It Could Happen Here - How to Build a Bail Fund

Episode Date: November 10, 2023

James talks to some of the blue ridge bail fund organizers about this they have built and sustained their bail fund . Paypal.me/blueridgebail  https://www.gofundme.com/f/blue-ridge-bail-fund See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking music, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and

influencers. Each week, we get deep and raw life stories, combos on the issues that matter to us, and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight up comedia, and that's a song that only nuestra gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Calls on Media. Call Zone Media of November 2023 and the reason we wanted to talk about bail funds today was that we're almost exactly a year out from the election and we're also in the middle of like a massive protest movement against the Israeli bombing of Palestine right I attended a free Palestine protest today lots of you will have attended them over the weekend. Normally in this kind of current political

climate, when people protest about things or when there are elections, it leads to an increased protest movement, which generally leads to more state clap down on the protest movement, which means people getting arrested, which means people getting bailed out. And we have like a year until the election. So it's a good time to maybe talk about organizing to hear from people who have been doing this for a while some of you will remember bail funds for 2020 some of you won't some of you will not be in countries where this is a relevant concept but I still think it's a very important one to talk about and so I'd like each of you guys to introduce yourselves if you could. I can get started. I'm Jake Wiener.

This is my second time on. I was previously on talking about the CBP One app and immigrant surveillance at the border. In my day job, I'm a lawyer at the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C. I'm also a UVA law grad. I've lived in Charlottesville on and off since 2017. And I've been on the board of the B bail fund for about a year and a half now. Yeah, my name is Taylor. And I've lived in Charlottesville pretty much my whole life. For work, I'm a carpenter. And I've been on the bail fund here since 2020. A couple months. I wasn't here for the start, but I joined quickly after it got founded. And I think, yeah.

Hi, I'm Azalea. I'm a 2L at UBA Law. I'm originally from Chicago. I grew up in a very proud Mexican, Mexican-American community. I have lived in the Pacific Northwest, North Carolina, most recently, DC, so various cities and places throughout the country. Nice. That's an excellent group that we got. So I think to start off with, just in case we've got folks who are not in the US or maybe are not familiar, can one of you explain to us what bail is? Yeah. So in the American legal system, we have a pretty unique concept which is after you're arrested for a crime or if you're detained as an immigrant you are then going to go in front of a magistrate who will decide whether you get out of jail right now or whether you have to wait

and most countries in the world that's surely a question of how likely now or whether you have to wait. And most countries in the world, that's surely a question of how likely you are to show up to court and how dangerous you might be to the community, right? Obviously, they're not going to let out someone who's just like killed eight people. That seems like it might be a little unsafe. In America, we do things a little differently. In almost every state and almost every municipality, we have cash bail, which means when you go in front of a magistrate, they will decide how much money you need to pay to get out of jail. And theoretically, this is to ensure that you show up to court. So when you go to court, your case gets finalized, then you're going to get that bail money back. For most offenses, bail is really low. We're talking about $500, $1,000, up to maybe $5,000 for misdemeanors, low-level nonviolent felonies. Now, obviously, if you are a person of means, that's really easy to come up with some money, have a family member

come post it, or to go get a bail bondsman. If you go to a bail bondsman, they're going to charge you about 10% of the cost of your bonds. So if you have a $5,000 bond, that's about 500 bucks, you're not going to get that money back, but then you don't have anything out of pocket. But for a lot of people, the criminal legal system mostly arrests people for crimes of poverty and drug addiction. That's the majority of people who go through the system. They do not have the money to go get a bail bondsman. So we regularly get calls from people who don't have $100, $500 to get out of jail. That's where the bail fund comes in.

We pay people's bonds. No questions asked. Nice. I'd also like to add that in addition to a lot of drug charges, a lot of ways that people end up in jail is through traffic stops and traffic violations, something as minor as a back tail light not being fully lit and that then gives officers police an excuse to proceed from there so something as simple as you know you didn't get to go to the mechanic to have your back tail light um fixed can lead to all sorts of issues down the road of ending up in jail unfortunately in this wonderful country yeah it's yeah it's it's certainly pretty messed up and it's good that we have you guys to help kind of uh well while we're working on having a better system i guess we can make this one a

little bit less painful especially for people who are not people of means so uh with your bail fund perhaps you could explain like obviously some of those better amounts you've posted even the ones you said that were were relatively low there's still a lot of money so uh you guys have had the bail fund for three and a bit years now um how did you go about starting a bail fund and then i guess what are the different roles that each of you plays within it now? Sure, I can talk about a little bit how it got started. It got started in 2020. I'm not 100% sure. But it was about the spring or the summer. And it was pretty much right around the time, you know, George Floyd got murdered, and all the protests

