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

 

RIP Dolly Parton

 

In 1988 Dolly Parton pulled every 7th and 8th grader in Sevier County into a room and told them to pick a buddy.

She made them sign a contract.. if BOTH graduate, she hands you both $500. One fails, nobody gets paid.

The county dropout rate went from 35% to 6%.

She handed out… pic.twitter.com/jtDpiMU24M

— Matt Van Swol (@mattvanswol) August 25, 2026

...the checks herself. In 1989 she offered $500 to every kid in the county who wanted to go to the local college. When Gatlinburg burned in 2016, she sent 900 families $1,000 a month for six months. You've probably heard that part. Here's the part you haven't: The fund raised more than expected, so she showed up in May and handed every one of those families another $5,000 on top. Then she quietly put $3 million into the recovery group that handles the years after the news trucks leave. She built her county an entire hospital. She played a benefit concert in 2007, Dollywood and the Stampede matched it, and LeConte Medical Center opened in 2010 with a birthing unit and a women's center in it. In 2022 she started covering 100% of tuition, books, and fees for Dollywood employees. Full-time, part-time, AND seasonal. In 1991 she paid for a bald eagle sanctuary because the birds couldn't be released back into the wild, no press release. And when Hurricane Helene came through here in Western North Carolina, she wrote a personal check for $1 million and her companies matched it. She didn't owe North Carolina anything, but she helped us anyway. She started the Imagination Library because her daddy couldn't read or write. Before he passed, he told her it was the most important thing she ever did. Rest in Peace, Dolly 🇺🇸

An example for us all.

Isabella M. Weber on Price Controls

 Ms. Weber is the author of How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate in which she observes the effectiveness of government interventions in markets in China. The Chinese case she discusses began literally millennia ago when rulers discovered the natural dislocations endemic to an agricultural economy. 

When crops were plentiful, prices would retreat, impoverishing farmers, and when they were scarce, prices would rise, taxing the poor and rewarding speculators. Government purchases of crops and essential goods (salt and iron) meant they protected the poor from speculators, and could control the prices of those things while they got revenue from their sale.

Classical economics calls the speculation government intervention prevented "rent seeking." Economic rent is money paid for no productive purpose. The Chinese example is a clear reminder that government can support productive activity.

The range of government interventions that work contradict the free market advice of the neoliberals and libertarians. Governments that follow the advice of the latter--in the case of China, the Kuomintang Nationalists who had to deal with very bad hyperinflation--often are turned out when inflation overwhelms society. 

Here she is in Foreign Affairs discussing the political effects of inflation in more modern times. She's well worth a read.. 

Enlarge the Jail? Sacramento County's Misstep

(c) by Mark Dempsey

Sacramento County will have another "listening session" Thursday, August 27th at 5 PM concerning its "Jail System Master Planning." Pre-register for the Zoom session here if you're interested. You can also send an email leading up to and following the webinar through September 10, 2026, by emailing PSJA@saccounty.gov

As someone who sat on a County Planning Advisory Council for nearly a decade, I can testify that it's often difficult to cut through the distractions and misdirection in County hearings. In this case, odds are that the County will want to confine testimony and any agenda or presentation to comments about "Jail System Master Planning" -- the title of the session. 

But confining comments to the alternatives of Jail-Big/Jail-Small/Jail-Stays-the Same is really marketing more than genuinely addressing the problem of crime. As Boss Tweed used to say, "I don't care who people vote for as long as I can pick the candidates." 

The bigger question is whether cops, courts, and cages are the best way to handle crime. While Hollywood tells us that detectives always nab the bad guy, and the courts get any that the detectives miss, reality is completely different. Cops solve less than 15% of crimes--13.2% of felonies in California in 2022. They don't even solve the majority of murders. Don't take my word for it; Google "what percentage of crimes do police solve?" 

Even worse: The current County Jail is full, but seldom heard in the "listening" is the fact that 60%-80% of the prisoners aren't convicted of anything other than being unable to pay bail. In Sacramento County, you're not "innocent until proven guilty," you're "guilty until proven wealthy."

This also makes plea bargains an extortion racket. Without trials or convictions, District Attorneys can tell those unable to raise bail that they can plead guilty to a charge, pay a fine and time served, then they'll be released. This lets prisoners, guilty or not, out, at a price, but gives them a criminal record. Its positive effect is that it lets poor people keep their job or family. Its negative effect is that it criminalizes poverty.

Is there any County proposal to have no cash bail, or some kind of supervised release? Not that I can detect. The State of Illinois initiated no cash bail without dramatic consequences. In fact, the US and the Philippines are the only nations on the planet using cash bail.

Because of such policies, the US incarceration rate is among the highest in the world, at five times the world's per-capita average, seven times more than Canada's per-capita incarceration. Is Canadian crime way worse than US crime? Nope. Canada has lower crime rates. 

Here's how US incarceration looks in comparison to its NATO allies:

 

It hasn't always been that way. Here's the history of incarceration in the US:

If that were not bad enough, current County policy, like policies throughout the US, increasingly criminalizes poverty. Sacramento County Supervisor Rodriguez actually celebrated courts permitting homeless sweeps on public property. 

Having police handle homelessness and poverty typically means criminalizing those things. There are alternatives. Contra Costa County now has a program ("Destination: Home") that prevents homelessness by providing emergency rent subsidies. The Federal Reserve reports 40% of the population can't handle a $400 emergency, so lots of people are living on the brink of losing food, medication and/or shelter.

Where are the County's proposals for the cheaper, more effective alternatives to Jail? The fact that this "listening" is entitled "Jail System Master Planning," not "Jail or Free Clinics," or "Jail or Emergency Rent Subsidies" is yet another indicator of its bias.

