because it punishes people with lower incomes, and at the same time, we have a bunch of alternatives that further enhance surveillance. I'm wondering what your analysis is of bail alternatives?
Weiss: Many places would say like, okay, yeah, we'll get rid of bail, but now everybody will be on electronic monitoring. Or, there is no such thing as just pretrial release, everything has conditions, all release is conditional. We see this a lot now in the fights across the states, where so-called bail reform is often, we'll substitute financial with non-financial conditions that are very restrictive. In some ways, it was easier to meet the condition of, here's $10,000 and now I'm out, which is like, quote unquote, I'm doing air quotes, cleaner, than you can get out with no money, but you have to check in every week, and if you don't, we can rearrest you. You can only be in these places, you can't go to those places. You have to pee in a cup every once in a while, and suddenly you have all of these barriers, and anybody just living your normal life in the stresses of 2023, is going to get tripped up at one point, and then you're get rearrested.
So, our demand is freedom, and in the immigration space and immigration detention, getting rid of immigration bond and immigration context wouldn't do anything, because it would remove actually the one of the only levers to get people out during a deportation proceeding. That's not our victory, our victory is get rid of detention.
Kidvai: Absolutely, and I think there is a shocking amount of commitment the state has to controlling our bodies, and it shows up in the Repro space all the time because we're talking about people's most private fundamental health decisions. But it's the same logic of control, and specifically, who gets control in the Repro space ties up with who gets criminalized, who the state wants to control. I guess wanting to step back is kind of why we call this podcast Nobody Criminalized, and I'm wondering what that phrase means to you, if anything?
Weiss: I think it captures a lot. I mean, I think for me, I think it hits on this idea that I think often gets missed, that the state will find any way to criminalize you, and that criminalization is the point at which then you are tracked, you are detained, you are incarcerated, you are punished. And the declaration of nobody criminalized, for me, it's such a liberating concept because you're just really rejecting, though we actually have to go that far upstream. I think a lot of times the so-called reform that we get stuck in organizing around the criminal legal system, we're so downstream we're like, oh, if we could fix this piece right here, or this law is bad, or we have to fight for better conditions for people who are detained, while there's detention, while we're also fighting to end detention. But it's very easy to get totally consumed by all of that downstream stuff, but actually the declaration of nobody criminalized really gets us back to some of the origin of so much of these cycles that we're trying to break.
Kidvai: I loved hearing that response. Also, I loved hearing it specifically because, truly, I feel like we've all been shaped by how you've shifted culture in your work, and the folks that you work with have shifted culture, and the bail landscape and the criminalization landscape. This is probably very much a symptom of all the ways in which you've changed all of us with your work, and I feel really grateful for that. It's also bleak work, but I feel like you're funny in a dark humor way, and I appreciate that. And I'm wondering, apart from sort of trauma humor, what are some other ways in which you care for yourself as you do all this?
Weiss: I'm glad you asked that question, we've been talking about that a lot across the National Bail Fund Network because we do a lot of bonding with each other, and we always joke bond fund therapy. We're always talking to each other to try to process a lot of the vicarious trauma and the disappointments, and the just carnage that people have to deal with on a daily basis, but I think people find ways to really celebrate small victories that are really, North Star should keep going. There's been an upswing of people doing really amazing artistic projects related to how they're processing. There's a woman in Kentucky who keeps making these beautiful art installations using data from the bail schedule and bail rosters, so I find a lot of joy out of when people can write poems, or music, or do art out of the ashes of the criminal legal system damage...
Kidvai: That's impressive. That's incredible. I love that your response is, not me, but I just look at other people be joyful, and then I derive vicarious joy from it too. I always find that being angry, and there's enough to be angry about, but won't sort of sustain me in the long term. What is your vision for being sustained? Or how do you sustain yourself in this?
Weiss: It's human relationships, and connection, and moving this a little bit towards these visions of community, that's what sustains me. Is that I get to work with people that, if you're going to show up in some very conservative county somewhere and figure out how to raise money and free people that you will never have a relationship with, and who's lives are very complicated, and your lives are very complicated, and you're going to keep doing, despite all of the barriers the system consistently puts up with and all the violence you have to endure. And to then have the moments of dark humor and hilarity that go on, there's a lot of slapstick humor in battling the ridiculousness of the system that also sustains us all in those relationships.
Kidvai: It was really nice to have you on the show. I love talking to you. I learned so much from you. Thank you for being here.
Weiss: Thanks for having me. It was great.
Kidvai: To sum up, Pilar says there's been a shift in how organizations are working towards liberation. Instead of demanding an end to money bail in the criminal, legal, or immigration detention systems, the intention must be to end all pre-trial detention, period. Pila Weiss is the founder and director of the Community Justice Exchange and founder of the National Bail Fund Network. I'm Rafa Kidvai, the host of this podcast, and Director of the Repro Legal Defense Fund and If/When/How. The Repro Legal Defense Fund funds bail and strong defenses for anyone criminalized for something that happens during pregnancy. Learn more at reprolegaldefensefund.org. If you have questions about your legal rights, go to reprolegalhelpline.org, or call (844) 868-2812.
Nobody Criminalized is produced by LWC Studios for the Repro Legal Defense Fund at If/When/How. Sage Carson and Jen Girdish are the media and marketing team at If/When/How. Pamela Kirkland is the show's producer. Paulina Velasco is the managing producer at LWC Studios. Kojin Tashiro is lead producer, and mixed this episode.
And remember, keep your community safe, and don't talk to cops.
CITATION:
Kidvai, Rafa, host. “There’s a Bail Fund for That.” No Body Criminalized, Repro Legal Defense Fund at If/When/How. March 20, 2023. Reprolegaldefensefund.org.