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<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>CITIES OF BAIL</title>
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="styles.css">
</head>
<body>
<div class="navbar">
<div class="navbar-left">
<a href="index.html">
<h2>CITIES OF BAIL</h2>
</a>
</div>
<div class="navbar-right">
<a href="#stories">Stories</a>
<a href="#explore">Explore</a>
<a href="about.html">About</a>
</div>
</div>
<div id="about">
<div class="about_heading"><h2>ABOUT</h2></div>
<div class="about_main">
<P>
Cities of Bail visualizes the extent to which people in urban counties mortgage their homes to secure a bail bond, either for themselves or for a loved one. The project maps six diverse cities across the United States to show where and often bail liens were created, satisfied or foreclosed from the year 2000 to the present.
Around sixty to seventy-five percent of those incarcerated in America’s local jails on any given day are unconvicted defendants awaiting trial. Because secured money bail systems remain in standard use across the country, the vast majority of pretrial detainees are detained because they cannot afford to post the amount of bail assigned to their cases. Those who are able to obtain freedom pending trial typically rely on commercial bail bond companies who post bail in exchange for a nonrefundable premium percentage of the total amount in addition to secured collateral like a mortgage on the defendant’s home or the home of their kin.
Every year, the commercial bail industry issues $14 billion in bonds and collects over $2 billion in profits assuring that the criminally accused appear for trial. In many cases the sole alternative to pretrial detention, secured money bail can trap individuals and families in a cycle of debt and collection that leads to the loss of income, child custody, homes, and other property. Even when property is not defaulted, mortgages to secure bail bonds can cloud titles to land and assets for years, harming credit and cutting off access to more productive financial investments.
Users can navigate to any of the six project cities from the landing page [LINK or screenshot] to learn more about why each city was included in this study and what it reveals about the commercial bail industry. Map overlays offer demographic information about neighborhoods where bail liens are prevalent as well as criminal charging and other information as available depending on the jurisdiction. The Stories tab [LINK] offers guided narratives through these maps, but readers are also encouraged to explore the connections of interest to them.
All of the data used in Cities of Bail comes from publicly available sources. (Read more about the data collection process [LINK TO PROCESS].) But individual identifying information is often stored behind many layers of lookups and fee-based retrieval systems, and records concerning the same individual are never aggregated in the public databases as they are here. To protect privacy, Cities of Bail does not make personally identifying information readily available on its public-facing pages. If you are a researcher in need of de-anonymized data, please contact the project director.
</P>
<div class="about_subheading">Researchers</div>
<div class="about_main">
This project is an interdisciplinary collaboration between researchers at Columbia Law School and the Center for Spatial Research at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation.
</div>
<div class="about_subheading">Principal Investigators:</div>
<div class="about">
Kellen Funk,
(Project Lead, Michael E. Patterson Professor of Law, Columbia Law School)
Laura Kurgan,
(Professor of Architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation, Director of the Center for Spatial Research)
Adeline Chum,
(Assistant Director of the Center for Spatial Research)
</div>
<div class="about_subheading">Project Staff:</div>
<div class="about">
Hongqian Li
E.J Shin
Kitae Kim
</div>
<div class="about_subheading">Research Assistants:</div>
<div class="about">
Priya Asokan
Emily Barshay
Justin Cerniello
Anu Chugh
Philip Eoute
Julia Fay
Abigail George
Henry Goldberg
Rebecca Goldberg
Marielle Paloma Greenblatt
Victoria Hay
Aria Hejazi
Nicandro Iannacci
Margaret Jewett
Luke Koekkoek
Melissa Mauldin
Kathleen Miklus
Jennifer Morton
Alice Park
Hendy Posner
Jacob Rosenberg
Nicholas Schwarz
Hayden Stephens
Henry Sternberg
Haley Talati
Elizabeth Walsh
Dorothy Weldon
</div>
<div class="about_subheading">Dedication</div>
<div class="about">
Cities of Bail is dedicated to the memory of Charles W. Daniels, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of New Mexico from 2010 to 2012 and 2016 to his retirement in 2018. In 2014, Justice Daniels authored the landmark opinion in State v. Brown forbidding New Mexico judges from using money solely as a mechanism to detain criminal defendants. Justice Daniels worked tirelessly with judges and lawmakers in his state to conform the New Mexico bail system to the requirements of the New Mexico Constitution and federal law. In conversation with the project director, Chief Justice Daniels surmised that “if people could just see the number of grandmothers in Albuquerque with their homes mortgaged to bail bondsmen,” it would clarify the stakes of policymaking around bail. Cities of Bail seeks to fulfill that purpose.
</div>
<div class="about_subheading">Funding</div>
<div class="about">
Funding support for this project is gratefully acknowledged from the Center for Political Economy at Columbia World Projects and from the Data Science Institute at Columbia University.
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>