Good-ish News from the Sacramento Bee: No Cash Bail

(c) by Mark Dempsey 

The Sacramento Bee's 8/23/26 front page (!) headline: "Did California Supreme Court end unaffordable money bail?" (my response: We'll see...)

This article recounts the stories of those detained with unpayable bail, like the homeless man who found a credit card and tried to buy a cheeseburger with it. He was then arrested and jailed. The man, Gerald Kowalczyk, "challenged the ruling while in custody, but by the time the courts got around to it, he had already been in jail, waiting for his day in court, for six months." The court ruled in his favor.

In better news: since the Supreme Court's ruling, the Bee reports that average bail has already fallen from $5,000 to $1,000 (in San Mateo County). 

"In the Kowalczyk ruling, the California Supreme Court cast the state's existing use of bail as a criminalization of poverty [validating this study] and declared, 'a court that intentionally sets objectively unattainable bail inevitably does so for the purpose of detention.'

"The court ruled that judges cannot use money bail as a de facto detention mechanism. It also said lower-level offenses can be dealt with through alternative means like monitoring, mandatory check-ins and 'reasonably attainable" money bail."

Previously, "California has tried its hand at restricting cash bail and reforming the pretrial process, most notably [with] SB 10, which was signed into law by then-Gov. Jerry Brown in 2018. The bill eliminated cash bail in California's criminal justice system and replaced it with risk assessment tools..."

"But before SB 10 took effect, it was shot down by the American Bail Coalition...[which] funded a successful veto referendum, Proposition 25....Judges took subsequent rulings not as instruction to evaluate a person's financial circumstances more closely, but to order pretrial detention by default..."

"...in 2022...74% of people in California jails were still unsentenced and awaiting trial. And California continued posting bail at five times the national average[!]

"... Defendants are typically only offered 10 to 15 seconds to discuss financial circumstances with their appointed attorney."

The ability of public defenders to monitor compliance with the Kowalczyk decision varies greatly from County to County. Public defenders are seldom as well-funded as posecuters. There are already reports of bail amounts affordable only when Bail Bondsmen participate and the defendant sells a car to pay the 10% cost of a bail bond.

Meanwhile, Santa Clara County's Pre-Arraignment Representation and Review unit is the only independent, non-law enforcement agency in California. They conduct interviews with clients who have been booked into the county jail the night before on the morning of their arraignment hearing, collecting information that could help the judge decide a reasonable bail, if any.

A reminder to readers: this is encouraging news, but we're not out of the woods yet. Remember the fate of SB10. Sabotage, and even assassination, are part of the US system of implementing public policy, and politics ain't beanbag. 

US public policy seldom moves in a straight line, too. Slavery was supposed to be over after the Civil War, but we got Jim Crow and debt peonage for the South, both of which are a little different from slavery, but not exactly liberating.

The end of cash bail is politics moving in the right direction, though, so a bit of good news. After all, only the US and the Phillipines still have cash bail.

Update: 

 

The median cost to incarcerate someone is about $66,000. The median cost to permanently house and feed someone is $16,000. They don’t want to govern. They want to oppress. So much so they made being poor a crime. https://t.co/jIvMN30rlk

— Fuck You I Quit (@fuckyouiquit) August 27, 2026