Courts: Bail

Another aspect of the public defenders job is to help with the negotiating of bail. Bail is also another way that the United States criminal justice system shows racial disparities and possibly discrimination. Bail is “the temporary release of a prisoner in exchange for the security given for the due appearance of the prisoner” (Merriam-Webster). Many Blacks and other racial minorities are not able to make bail because they can lack economic resources needed to pay for their release. This leaves minorities to remain in detention before their trail and can skew how the jury, prosecution and the judge look at the defendant in the criminal trial, increasing the rate of conviction for minority people.

The Pretrial Justice Institute explains how American Americans are have the highest bail amounts in the United States. Click here to proceed to their website, the video at the beginning explained the disparity.

Public defenders and other lawyers are  more like negotiators than anything else. Especially when it comes to bail and other pretrial negotiations. Today, "more than 90% of criminal cases" end with people being charged accepting plea bargains, than going to trial (Papachristou 2011: 85). This leads to the question of whether lawyers are actually trying to help their clients, or is they are just "on the front lines of processing people through the system"? (Papachristou 2011: 85). There are public defenders who are truly trying to help the people that are assigned to them through the system, but they cannot do this because they have a large caseload that they cannot treat every case the same.