was going on. It was started by a group of four or five law students at UVA. And since the founding, they've all graduated and moved on to other things. But that was a time when it was relatively easy. There was a lot of people donating money. So we were able to raise quite a bit of money at that time. And the way the bonds work is that we pay the bond. And then as the case, as the person goes through the court system and the case gets finalized the money gets returned to us and we're able to use that money to post bonds again and so with even a relatively small amount i believe we have now

we have forty thousand dollars we're able to post a lot of bonds uh up to nearly two hundred thousand dollars so far in bonds posted. And so that's like, it's a self-sustaining process. Like it can sometimes take up to a year to get the money back. But instead of, you know, paying the money and it being gone forever with the bail bondsman, like we're able to continuously do this and get a lot done with a little bit of money. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You can keep it moving through the system, I guess.

Um, so when you guys, uh, like you said, you had that 40 grand, right? Where did that come from? How, how did you guys obtain that 40 grand? Uh, just donations from individuals pretty much. Yeah. I think, like, I think there were some larger donations in the $5,000 range from organizations at the time. But, and then since then it's kind of trickled in, you know, and I think, uh, I've donated my money

sometimes it's, uh, yeah. Yeah. It's very important thing. So perhaps you could, can you give us a, just, we get it, like get it in at the top of the episode. Is there a link where people can donate if they'd like to? Yeah, we absolutely need your donations. Bail funds around the country have had fundraising dry up. And right now we have a waitlist. People are in jail because we don't have enough money. So please donate to us. We're on PayPal at paypal.me slash Blue Ridge Bail. We're also on GoFund um at blue ridge community bail fund and that information is on our instagram which is ridge bail nice at ridge bail perfect so i think you were talking about that like a lot of bail funds have have dried up since 2020 and i know that like i've seen that in

a lot of places so there was this real like growth in organizing in 2020 right and and then obviously there's been like it just people have burnt out people have been incarcerated been a number of things which made that movement hard to sustain that we don't necessarily need to go into but what i do want to talk about is like how you guys have been able to sustain your bail fund and keep helping people out and doing this important work. So perhaps you could explain the different roles that people play in a bail fund. If people are thinking like, oh, this needs to exist in my community.

Like what roles do you have? What kinds of people do you need? Sure. Yeah, I think, you know, a lot of bail funds can be structured differently, but the way ours works, and we're relatively small, and the way ours works is we have a group of um about six of us

that's on the actual board and we handle like the logistics um so i'm the chair jake's the treasurer azalea is a you know board member at large but we all kind of share the same responsibilities which is we answer the phone which is the one of the biggest parts uh when people call us either from the jail or from the street like like family members and someone in jail. And then when we get a call, you know, we'll, we look up the case, call the jail to find out. And then, then what the next step is posting the bond. And so we have a list of volunteers that their job is just to go to

physically go to the jail with the cash to post the bond. And sometimes, you know, one of the board members will do that or so. So, yeah, it's it can be. Yeah. And then as far as like keeping the organization running well, like I said, all the original board members are gone. And I've been the longest running member, but we do have a lot of law students. Like half our board is law students.

And that presents some challenges because they graduate and leave. But it also brings fresh people into the organization. And then, you know, me, I live in Charlottesville. I'm here forever. It helps kind of continue with the institutional knowledge. Sure. Yeah, having that longevity, I think, is important. And Melissa, Jake, and Taylor have done an incredible job sustaining the bail fund.

And those of us who are law students just kind of come in and out and try to support the best we can in the limited time that we're here. Those of us who leave after the three years. Yeah, I'm sure it's still very important to have all those people on your time and energy commitment so like just just by existing right the bail fund kind of points out that this is a system that is broken uh or that it certainly doesn't work to serve people so perhaps we could explain a little bit of that like in the absence of a bail fund how do things look for people who are incarcerated right like what you spoke a little bit about bail bondsman but like perhaps you could talk about like the amount of bail some people would post for oh it would be the amount that how it's calculated

like what it would be and like what that would mean in terms of people being in prison and like how long they might expect to stay in prison just because they couldn't afford that bail or being incarcerated i should not say prison i guess yeah folks are in jail yeah so the one of the cruelest parts of the american criminal justice system criminal legal system there's not much justice is that your freedom is contingent on having wealth. So bail for most offenses, as I've said, is quite low. And it's very, not only is it very difficult to post if you don't have anyone, but it's also, you know, people are locked up because they don't have $500. We, I've gotten calls from people who have literally said, I have, I don't have $500. I've gotten calls from people who have literally said,

