Google announced Monday it would no longer run ads on its platforms promoting bail bond services, an announcement that precedes a bail reform event Google plans to hold Tuesday in Washington with Koch Industries.
“Studies show that for-profit bail bond providers make most of their revenue from communities of color and low income neighborhoods when they are at their most vulnerable, including through opaque financing offers that can keep people in debt for months or years,” said Google.
According to an invitation shared with the Washington Examiner, the event will be attended by representatives of various groups, including Koch and the Leadership Conference for Civil and Human Rights.
There will also be a “special announcement” on bail reform, which has been a rallying call in recent months for a few Republican lawmakers interested in criminal justice reform.
Mark Holden, general counsel and senior vice president at Koch, told the Washington Examiner the policies they support are “smart on crime and soft on taxpayer[s].”
“That is why we advocate for data drive and evidence-based bail reform that focuses on whether the accused is a threat to public safety based on a risk assessment and doesn’t base an individual’s freedom on the ability to pay bail,” he said.
The joint push by a company based in the left-leaning Silicon Valley and a company that often backs conservative policies and politicians falls upon a Congress that has been looking to implement small criminal justice reforms for almost a year.
Criminal justice reform has been slow to move in Congress, despite opportunities in 2016 and 2017.
Sens. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., co-sponsored a bill in July 2017 that would replace the current bail system.
In an op-ed for the New York Times, they argued the bail system keeps people in jail when they should be otherwise free, which creates bigger problems for society.
“Meanwhile, black and Latino defendants are more likely to be detained before trial and less likely to be able to post bail compared with similarly situated white defendants. In fact, black and Latino men respectively pay 35 percent and 19 percent higher bail than white men,” the two lawmakers wrote.
They added: “People awaiting trial account for 95 percent of the growth in the jail population from 2000 to 2014, and it costs roughly $38 million every day to imprison these largely nonviolent defendants. That adds up to $14 billion a year.”
Lawmakers on Monday reintroduced the Prison Reform and Redemption Act, renamed as the FIRST STEP Act.
The legislation was introduced in the Senate by Sens. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., and in the House by Reps. Doug Collins, R-Ga., and Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y.
“The FIRST STEP Act is modeled after successful reforms that states like Texas have implemented to rehabilitate low-risk offenders and prepare them to re-enter society,” said Cornyn. “This legislation will help shut the revolving door of recidivism to save taxpayer dollars and reduce crime. I look forward to working with my colleagues to move these necessary reforms forward on the federal level.”
One of the biggest reforms that would be initiated by the bill is allowing inmates to accrue up to 54 days of good time credit a year, and the changes would apply retroactively — meaning 4,000 federal inmates could be released.
Jessica Sloan, director of #cut50, an initiative that works to reduce the U.S. prison population, told the Washington Examiner the FIRST STEP Act could help bring momentum to further criminal justice reform efforts in Congress, including sentencing reform.
That legislation — the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, led by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa — has since been shot down by the White House, which said earlier this year in a call with reporters it wanted to focus on prison reform.
