SLATE COLUMN: ..It’s important to remember that this system of exploitation is not an accident. It is by design. Because without coercing pleas from as many defendants as possible as expeditiously as possible, the criminal justice system would collapse under its own weight. In 2013, New York City arraigned 365,752 criminal cases (a number that does not include more than 450,000 summonses). Those cases resulted in 691 trial verdicts, leaving 365,061 cases to be disposed of without a trial.
Judges and prosecutors are fully aware of their utter inability to try anything close to the number of cases police push into the system. For the system to function, there must be pleas. By setting bail, judges accomplish two things: They cover themselves politically if a defendant goes out and kills someone (because at least they set bail rather than releasing anyone), and they fundamentally alter the criminal justice playing field by dealing the prosecutors an essentially unbeatable hand.
There is a vaguely Newtonian truth of criminal justice: A body incarcerated tends to stay incarcerated. A body at liberty tends to stay at liberty Much like a phase change in physics, sending someone to jail takes a great deal of effort, and getting him or her out of jail does as well. Thus the incentives to plead guilty when one is at liberty are a fraction of what they are when one is incarcerated… (more)