I don't have $100 and I don't have anyone on the outside. And I've been sitting in jail for three months. Sometimes for an offense that when they go to court was maybe only a month of jail time. People routinely will spend six months, a year in jail for offenses that their total amount of jail time is a couple months. And you don't get compensated for that. Like, if you spend a year in jail for, which means that you did 11 months that you didn't have to do, the state doesn't like cut you a check that's like, hey, we destroyed your life for 11 months for no reason.

destroyed your life for 11 months for no reason um and i one of the things that is just like the most heartbreaking about doing this work but is also sometimes like it makes you feel really good is the way that caging people just like ruins their lives um it's incredibly hard to talk to people in jail from the outside it's very expensive so when to people in jail from the outside. It's very expensive. So when you're in jail, you are not talking, you're like not talking to your loved ones. You are not able to sustain a job. You're probably losing housing. Um, it's, it's destroying, you know, the life that you have on the outside. Um, but the flip side is like, we've gotten calls from folks who have said like, Hey,

you bonded me out. And now I got a new job. I got a new place to live. Like I'm doing great, which is incredibly meaningful. Um, and Taylor can probably talk a little more about what being in jail is like. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks.

So I think one of the things that like really drew me to this work is like, I'm an abolitionist. And but when I was younger, I spent two years in jail. I was 23, 23 to 25. I was in jail for selling drugs. And I think like, yeah, I really that's like something that really motivates me now to do this stuff. It's it's crazy. Like Jake said, yeah, we've had people that one guy called and thought that we were a bail bondsman and then found out like on the phone he's like oh I didn't know you guys

like we pay my bond for free it was a $500 bond so he would have to pay $50 to a bail bondsman and he didn't call us for several days because he thought he has $50. So it's like, you know, I like it's, you know, we spent all this time, like, let's thinking about like, left his stuff and like, but it's, it's eyeopening to see people that are stuck in jail, like for lack of a hundred dollars, you know? Like, and that's it, they can't get out. And so I think, yeah, like, and then sometimes people call us and they're like, I have nobody, there's nobody out outside that can help them. So it's that kind of stuff. It is upsetting. Like, yeah, it's like crazy to see this like system set up like this. But it's like,

it's one of the things that like really motivates me to keep doing this work is like, man, it's so rewarding when you get those calls. And then also I think to expand on something Jay said about the bail system, it's like it's the magistrates when you go in front of the magistrate to get the bond, there's no the magistrates have no oversight, they're not elected. It's, you know, we kind of joke like it's a vibe based system, like they just can issue a bond for however much they feel like and so this is where you're really going to see like the structural racism and like the classism really come crashing down on people you know

in front of this system so yeah one thing that i'd like to add because i think people don't really realize is so a magistrate is working under a judge they're basically a judge is like an appointed position or elected you have to be a. You have to have a fair amount of legal education. Your magistrate is just some dude, like the most some dude person you've ever met. They have no training require. They have no like legal training requirements. Many of them are like fresh out of the army. Like maybe went to college, maybe didn't. So you're talking about someone who has no particular expertise in evaluating people, looking at someone for a few minutes and deciding how dangerous they are to the community and making up in their head how much that person can probably pay to get out.

Yeah. I spent the summer, my first year after year after summer after first year of law school at the Lynchburg public defender office. So I got to review a lot of body cam footage and the way it worked with the magistrate. A lot of the times was that a police officer would give a report, an incident report, read it aloud, them in they'd say this is true this is what happened they would give their full report and basically that's how it was determined whether bail would be or how much bail would be set to um it was heartbreaking and it was very it happened very quickly like it was all based on the police officer's report and what they

just decided to spew in five minutes or less yeah that's uh yeah it's it's a pretty messed up system i think some states have like bail guidelines right if i'm not mistaken like i think california has like you know if you did this if if you're accused of this offense and then your bail goes in this bucket and then you know if it adds up depending on offenses or conspiracy or whatever yeah that's a really good point like the thing about bail is this different like in every state almost some states you know have maybe like more progressive quote-unquote uh setups but some some have some don't and yeah yeah i was going to say like california has a reputation of being progressive san diego has charged some of the most insanely high bail

amounts i've ever seen although we all aspire to do what illinois just did at the beginning of this year which was to eliminate uh bail altogether it would just or cash bail altogether. It would just be based on whether you can be released or not. Yeah, that would be nice. Just to be clear, the bail isn't like, it's not like the state keeps the money unless you don't show up. Is it a revenue generator for state, or is this purely like a revenue generator for state choices purely like

a sort of punitive thing that they think has some kind of value in that regard it's purely punitive the idea truly is to make sure that you show up to your court case um and in the u.s it's often used as a proxy for dangerousness so you when you go in front of a magistrate you got three options number one is your get out on personal recognizance if you're a nice white boy like me you're getting personal recognizance almost certainly yeah um option two is you're gonna have to pay cash bail and that amount is decided by the magistrate as you said possibly on a schedule possibly just whatever the magistrate feels like.

