The cost of reducing risk
The Texas Organizing Project came under fire in December, because they had bailed out a person two years previously (on a misdemeanor DV charge) who committed a more serious crime two years later. One form of logic says they either should have known this man in particular would cause harm in the future, or should have had a more stringent general standard before bailing him out. We know that he did commit harm later, so it stands to some reason that they are responsible for it. This isn’t something we want to get wrong in the future!
But what happens when we apply this logic across hundreds of thousands of people cycling through the system each year? We would be keeping tens of thousands of people in jail for months (because they are too poor to pay bail) in order to be more confident that we’re not going to let someone out who might commit a more serious crime in two years.
This starts to look and feel like collective punishment: let all of those people suffer the agony of imprisonment, the trauma and pain, the loss of family connections, the destruction of their families who can’t survive economically without them, the massively increased chances that their children will end up in jail or prison, all to reduce the chances that someone will be let out who might commit another harm. These thousands of other people whose lives are at stake tend to be made invisible in this analysis, as if it were only about whether it’s ok to limit the freedom of one person who presents a risk. But it’s never about just one person. These are systematic practices.