Film 'Criminal' Exposes Injustice of Cash Bail and Houston Jail Deaths

The Crisis of Cash Bail

• 💸 The film 'Criminal' highlights the injustices of the criminal legal system, focusing on how the for-profit cash bail system preys on the poor and mentally ill.
• ⚖️ Alec Karakatsanis describes the cash bail system as unconstitutional, leading to millions of coerced guilty pleas annually because people are desperate to get out of jail.
• ⛓️ Hundreds of thousands of people are incarcerated solely because their families lack the cash for pre-trial release, not due to being a danger to the community.
• 🇺🇸 The United States and the Philippines are the only countries with a for-profit commercial money bail industry.

Harris County Jail: A Warehouse for the Mentally Ill

• 🏥 Harris County Jail is the largest warehouse of people with mental illness in Texas, with 78% of its inmates tagged as psychiatric.
• 🚨 The jail has become the community's emergency room, criminalizing mental illness, homelessness, and reproductive rights.
• 💔 At least 15 people have died in Harris County Jail this year, disproportionately those with serious mental illness and medical issues who cannot advocate for themselves.
• 🩺 A 39-year-old man with severe schizophrenia died of a treatable throat infection after starving because he couldn't advocate for his needs.

Systemic Failures and Propaganda

• 😔 The film features a clip of a prisoner incarcerated for 13 months awaiting a court date, feeling compelled to plead guilty just to move the process forward.
• 📢 In misdemeanor cases in Harris County, 84% of poor defendants plead guilty within 3.2 days because they cannot afford bail.
• 😷 During COVID-19, prisoners in Harris County Jail reported unsanitary conditions, including sweeping with newspapers and being denied food and solitary confinement.
• 🗣️ The jail's statement about a low COVID-19 mortality rate is dismissed as a distraction from the preventable deaths of vulnerable individuals.

The Punishment Bureaucracy and Propaganda

• 📈 The U.S. incarcerates Black people at six times the rate of South Africa during apartheid and puts all humans in jail at six times the rate of comparable countries.
• 💰 A multibillion-dollar industry profits from every stage of the punishment bureaucracy, incentivizing its expansion.
• 🎭 Propaganda is used to create a narrative that the system is about safety and justice, not profit and control.
• ⚠️ Propaganda narrows the conception of threat to marginalized groups while ignoring larger harms like wage theft and air pollution, fostering fear and justifying increased investment in punishment.