And then option three is you might get no bond, which is to say that it doesn't matter how much money you have, you're not getting out of jail. And in like a functioning criminal legal system that just on its own terms, like worked, this is not an abolitionist perspective. Cash bail is unnecessary. The magistrate should be deciding and the judge should be deciding whether you are a threat to the community or whether you're not. And that should be like the only option. The other thing I'll throw in here is that paying money is not the best way to make sure that people show up to court. There's extensive data from the immigration system and from the legal system that the

number one best way to make sure people show up to their court date is to give them an attorney. Yeah. Yeah, which is a whole other thing we can get into with immigration. So I think that's a really good kind of example of a good deep dive into what bail is. So essentially, a bail fund can make it so that there is not this financial burden or this financial barrier to freedom, right? Well, you haven't been yet to be convicted of any crime. So it's not necessarily an abolitionist thing to exist,

but it helps at least move us towards a less cruel, a less unjust system, I suppose. So I want to talk about a little bit of the nuts and bolts of what it takes to run a bail fund. But before we do that, we are 22 minutes in. So talking of nuts and bolts, we need to pay our bills. So this is an advert. It's probably not something you need, but here it is anyway.

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Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. I hope you've bought whatever it was, MREs or one of Reagan's dog coins or, I don't know, a Hoover. So let's talk about the, like, if you're listening to this and you're in your car on your way home or whatever time you're listening uh on a long road trip you're thinking i would like to be the person maybe you're a law student yourself or you're formerly incarcerated person or you've had family members go through the uh system and you're like hell yeah this shit sucks and i would

like to help make it a little bit less sucky. When you're like, I'm thinking here, when you establish a bail fund, like is it a 501c3? Do you need like a certain, like do you, I know for 501c3, you need certain people and a certain number of people doing certain jobs on your board, that kind of stuff. Like what are the like concrete steps that one has to take to go from this sucks to i'm the chair of the bail fund and i can help you yeah i can talk a little bit about that um

so we are a 501c3 um but uh we were posting bonds before we had like the official status so i think truly like all you need is some motivation and some money. There are bail funds that post 10 to 15 bonds a week. And there's bail funds that post one bond a month because that's all they can do. And I think as our organization has grown and matured, we've gotten way more organized. And we started out, it was, it was pretty chaotic and people, it was poorly organized, but we were still posting the bonds. And I think from day one, we've been good about that. And so like, you can definitely start and you'll learn as you we've learned as we go and,

you know, we refined everything, but like I said, it just, it takes some motivation and a little bit of money. And then maybe Jake can talk some too, but the finer details. Yeah. So I think Taylor's absolutely right. I'm going to give some recommendations that I would say are how to set up your structure in a durable way. But I would also point people to the National Bail Fund Network, which can provide resources and advice for this type of thing. thing. So basically what you need to run your bail fund is you need a group of people. The load, honestly, is just like too much for one person, both emotionally and literally.

You need people to share this work with for it to be sustainable. I recommend that you set up a 501c3 nonprofit. This will help shield your volunteers from legal liability. And it means you could take tax-deductible donations. The way that you set that up is going to depend on your state. Um, in Virginia, you register that with a state corporation commission, which means you need a like president, which is Taylor. Um, and you need a treasurer and then a couple other, potentially a couple other board members. These are the people who own technically the 501c3. And you just need those people on your documents.

You can use their address, but we recommend that you set up a PO box for getting mail. It just makes things a little easier. It means you don't have to hand your personal address over to a magistrate. Yeah, it makes you less doxable as well. Yes. And I recommend setting up a dedicated bank account

and go to a bank that has good hours so that you can readily withdraw cash because you can only postpone in cash, which is its own insanity. So one thing we deal with is the bank being closed and then having to wait a couple of days, a day and a half to be able to post. Yeah.

We also recommend a Google voice phone number so that multiple people can receive phone calls at the same time, right? We can have four people on our Google voice. And that means that if I'm working, Taylor can answer the phone. We split it up by weeks. So we have a point person each week who is responsible for answering the phone mainly. But that doesn't mean you're the only person who answers that week. It's just sort of you want to be more heads up. You also are going to want a decision making structure. We use a consensus based model, do most of our discussions in a signal thread.

based model. I'm doing most of our discussions in a single thread, but then we also meet about once a month. And if we have some issue that comes up, we can meet more often. And you need ideally a way to connect to volunteers. So we've had good luck with the law school, but we're expanding beyond that, you know, trying to be go to different institutions in the community and recruit folks to volunteer for us. You want to do some amount of vetting of your volunteers. They should be in an affinity network or have a way that you can ensure that they're not going to walk away with the five grand in cash that you hand them. It doesn't have to be extensive, but it's good to be smart about. And one thing that we found really helpful is having business cards, because that means you can hand it to the magistrate and they can get your address right.

