TED Radio Hour - Bonus Episode: Robin Steinberg

Episode Date: November 17, 2021

Nearly half a million Americans are jailed because they can't pay bail. In this live conversation, host Manoush Zomorodi interviews public defender Robin Steinberg, who has created a rotating bail fund to help pay cash bail for those who can't afford it. This bonus episode is a follow up to our most recent episode, Bucking The System – stories of outsiders who are taking on institutions like schools, medicine, and policing.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Anous Zummerode. And this week, we have a little something extra for you to listen to. It's a follow-up to our most recent episode where we profiled three people who are bucking the system, making systemic change. Which is really hard to do. We dove into fixing the school system, law enforcement, even the pharmaceutical industry. The speakers were pretty amazing. And now I just want to add one more person for you to listen to.

public defender Robin Steinberg. She's changing how jails work in the U.S., in particular, the bail bond system. Robin and her husband David Figa co-founded the bail project, which now operates in 18 states, and it's kind of ingenious what they do. I got to interview Robin in 2019 at the TED Women Conference. Here we are on the TED stage, where Robin started off by explaining how she and David came up with the idea a few years ago. So we had both spent decades in the trenches of the criminal legal system as public defenders, fighting for each and every client the best we could,

defending people's humanity and their dignity and fighting for their freedom. And no matter how good we were as lawyers, and I like to think we were really good, and how forceful we fought on behalf of a client, sometimes it all came down to a few hundred dollars. And that was whether or not your client could pay bail and fight her case from freedom or whether she was going to be locked in jail

on Rikers Island and desperate would wind up pleading guilty whether she did it or not. And that just enraged us. And sometimes, you know, the answers are simple and they're right in front of you. And so we thought, well, what if we just paid clients bail? And that's where the idea of creating a revolving bail fund

because bail comes back at the end of a case, if we could raise money and put it in a fund, and have a revolving fund, we could just pay bail for our clients. Now, I have to say that was back in 2005. People weren't talking about criminal justice reform the way they are now. There wasn't a lot of conversation about bail reform. And quite honestly, we spent two years knocking on people's door.

Nobody answered. Until one day, one man and his family, Jason Flom and his family, decided to take a chance on us and gave us a grant in 2007. and we began to test the revolving bail fund model and to see what would happen. Can you clarify, though, why it is so important for someone not to be in jail while they await trial?

You've explained this in the past, and it really blew my mind because I had no idea what could happen in those days or weeks before someone actually has to plead their case. Sure. So being held in jail even for a few days can change the trajectory of,

your life. It is not only the place where you can be victimized sexually, you can be exposed to violence, you'll be traumatized in all sorts of ways while you're in the jail. And even that's even the first few days or a week is when most jail deaths actually, whether there's suicides or homicides, actually happen. But while you're sitting in jail, and I understand folks sitting in jail pre-trial have not been convicted of a crime. They're there because they don't have enough money to pay bail. And while that's happening, people's lives are falling apart outside. You're losing your job. You might be losing your home. Your children might be taken from me. Your immigration status might be jeopardized. You might get thrown

out of school. So it's the damage to you that's happening in our local jails, but it's also what's happening to you and your family and your community that you've been removed from while you're waiting for your trial, which, by the way, can take days, weeks, and no exaggeration can take years. So you explained this sort of crazy limbo that people Lauren, from the TED stage in 2018. And I want to just play a quick clip from that talk that you gave, which was incredibly moving. Can we play that? It's time to do something big.

It's time to do something bold. It's time to do something maybe audacious. We want to take our proven, revolving bail fund model that we built in the Bronx and spread it across America, attacking the front end of the legal system before incarceration begins. The energy in the room when you gave your talk was palpable, and it ended up getting you quite a bit of funding from the Audacious Project, which is Ted's initiative to get some of these big ideas support to make them actually happen. Can you explain what has happened since you gave your talk?

Sure. So the Audacious Grant allowed us to take our proven concept, and to scale it. And the idea is that we are scaling this model across the country. We're currently in 18 different sites. And we are doing two things, right? The bail project is designed both provide an immediate lifeline for folks that are stuck in jail cells

simply because of poverty because they can't pay their bail. And that's the immediate response to the immediate direct emergency and human rights crisis that we have in this country around pretrial incarceration. But the second thing we're trying to do is we're testing a model that we call community release with voluntary supports.

And what we're trying to prove is, A, you don't need cash bail, people will come back to court without cash bail. That myth has already been debunked, and we know that. But we're also trying to model you can actually release people back to their communities with effective court notifications, make sure that they're connected to services they might need,

and people will come back to court while their cases are open, and until this case is close. It is in an effort to move policy forward to ensure that systemic change happens. But here's our fear. It's a race against time. Because as this conversation picks up speed

and as bail reform begins to take hold, some systems will move to new systems that we fear will recreate some of the same harms, right, that the initial bail system happen. Those are racial disparities. economic inequality, and we can actually recreate that if we don't get this right. And so we're to race against time to prove that you can do a community-based model that doesn't require electronic monitoring or risk algorithms or jail sales or cash bail, but that you can simply

