If you have money, you can pay the bail and get released, while poor people can’t.
I don’t see why people with money should get benefits in the legal system?
If you have money, you can pay the bail and get released, while poor people can’t.
I don’t see why people with money should get benefits in the legal system?
It’s one of those things that mostly works because there aren’t many rich people.
Since crimes committed by rich folks are mostly white collar, they’re rarely a danger to society if let back onto the streets.
It’s one of those statistical solutions that doesn’t really do enough thinking about why the statistics shake out that way.
That said, there is a gradient, rich folks can make bail for petty offenses but for violent ones judges may be inclined to just deny bail purely because the rich prick would be able to post it easily and the crime they’re accused of warrants not letting them back out.
The big white collar crimes are far more of a danger to society than many of the so-called blue collar crimes. Massive pollution leading to global warming, which impacts billions of people around the globe, that’s high impact, and that’s 100% white collar.
Or pick something that’s not as dramatic. Pick the bank collapse in the US 15 years ago, where many people lost their homes but we didn’t see finance experts get locked up even though they created a massive catastrophe for the country and had to get bailed out by the government. But of course we would lock up someone for stealing an orange, or breaking a car window, because somehow those are more dangerous.
Or let’s get even smaller scale. Let’s just talk about wage theft. If my boss steals thousands of dollars from my paycheck, as she did many years ago, there’s zero chance she’s going to get locked up. But if I were to steal $20 from the cash register, the police might take me away in handcuffs.
And this is why stuff should be defined in terms of day’s earnings to provide scaling. If an ultra-rich person gets jailed and has to post 20 billion dollars in bail, they can’t treat jail as a minor inconvenience.