They can put the name of the bail fund down. A problem that we've had is not all magistrates recognizing the bail fund, but you really want to have a PO box and that business card so that when you get checks back from the court system, they come to a centralized place. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And then anyone can drop in and deposit them in the bank account. And then the last thing that you want is website and a fundraising infrastructure. So as we said at the top right now, we're using GoFundMe and PayPal. But any way that you make this work is great and we can definitely do better

and we'll be expanding. That's basically it though. It's really not that much. Yeah, but that's great. I think it's like so often, like a thing that I've seen just being sort of on the left in various movements since I was younger.

It's like we reinvent the wheel every four or five years, you know? So just having those things that you guys have learned, you know, like using Google voice and, and having a bank with good hours, I think that saves someone from having to fall down those same holes again. So that's, that's really valuable. I wonder then like you talked a little bit about legal liability, which we don't necessarily need to go into but like there must is there like for i mean there have been some obviously heavily

politicized arrests in the last few months in the united states uh do you guys face like personal blowback or blowback against a group when if uh if you're able to bail someone out where their arrest has been heavily reported on or politicized because that's something people need to be aware of. I think that's a great question. Um, where we are, there's really, we haven't posted the bond for anything that's like political protest related, but there is a bail fund that's about an hour away, much bigger than ours that in 2020 was doing like every night bail support, uh, jail support.

Um, so yeah, that's like an example of, you know, just way different bill funds operate. Um, and then, so basically we have not ever faced any kind of political blowback or any

issues. Um, but it's definitely something that we're prepared. We think about, uh, cause it can't happen there's definitely cases around the country where like prosecutors

have taken aim at bail funds you know Atlanta of course was a really a really big one but I think so yeah Jake do you have anything to add maybe yeah I will say that it's certainly a possibility that your bail fund becomes the target

of both like institutional and like a kind of right-wing moral panic. These things happen. It's, I think, relatively unlikely, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be prepared for it. And I think that when you kind of address that, and if you're end up in the media, or getting heat for it, the most important thing that you can do is reflect the fact that the bail fund is not responsible for what happens when people get out,

because we don't decide if you're getting out of jail. We will work on a first come first serve basis. When someone calls us, we post their bail, no questions asked. And that's because there's already been a decision of whether this person is safe to be released. And that decision is made by the magistrate. So any responsibility falls on the criminal legal system. It does not fall on us. I think it's important to say that you never hear this blowback coming towards bail bondsmen even though they get out way more people and more dangerous people than we do yeah yeah that's definitely the case um so i wonder like what other issues you have faced

hardships and you spoke about a couple of them but uh are there other things like um that you've i know for instance like i've obviously as part of my reporting or maybe not obviously but some people apparently don't bother to do it but uh i communicate with incarcerated people when i'm writing about them uh because it seems like a reasonable thing to do and i i am very aware of how annoying, expensive, time-consuming and just generally totally inadequate the system is of communication with people, even people who are not convicted of any crime. So I don't know if that's something you've encountered,

if there are other sort of hardships that you guys have had to deal with. Perhaps if there are ways you've worked out to get around them or to at least make them less difficult, then that would be great for people to hear too the communication thing is a huge problem yeah exactly uh you know most of the calls we get are from people that are currently in the jail and they can only call us and we cannot call them uh so you know they call us and we have to just say okay like you need to call back in a couple hours and then uh you know they have lockdowns they can't get to the phone all sorts of things so the worst i mean yeah probably one of the worst things that ever

happened was someone called and i called the jail and the jail was like oh they can be released today and so the guy calls back and i'm like, hey, man, you're going to get released today. We're going to have a volunteer go out and post this bond. Like, you don't need to call me back. Like, if you want to, you can, but it's all rolling. Right. Yeah. And then I call the jail to triple check everything.

And they say, oh, you know, we have to hear back from the court. The court has to approve this. And they're like closing in in 30 minutes so it's not going to happen today jesus and so now like i have no way to call this guy and tell him that he's actually not going to get out today because of a like bureaucratic issue yeah i just have to wait until he just like can't take anymore and then calls and that was it's really unpleasant situation it's really unfortunate and you know he was not happy he was not happy and i mean you know he took a little bit out on me but it wasn't

the case of him actually mad at me you know i think that's something that's really cool is like no one we deliver bad news all the time you know we say you can't get out because of xyz and no one's ever like actually mad at us you know they might be like annoyed for a second because you know i'm on the phone delivering the bad news but every time at the end they're like thanks so much like i appreciate you so we haven't had any like i mean yeah i think nothing really super negative has happened it's just like you said the communication huge problem when it's family members calling from not in jail it's a little more easy to deal with we can call them back yeah yeah i'll jump in on communication just for a minute yeah because this is an issue that i

work on in my day job yeah the paid prison phone system is one of the worst parts of American life. It is incredibly expensive to call people and the phone systems work really poorly and they're actually getting worse. So for us, like our, the main jail that we work with, Middle River Regional Jail, used to use a phone provider called GTL, who's one of the biggest in the country.

And that was pricey, but we could reliably get calls. They just switched over to a different provider who makes money in a different way. They provide tablets to the prison. And as a result of that, all our phone calls are now made coming from the prison social room on a tablet, which means sometimes it's too loud to hear the person calling. And about 15% of the time, the call just drops when you pick it up. So the system makes it really difficult to correspond with people. As a result,

a couple of things that we do are sharing the phone responsibility, not promising people things when we can't deliver them is super important. And like, that's mostly a problem because the phone system works so badly and we can't communicate with people. And then the biggest thing is like giving yourself grace when you miss the phone, when something goes wrong,

because it's emotionally very taxing to know that someone desperately wants to speak with you because they're potentially at the worst point in their entire life and need to get out and you've like missed a phone call um so it's yeah it's really important to be kind to yourself in those situations um yeah yeah you won't stick around. One more thing that I was surprised to find out about the phone system is how much recording and reviewing of recording goes on through those phone calls. I witnessed so many prosecutors,

Commonwealth attorneys, bring up something from phone calls when folks were actually in trial or for sentencing hearings, or this is later down the road, but the fact that they could pull up those recordings from a year before two years before they were, they were calling a loved one, a family member, just incredible how much access there is to that and lack of privacy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's very dehumanizing i gotta jump in on

that yeah yeah you end up in jail do not say anything about your case on the phone not oh and don't talk to the guards about why you're innocent because i've seen that people do that it's not good advice don't do it don't talk about the case ever yeah one way that we address that is by telling people up front that we post bond no questions asked um and like telling people like it doesn't matter what your situation is we're if we have the money and you can get out we're gonna post yeah yeah yeah it's not your job to adjudicate like you said if someone's safe or unsafe or innocent or guilty that that's what the state purports to be doing like your job is just to make sure that someone's not too poor to

be free welcome i'm daniel thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction

of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God, things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better.

Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hey, I'm Gianna Prandenti. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money?

I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year, you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're gonna get 15% every single year,

but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts so on the subject of like the sheer finances of it, I know like certainly here, I've seen and I have no idea what the sort of, I know San Diego does have, California has these bail guidelines so they can't just set whatever bail they want. But like in 2020, we saw some sky high bails.

And I don't know if it was just because it was like, fuck you bail fund or it was just because that was what the guidelines allowed or some combination thereof. But do you guys have a like, we can't, because you said you're dealing with 40,000, right? Like if you drop 10,000 on one individual, that obviously means that there are a lot of people

with $500 who can't, who have to stay in jail. So do you have like a cap on your individual bail amounts for that reason? Yeah, Taylor, do you want to take this? Yeah, yeah. So yeah, we have a cap. We pay up to $5,000. So $5,000 or less.

And that, yeah, it's exactly what you said. Like, otherwise, you know, we would be totally broke and out of money. And even, you know, two $5,000 bonds in a row, and then, yeah, we're pretty screwed. And then I think that brings up something else that Jake and I were talking about. It's important to stick to that limit. One time we posted a bond up to $12,000 for somebody.

And I think it was a combination of many factors that led us to do that. But at the end of the day, it can be very hard just to tell someone no because it was like he had a $5,000 bond and then in a separate court, I got another one. And so we already told him he could pay the one bond. Anyway, long story short, we had $12,000 tied up on this guy and then he didn't show up to court um and if that's that's when you can lose the money and people don't show up to court so uh well yeah fortunately for us unfortunately for him he did

get re-arrested on another charge. And when that happens, there's like a 90 day period where if the person gets caught, then we get the money back. And that's where like, we, our prints, our policy is like, we're not going to do anything.