release people to communities with supports, and that will work. I mean, you're going to states with different laws. Each city must be so completely different. How do you do? How do you do? it. So, you know, scaling the revolving bail fund itself, that's been the easy, elegant solution, right? That's the easy part. That's direct service part. We can scale that across the country. The ground game, the teams that work as bail disruptors for the bail project at different locations across the country, they have to take our model and adapt it to the unique needs of each jurisdiction. And that's where it becomes complex and it's very resource intensive, because criminal justice is incredibly local. And so how each system operates is unique. And what the

needs of our clients are are incredibly different from jurisdiction and jurisdictions. So you can be in Oklahoma. And what you know is that communities have been ravaged by the opioid crisis. And when we're bringing people home, we have to connect them to services that might address that. When you're in Spokane, you're talking about an epidemic of homelessness. So when you're thinking about providing direct services and bringing people home, you have to be mindful of the fact that in that jurisdiction, that may be the biggest obstacle for people, is that they don't have shelter.

And so we need to adapt our model in every jurisdiction we go to to address the needs of that community. I mean, I could only assume that some of these communities are not so happy that you're there. That must be a reality of it. Do you have to win hearts and minds as well in some of these places? So I think it depends on the definition of community. So communities that have been targeted by our criminal legal system for generations, communities of color,

low-income communities, marginalized communities, women across the country, they are more than happy to see us come because we are just an immediate lifeline. Bail funds are a tool to get people out as an immediate lifeline. It's not a long-term systemic answer, right? But people are, of course, they want to get out, they want to go back to their families, their communities want them home. Has there been some opposition? Sure, of course. You know, when we go into a new site, we do so carefully, we prospect it carefully,

we try to understand who are our partners on the ground that might help us in this initiative, grassroots organizers, not-for-profit organization, systems holders, sheriffs, right? Who's going to support us and who our opposition might be? You also put some of the people that you bail out, you bring them back, right, as program officers? Is that part of the system that you're trying to actually, you know, make a community around your efforts in some way? So when we're hiring for local jurisdictions, we always hire locally.

So if we open a site in Baton Rouge, we hire people who are from Baton Rouge and connected to the community. We do try to prioritize people with lived experience in the criminal legal system or people who have been personally impacted by the system. We think it's important. They understand the system best. They have the best solutions and answers, because they're closest to the problem,

and they're credible messengers for the clients that we're going to be interviewing and providing veil for. All right, so I want you to forecast into the future. What does an ideal system look like? You have said that America is addicted to incarceration. Does there have to be a cultural shift around that in addition to making some of the changes that you're talking about? So, you know, we have to reckon with what we've done.

if we don't face head-on how we've used our criminal legal system and who we have targeted and how we've defined a crime and how we punish people, we're never going to move forward. So we are going to have to reckon with the harm that we've caused. And in so doing, we're going to have to shift our lens, and that's a real challenge for us, right? We're going to have to shift our lens from a system that's about punishment and cruelty and isolation

and cages to a lens of what do you need, how can we support, where have we failed, how can we make that better, how can we restore, and how can we heal? And if we aren't willing to do that, right, criminal justice reform is going to be stalled or what comes next is going to be really problematic. It is a fundamental shift in the way that we see our criminal justice system. And make no mistake about it, right? the context of our criminal legal system is we have turned our backs on social problems, right? So we have turned our backs on homelessness and dire poverty and structural racism and mental health challenges and addiction and even immigration status.

And instead we have used our jails and our criminal legal system, right, to answer those problems. And that has to change. That has to stop. We have done damage to millions of people, and in so doing, we have harmed their families and we have harmed their communities, and we need to reckon with that. This problem is all of our problems.

Each and every one of us is implicated in what our criminal legal system looks like. There is no escaping that. It reflects each of us, and every time a prosecutor gets up and says, the people of the state of California or New York or Idaho, They are speaking in your names. So we have to take some ownership over this, and we really have to own the fact that this has to change

and this implicates every one of us. But the only way you're going to do that is if you fight back the narrative of fear that enables that to happen. I'm actually convinced that we're at a moment where we will build a better criminal legal system. If you get proximate to this and you actually begin to engage in it,

we will not only be a better country, each of us will be better people. And that is a worthy goal. It's a very worthy goal. That was my live conversation with Robin Steinberg. She's a longtime public defender and CEO of the Bale Project. We spoke at the 2019 TED Women Conference. You can learn more about her work at baleproject.org. And if you haven't heard it already, go listen to our episode, Bucking the System.

And of course, to see hundreds more TED Talks, check out TED.com or the TED app. This episode was produced by Harrison VJ Choi. It was edited by Sana's Meskampur. Our production staff at NPR also includes Jeff Rogers, James Delhousie, Rachel Faulkner, Diba Motisham, Katie Montalione, Fiona Gehrin, Sylvie Douglas, and Matthew Cloutier. Our audio engineer is Daniel Schuchin. Our intern is Catherine Seifer. Our theme music was written by Romteen Arableau. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Colin Helms, Anna Fulin, Michelle Quint, and Micah Eames.

I'm Minoosh Zamoroti, and you've been listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR.