Tuesday, November 23, 2021
Tragedy in Waukesha
Many of the people I know are prison abolitionists-- they think we would be better off without anyone incarcerated. I disagree with them, as I do think there are some people who can only be incapacitated from committing crime through incarceration (and even then, only if we do incarceration right and they don't victimize others in the prison).
As most people know, there was a terrible tragedy in Waukesha, Wisconsin on Sunday. Darrell Brooks is suspected of being the person who plowed through a Christmas parade in an SUV, killing five people and injuring 48. Some of those killed and injured were part of the "Dancing Grannies" who were performing in the parade.
Brooks reportedly was involved in a "domestic incident," and then fled that scene-- right through the Christmas parade. Brooks was free on $1,000 bail on charges related to running over a woman with his car-- something that happened on November 5. At the time of that incident he was already out on bail for charges asserting he fired a handgun during an argument in 2020. He also jumped bail on a 2016 charge out of Nevada.
How he got $1,000 bail after jumping bail twice is baffling.
It gets complicated, of course. The primary purpose of bail is not incapacitation-- it is to ensure that defendants show up for their next court date. If the point was simply incapacitation, we would just detain people without bail. But, clearly, bail had failed to serve that function in Brooks's previous cases.
Bail is problematic, of course-- it too often serves as a way to incarcerate poor people who are presumed innocent while wealthier people get out pending trial. But there are ways to combine ways of assuring later appearances without using bail that would still detain people like Brooks who flaunt the rules. For example, in the federal system, the two most-often used pretrial tools are unsecured bond and detention pending trial. Neither involves bail, and the latter is useful in cases such as this one (where the issue is not innocence or guilt, but failure to show up for court in the past).
People who know me know that I think there are some people in prison who shouldn't be. But there are also some people NOT in prison who should be-- and this may well be one of them.