If the person runs, like, we're not going to do anything to try to get it back. We're not going to revoke anybody's bond. But like a bail bondsman might try to like find you if you run yeah but so our kind of our joke was kind of like well we hope that we hope the guy just gets away completely but if he's not going to get away maybe get caught within 90 days yeah but but the best thing is if uh people would contribute and donate we could be able to allocate for so many more people

and not have people spend time in jail where things like mental health conditions worsen because prison guards are and jail guards are not paying attention where you don't have access to an attorney easily where when you show up to your day in court, you don't have an orange jumpsuit on and that's not factoring into the judge's mind. So please, please donate for all those reasons to our bail fund. Yeah. If we had more money, that's something we talked about a lot of times. If we had more money, we would be able to raise the limit on the amount we could post but it's just not feasible right now in terms of donation it's a great thing i was just thinking like good because it keeps going

around and around and around right it's not like you know you give a donation once and you get someone a thing and you change their life like you could potentially change dozens or hundreds of people's whole trajectory yeah absolutely cool and yeah and i will add on how we address our lack of funds the other system that we have in place is a waitlist so people call us and we can tell them hey you're on the waitlist they'll call back all the time be like hey have i moved up the waitlist sometimes people call like multiple times a day and they're like, Oh, any movement? My number four now, which is kind of wild, but having the waitlist and we go like in strict waitlist order with the exception that if someone has an under $500, $500 or less,

we'll just post that because if we're sitting around waiting for someone to like get money back from the courts for a $5,000 bond that's next in line, we could have 4,500 bucks. And so for the super low bonds where the issue is like purely, purely poverty, we make an exception. But you run into that kind of ethical question all the time running the bail fund, like, how do we make the best decisions to help people in the best way and then accords with our values the most, that can get pretty heated and intense. And having a setup of folks where you really respect each other and like each other, I think is really important to not let that spiral out of control it helps that you know taylor and melissa and i

have been friends for many years um and we can like hang out and talk about this and then like taylor and i can go out and go for a bike ride um nice so having those relationships i think is really important yeah yeah and don't get too competitive over board games like wings uh when somebody wins and still being able to talk at the end of that seems like a direct uh experience one man yeah we are an abolitionist like in principles you know and um but i think almost like you know i've talked one of their bail fund that i know of they have a some sort of system i'm not super familiar with like prioritizing someone that maybe they consider to be higher risk in the prison system to get out first and i think that

that's a really a really appealing uh thing but it's it's just like kind of jake touched on earlier like that's just adding like another layer of judgment like then we become these like arbiters of who is in jail and who's not in jail and yeah as much and so like almost almost counterintuitively like having this system first come first serve i think is like the most abolitionist thing we can do yes i can see that yeah yeah and it does certainly reduces the load on you and making those difficult choices which it helps see that yeah yeah and it does certainly reduces the load on you and making those difficult choices which it helps with that yeah yeah we were talking about the system and like i want to bring that up because the system is like you know i i cover not a lot of criminal justice but a decent

bit and it is incredibly confusing it's convoluted it's like they've got these old ass names that you don't understand and then the gear in virginia so you have a whole other layer of weird stuff going on uh liquid names and so like if someone's thinking of starting this and they're like i want this to happen but i do not understand how to navigate this system does that mean that they need someone with a little more legal experience like can you explain how as like someone who isn't obviously some of both uh like at least two of you have i suppose all of you have some experience with the legal system in one way or another and understand it a little better because of that but if someone has been fortunate enough not to have to interact with the uh the criminal law system. Are they like, do they need a law student

or a lawyer to start a bail fund? Or like, how does one go about learning to navigate that system, I suppose? Yeah, they definitely do not. You do not need to have legal experience. I think it was kind of a just random chance that it was the law students that founded this one. Basically, like you said,

it's an extremely confusing system. And the only way you're going to learn how it all works is just by going and posting the bonds like the the system is possible like the bond system we're just like a family member going to post someone's bond so like it's set up and then it is possible for like your loved one to post your bond um and we just learned it all with experience you know you just go you call you would just call the jail and say where do i post this bond and they'll tell you you know you come to the magistrate this is where the magistrate's located and then you

know you go with the cash and post and like there'll be every like we work in it's 10 courts five different jurisdictions and then they each have two court systems. And I swear almost every single court does things somewhat differently. And the way we just get on the phone and call them, be really polite and just figure it all out

and write it down so that we know in the future. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'll tell you, you can learn these systems over time and that's really worth doing because in a moment of crisis, like mass arrest during a protest movement, knowing how to navigate the system in a quick and reliable way is really valuable. It makes it way easier to get people out. If you don't feel really strongly about getting people out of jail, but you want to be helpful in a time of crisis, like learning the legal system as a non-lawyer is doable.

