CONTACT: Keith Wilson, 202-557-0452, keith.wilson@gmail.com
Cleveland – Last week the Ohio Supreme Court’s task force on bail reform released a report and recommendations to improve the pretrial system. The task force was comprised of 30 members from diverse justice-related backgrounds and the nine recommendations now lay before the seven justices of the Court for their review. The Cuyahoga County Progressive Caucus (CCPC) is pleased that stakeholders across the state are taking bail reform seriously.
Yvonka Hall of CCPC and the Coalition to Stop the Inhumanity at the Cuyahoga County Jail said, “Ohio’s jails are overcrowded and inhumane. Bail reform is sweeping the nation, mitigating the brutality of the prison industrial complex. We welcome the recommendations for reform put forward by the Ohio Supreme Court’s Taskforce.”
However, CCPC vehemently opposes the recommended “risk assessment tools.” Such tools are well documented to reproduce and perpetuate the race and class hierarchies that the tools were built upon. The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University published a report last month that stated:
Decades of research have shown that, for the same conduct, African-American and Latinx people are more likely to be arrested, prosecuted, convicted and sentenced to harsher punishments than their white counterparts. Risk assessments that incorporate this distorted data will produce distorted results. These problems cannot be resolved with technical fixes. We strongly recommend turning to other reforms.
We look to the Ohio Rules Committee to incorporate many of the Ohio Supreme Court’s taskforce recommendations in the amending of Criminal Rule 46 in the fall. We look to the General Assembly to provide the resources necessary to support a fair pretrial system.
“Judges in Ohio who are interested in practicing morally are faced with an impossible task: wring justice out of a legal system designed to reproduce white supremacy and class hierarchy,” says Keith Wilson of CCPC and the Coalition to Stop the Inhumanity at the Cuyahoga County Jail. “The risk assessment tools being recommended would not help ethical judges in this task. Instead, what they would do is institutionalize these brutal underlying hierarchies by providing a veneer of legitimacy and impartiality to pretrial bail proceedings. The tools would reify race by making deeply racist punishment disparities appear objective.”
The justices of the Supreme Court of Ohio will discuss the report at an August 6 conference.
To learn more about the Cuyahoga County Progressive Caucus, please visit: www.cuycpc.org