(NEW YORK CITY SCOTT STRINGERS) January 19, 2017 — The U.S. jails more people than any country on the planet – over a million Americans. That’s because for decades, our nation embraced a backwards approach to criminal justice. Since it was politically popular to be “tough on crime,” America built more and more prisons, and implemented policies that put more and more people in them.

Mass incarceration isn’t just morally wrong. It hasn’t worked – and it has left millions of Americans behind. As a nation, we need to turn the page on the criminal justice policies of the past. As a city, we need to lead in the fight.

So yesterday, we took a big step. We released a groundbreaking new report to end commercial bail in New York City. Here’s why.

Every year, 50,000 people are detained before their trials, and 33,000 of them – or two-thirds – are held in City corrections facilities because they can’t make bail. Yet, if those tens of thousands of New Yorkers had been wealthy, they wouldn’t be detained at all.

In short, that means the criminal justice system is punishing New Yorkers for being low-income, and it means that we don’t have a uniform system of justice.

Equally important, by detaining people pre-trial because of income, we’re putting artificial hurdles on their ability to get jobs, secure places to live, and be successful economically. Consequently, we’re making it harder for people to escape the revolving door of the corrections system.

And while bail doesn’t reduce the risk of flight and actually worsens recidivism, it comes at a cost to New York City taxpayers – a whopping $100 million per year.

So who wins in all of this? The bail bond industry.

Last year, it extracted as much as $27 million in non-refundable fees from low-income New Yorkers. It’s an industry that profits off of suffering, and it’s making money from those who need it most.

That’s wrong. We can’t have one set of outcomes for the wealthy – and another for those trying to make ends meet.

So yesterday, we called for an end to commercial bail in New York City, and after becoming first in the nation to divest our pension funds from the private prison industry last year, it’s yet another way we’re trying to lead on criminal justice.

It’s morally right, economically smart, and critical to reversing the short-sighted policies of the past.

And we’re going to keep leading.

Thanks for everything.

Scott