I'll also say that like you don't learn how to do this stuff in law school. I didn't learn how to post a bond, how to like file a KPIs, any of this crazy stuff that we have to do. Virginia is truly like one of the worst states in the country. I talked to a public defender who's worked in courts in Louisiana and was like, yeah, Virginia court system is worse and more unfathomable. If you know anything about New Orleans legal system is not great, but you can, you know, you can learn an incredible amount. And then that skill just becomes valuable in a number of different areas. One of the most like

powerful ways that can help people is even when you're not able to postpone for them, knowing how to look up someone's case, tell them what their charges are, tell them what is happening to them is incredibly helpful because the majority of people we talk to have some idea of why they're in jail, but they don't know the details. And that means that they don't know why they're not getting out. And just being able to give people a little bit of certainty is really important yeah i think it's a very valuable thing you can do um i yeah i think this whole thing has been a really valuable insight into how to build a bail fund i guess um is there anything else

do you guys think that we didn't cover like in the in the grand scheme of being bail friend uh entrepreneurs i don't know what the right phrase is, bail fund founders. Just the importance and making sure to be rooted in the community. I think that's going to be the best way not only to fundraise in the long term, because you can have even $5 if it's reoccurring from some community members, you get to know what's happening, what's something that's a reoccurring problem throughout the community um and just making sure to listen to that and to be able to navigate going forward i think one thing uh this i think i found so interesting about doing this the bail fund

is that it spans it really crosses completely there or even like, I would say it transcends politics. I think that all of the board members are in here politically motivated, you know, or abolitionists or, you know, against the current court system. But the people's lives, like across every political spectrum spectrum have been ruined by prison and jail and i think one time like i think the most interesting example that really drove this home was i was at work i was at the lumber yard you know and i think you know the people the salesmen at the lumber yard i think they would fall in the more if i was going to stereotype them i would say they're doing one of the conservative side and the one guy the salesman was he had heard about that i did this i think you saw on facebook i posted about it and he was like that is he's like this is the coolest

thing ever man like i think it's so awesome you know like he's like people are just locked up for like bullshit and yeah and i think you know we've had volunteers that i think people were like knew him or like why i think he's a like almost like a Republican and just going out and posting his bonds? And I think that it's, like I said, yeah, it's just fascinating that it does transcend. It transcends the politics a little bit. Yeah, I think anyone who's had to interact with the criminal justice system,

I haven't interacted with the American one, but if they've had it in their family, if they've had it in their friend group or whatever, realizes how dehumanizing and unjust it is. And especially if they're working people, not people of massive means, they'll have seen how hard it can weigh on you trying to come up with money to bond someone out

who you care about, even if they end up not being found guilty. And so it can be a very broad-based thing i think uh it's certainly something that like i saw a lot of people giving money to bail funds in 2020 who like i may not have you know they weren't necessarily people who are also out in the streets like it's a way for people to be part of a movement it's a way for people to who feel that like this is unjust, even if, yeah, they might not share abolitionist politics or whatever. I think it's something that a lot of people would want to get behind.

Yeah, I'll say that for me, the most meaningful part of this work is having the opportunity to treat people with dignity when they are in a system that absolutely gives them no dignity. The police do not treat people with dignity. The judges in the courts do not treat people with dignity. And your jailers are not going to treat you with dignity. So having the opportunity to answer a phone and be kind to someone, to listen to them and to do small things for them, call their family, let their family know that they're locked up. Let their family know that someone is working on

getting them out. Oftentimes, I will get a call from someone and we aren't able to post, but I can call their mom and talk their mom through getting a bail bondsman. I've had people cry on the phone with me because they've said, I felt so helpless not being able to get my son out of jail and getting a call from you made a huge difference so i think i just like if you can do this you can get together with your friends and form a bail fund and in a really concrete way improve their lives and treat them with dignity and that's such a radical thing yeah that's really cool yeah all right so i think to wrap up we should we should again remind people where they can give you their money so how how will people go about doing that yeah please please donate to the blue ridge community bail fund um we are on paypal at paypal.me slash blue ridge bail

ridge is r-i-d-g-E. We're on GoFundMe. You can find us on the Blue Ridge Community Bail Fund. We are on Instagram at Ridge Bail. And we also have a website, blueridgebailfund.org. I think so.

You can Google Blue Ridge Community Bail Fund. It'll show up. And yeah, if anybody is interested in starting a bail fund and wants to ask us any questions, please do. We would love to talk about it.

We've learned a lot through just reaching out to other bail funds, even if they're not in the state of Virginia, of how they were formed, what worked for them, what didn't. Just having a 30-minute conversation gives sometimes wonderful ideas on how to go forward. That's great. Thank you so much, guys. I think that's really good. Anything else you want to share before we go? I think we're good. Awesome. Thanks so much. Thank you for having us. Yeah, thanks.

It Could Happen Here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com sources thanks for. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of an anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons?

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Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season or wherever you get your podcasts veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from.