There are cheaper, more effective ways to prevent crime like social services, but cops, courts and cages don't get as much budget scrutiny, and are very expensive. If you want to cure addiction with incarceration, it costs seven times more than medical treatment ("rehab"), and medical treatment cures more addicts. Canada has lower crime rates and lower incarceration rates, while the US has higher crime rates and a half million medical bankruptcies that Canada's (cheaper) Medicare-for-all prevents.

Sacramento's population wants safety, but constantly hears homeless people are mentally ill or addicted. Even if surveys disclose that most are just too poor to afford rent. This means ever-larger cages to keep the crazy addicts away is an easy sale. Incidentally, surveys say the majority of homeless are not mentally ill or addicts; they're just poor.

Most of us would object to training even a pet with cages and beatings--and the County lost the "Mays Decision" court case for mistreating prisoners, not because the jail was too small--yet that's the implicit bias in "Jail System Master Planning" debates. County policy endorses the all-sticks, no-carrots approach as a response to crime most people would find disgusting if it were practiced by the SPCA on our pets. Somehow, though, we've been persuaded human beings don't qualify for better treatment. 

From here, it looks like the mental illness isn't confined to homeless (poor) people. It's guiding the region's public policy. As Ian Welsh (the source of the graphs above) says: "[T]he truth is that America’s incarceration, court and police systems are all world-class piles of flaming garbage and everyone involved with them knows it."

Are alternatives politically possible? This just in:

The public overwhelmingly prefers spending on social services and root causes over spending more on policing. What got lost in the defund/abolish language is that the underlying thrust of the policy approach is quite popular.

People just don't like the ultra-woke stuff of… https://t.co/jA8Jq08JZu

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) August 11, 2026

Yet another Obama scandal

From Twitter (quoting Matt Stoller's newsletter):

Today I learned private companies were legally required to disclose their financlals when they passed a certain threshold until Obama revoked it. 

For eighty years, if a company passed a certain tlnshold - most recently 500 shareholders and $10 million in assets - it had to register with the Securities and Exchange Commiuion (SEC) and disclose. Through the explosion of high-tech firms, from Intel to Microsoft to Google, one important step was to have -a firm go public, simply because it had to as its stock-owning employees multiplied This dynarric fostered openness, as soon as a company grew to a certain size, it usually ended up having to disclose a lot more data by dint of the reglstretlon threshold.

In 2012, however, the Obama administration worked with tho GOP ond a set of Democrats to roll this system back through a law called the JOBS Act. Obama argued the New Deal SEC rules were outdated, that "laws that are nearly eight decades old make it impossible for others to invest" in startups. The JOBS Act raised the number of allowable outside investors in private companies to 2000, and excluded employees with stock from that number.

The result was an explosion in private markets, and firms like WeWork and SpaceX. 1 wrote tbout this dynamic on 2019, walking readers thtaugh how less regulated private markets enabled the founder of WeWork to keep manipulatng the valuations of his company upward. WeWork blew up when it tried to go public, and released its S-1 form with all that batshit stuff about Adam Neumann. And SpaceX has fallen by 50% since it went public because everyone can see the financial lnformatlon clearly.Transparency works,

Socialists live in cloud-cuckoo land! (Today's Bee Letter)

 Answering the 8/4/26 Bee editorial "What do Democratic socialists want? A look at their platform"
by Chicago Tribune Editorial

In the old days, newsmen would interview even opposing views just so they got their facts straight. When did reporters get license to mischaracterize the opposition so completely?

Your editorial says that among their unrealistic wishes "The [Democratic Socialists] platform and messaging skip over the part where someone still has to build the smartphone...[and] finance the next medical breakthrough" dismissing these as absurd wishes. Why the public sector couldn't produce smartphones and innovative drugs (says some anonymous editorial board in Chicago)! 

But public financing is responsible for 80% of the inventions that made the smartphone possible, and for 75% of innovative drug research. Privately-owned PG&E is still 35% more expensive than publicly-owned SMUD, and PG&E's C-suite keeps attorneys on retainer in case they face negligent homicide charges for skimping on maintenance to goose profits, burning down the ironically-named town of Paradise.

Can we have facts, please, not just capitalist fantasies? 

MMT's Answer to the Austrian Economists

 (c) by Mark Dempsey

This Austrian economist tries to debunk MMT and one of its founders, Warren Mosler. Nice try. [Caution, the video's not short or particularly coherent.]

My comment:

How is the government going to service its debt with revenue from the private sector? Do dollars really grow on billionaires? Does government really need to get tax revenue to provision itself? Can't it "print" money to pay its obligations? Gosh, I wonder! (Hint: taxes make the money valuable. They don't and can't provision federal programs.)

Does government invest in useful, productive things, or mobilize idle assets with its money?... And does the government do nothing productive to create value? What about the 80% of the iPhone's inventions that come from government-funded research? What about the 75% of innovative pharmaceutical technology that comes from government-funded research? (Of course, the Trump administration is working busily to kill this particular goose.) See Marianna Mazzucato here for the answer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r1IPsldbBg&t=41s 

What you need is the BEA chart of GDP growth rates showing the government's intervention (New Deal and the big public works project called "WWII" are the massive exceptions to the rather modest business cycles). Here it is: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Historical-Growth-Rate-of-US-Real-GDP-19292013_fig16_287386917

 

Plenty of straw-manning here. Reinhart & Rogoff tried to make the case that large budget deficits impaired the economy. They neglected to separate monetary sovereigns (US, Japan, UK) from non-sovereigns (Greece, Liberia, Panama) and even made a mistake in the spreadsheet formulas that made their point. This kind of stuff simply serves the oligarchy promoting austerity.