The Problem with Bail isn’t the Bondsman, it’s
the State
By Lily Fahsi-Haskell and Mohamed Shehk
“The story of SB 10 is a familiar one of policy reform gone haywire, with politicians manipulating community interests towards political gain in a final gut-and-amend maneuver. As movements fight to scale back the reach of the prison-industrial complex, the shift from victory to potential loss is a harsh reminder of the nature and aims of imprisonment. Imprisonment enforces social control in order to uphold economic, racial and social orders for the state to function as designed; that some private entities are able to make a profit by exploiting this enforcement of social control is merely capitalizing on its function, and not the cause of imprisonment. Thus, reforms that attack private profit as their end goal but do not target the state or its capacity to cage people are even more prone to result in mere shifts to the shape of imprisonment, rather than steps towards its dismantlement.” |