At a City Club forum on Wednesday, Darrell Houston stepped up to the Q&A mic to share how the criminal justice system has impacted his life. He had been wrongfully imprisoned and spent 16 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, he said.
“I’m glad that you guys are in this room having these conversations. I’m very emotional about it because I’m still trying to put my life together as we speak,” said Houston, who was exonerated and released from prison in 2010. “It is refreshing to see all these different nationalities and minds trying to come together for a common solution to a problem that we all deal with every day.”
The City Club event focused on a specific element of the criminal justice system: cash bail and pretrial justice. After someone is arrested but before they go to trial, a judge sets bail, an amount of money that must be paid to release them from custody before their court date. If a defendant cannot pay bail, they remain in jail until their trial.
The purpose of bail is not to punish defendants; it’s to make sure they come back to court for their trial, said Robin Steinberg, the founder and former CEO of The Bail Project, a national nonprofit that helps people pay bail and provides post-release support services such as transportation to court. But the result of the cash bail system “creates a two-tiered system of justice: one for people with money, and one for people without,” Steinberg said at the City Club event.
The Bail Project has a national revolving fund that receives donations from both foundations and small donors. A defendant (or someone who pays bail on their behalf) gets the money they paid for bail back if the defendant attends all their court appearances. When The Bail Project bails someone out, and that person appears in court as required, that bail money goes back into the nonprofit’s fund to help others pay bail. The nonprofit has more than 20 sites across the country, including one in Cleveland.
The Bail Project has paid the bail bonds of nearly 1,000 people in Cleveland. Beyond paying a client’s bail, the nonprofit also helps with transportation to court and connects people with resources to meet their immediate needs. Meanwhile, an upcoming app called unBail aims to build on The Bail Project’s work, helping people navigate the criminal justice system by sending court date reminders and breaking down legal processes in plain language.
The Bail Project: helping people pay bail and meeting immediate needs
The bail system can cause lasting harm to an incarcerated person — and to their family and loved ones — because it puts people who can’t afford bail at risk of losing their jobs and housing, said David Gaspar, the current CEO of The Bail Project. About 57% of U.S. adults would not be able to pay for a $1,000 emergency expense using their savings, according to a 2023 Bankrate survey.
“When a small amount of money can rapidly deteriorate somebody’s life in a matter of days or weeks, that’s something we need to pay attention to,” Gaspar said.
Gaspar helped create The Bail Project’s Cleveland site after community members Rob Martens and Holley Fowler Martens reached out to him.
Referrals for help paying bail come from individuals themselves, family members, and jail staff, Gaspar said in an interview with The Land. Team members known as “bail disruptors,” then do interviews with potential clients and post bail bonds. The local teams also help clients with transportation to court, typically in the form of Lyft rides, and they text and call clients to remind them of their court dates. If a client has another need, such as child care, the team also helps them brainstorm options and connects them to resources, Gaspar said.
Unlike relying on bail bond agents, which charge nonrefundable fees, The Bail Project pays bail at no cost to the defendant and connects them with post-release support services, including court date reminders.
Defendants bailed out by The Bail Project have made at least 92% of their court appearances, data from The Bail Project found. In Cleveland specifically, defendants bailed out by The Bail Project have made 94% of their court appearances, Steinberg said.
It takes The Bail Project an average of eight days to secure a defendant’s release. In Cuyahoga County, defendants can remain in jail for up to four months before their trial, Gaspar said. Out of the nearly 1,000 people who The Bail Project has bailed out in Cleveland, 80% don’t have to spend any more time in jail after their trial, he said.
App coming soon to help defendants navigate the criminal justice system
The Bail Project is not the only organization working to help people in Cleveland impacted by the criminal justice system. A nonprofit called unBail will soon release the pilot of a mobile app that will help defendants “navigate their legal cases from start to finish, from point of first arrest to expungement to beyond,” said Cait Kennedy, unBail’s co-founder and executive director.
The project came out of a 2018 Hack Cleveland event where teams used technology to address criminal justice issues and competed for cash prizes, said Kennedy, who also serves on the Cleveland Community Police Commission and is a visiting assistant professor at Baldwin Wallace University. Her team received the first-place prize in the tech competition. Their initial idea was to create a bail fund that would be accessible through a mobile app.
When the unBail team found out a few months later that The Bail Project was bringing their bail fund to Cleveland, they asked the national organization’s leaders and the incoming Cleveland site leaders how they could help The Bail Project’s clients.
“The resounding response to that from The Bail Project was, ‘Our clients do not have enough information about their cases, about the legal process, and that is detrimental to the outcomes. And we said, ‘OK, we can work on that,’” Kennedy said.
Now, unBail is finalizing a contract for the pilot of a free mobile app that would give defendants updates and explanations throughout their cases. Rather than providing legal advice, the unBail app will focus on informing defendants, including breaking down legal processes, and outlining defendants’ options.
Defendants’ information needs play a direct role in the outcome of a criminal case. For example, a defendant may opt for a plea agreement without realizing that agreeing to those terms could mean that the charges are not eligible for expungement and will be on their record forever. (Read more about the process of sealing, or expunging, records here.)
The app also aims to reduce court appearance no-shows, which can result in arrest warrants. Court date reminders would most likely come in the form of push notifications, Kennedy said.
To get feedback on ideas for the app, unBail has had one-on-one conversations with people who are going through legal cases right now. Compensating participants for their time, the unBail team asked defendants about the questions they’ve had as they’ve navigated the legal process and their opinion on ideas for the app. Lutheran Metropolitan Ministries helped unBail connect with defendants and hosted the conversations at its location, Kennedy said.
“Because these are really deep listening conversations, we also hear their stories too. And that’s been some of the most compelling moments for me, working on this project,” Kennedy said.
The pilot version of the project is coming “very soon,” Kennedy said, and after that, unBail plans to release the beta version of the app in the fall and then fully launch the app next year. The app will launch in Cleveland first, with aspirations to eventually expand to other places.
Kennedy hopes organizations like The Bail Project will partner with unBail and refer clients to the app. For now, the unBail team will continue to gather feedback during the pilot and beta stages, she said. To get involved in the development of the app and provide feedback, Kennedy directs people to subscribe to unBail’s email list (near the bottom of the webpage) and look out for an open call for testers.
Partners and supporters of the app include the city and county courts, local universities, the Cleveland Public Library, and various nonprofits.
“Through this process of creating this product and this organization, I’ve met so many amazing leaders doing phenomenal work in our community. We have the talent and the answers to the problems that we need; we just have to listen to the people that know best,” Kennedy said, referring to both experts in the space and people navigating the criminal justice system.
You can watch the recording of the City Club forum about bail reform here. Learn more about The Bail Project and request help paying bail at the Cleveland page of the nonprofit’s website. Visit unBail’s website to learn more about the app.
Keep our local journalism accessible to all
Reader support is crucial as we continue to shed light on underreported neighborhoods in Cleveland. Will you become a monthly member to help us continue to produce news by, for, and with the community?
P.S. Did you like this story? Take our reader survey!
