Manoush Zomorodi: So, Robin Steinberg, thank you so much for being my first official guest as the new host of TED Radio Hour.
I'm pretty psyched about that.
Robin Steinberg: I'm delighted.
(Applause) MZ: So OK, I want to start with the Bail Project, how it came to be, how you came up with the idea.
The story goes that 10 years ago, you and your husband were eating Chinese takeout food when you came up with the concept.
You'd been a public defender for over 30 years, but there was this moment where you decided something had to change.
RS: 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.
MZ: Can you clarify, though, like, 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.
RS: 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 that's even the first few days or a week is when most jail deaths actually, whether they're suicides or homicides, actually happen.
But while you're sitting in jail, and understand, folks sitting in jail pretrial 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 you, 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.
MZ: So you explained this sort of crazy limbo that people are in 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?
(Audio: Robin Steinberg TED2018) It's time to do something big.
It's time to do something bold.
It's time to do something ... maybe audacious?
(Laughter) 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.
(Applause) MZ: 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?
RS: 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 a 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 they're connected to services they might need.
And people will come back to court while their cases are open, and until those cases close.
It is in an effort to move policy forward, to ensure the 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 [created].
Those are racial disparities, economic inequality, and we can actually recreate that if we don't get this right.
And so we're in a race against time to prove that you can do a community-based model that doesn't require electronic monitoring or risk algorithms or jail cells or cash bail, but that you can simply release people to communities with supports.
And that will work.
MZ: I want to come back to that in a minute, but before we do that, my background is as a tech journalist, and when you talk about scaling a program like this, I can only assume that you are facing completely different challenges than, say, a founder of an app or a platform or something like that.
What are the challenges?
I mean, you're going to states with different laws, each city must be so completely different.
How do you do it?
RS: 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 to jurisdiction.
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.
MZ: 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?
RS: 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, 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 organizations, systems holders, sheriffs, right?
Who is going to support us and who our opposition might be.
MZ: 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 make a community around your efforts in some way?
RS: So when we're hiring for local jurisdictions, we always hire locally.
If we open a site in Baton Rouge, we hire people from Baton Rouge and are connected to the community.
We 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 because they're closest to the problem and they're credible messengers for the clients that we're going to be interviewing and providing bail for.
MZ: So you touched on this, criminal justice reform has become a hot topic, you must be like, "Yay, finally people are talking about this thing that I've been banging on about for decades."
Here in California actually, though, there has been a big change.
Now it's complicated, but my understanding is that they're getting rid of cash bail.
Good thing, bad thing, not quite that simple to explain?
RS: So everything about criminal justice reform, and particularly bail reform, is way more complex than it looks, right?
So it's easy to have a hashtag that says "end cash bail."
Totally right.
We have to eliminate unaffordable cash bail forever.
We know money isn't what makes people come back, it's a myth, let's get rid of it.
But the question about what comes next is very, very complex, and California was a good example.
There was a bill that worked its way through the political process, called SB 10.
It started out as what looked like a bill that would actually move towards more decarceration.
By the time it came out of the political process, frankly it was a bill that almost nobody in the community would support, including the Bail Project.
And it had gone through some changes in that process that placed, you know, pretrial services in the hands of law enforcement, that put people through risk algorithms, that sort of had a lot of the telltale signs of a system that was going to recreate the same racial inequity and economic inequalities that we had always seen, and so, that bill actually moved through the process, and we thought that was the end.
But then the bail bond industry actually got 400,000 signatures to put it on the ballot.
So in November, Californians will be voting on whether or not SB 10 should go forward or not.
MZ: So Californians in the audience, you will be voting on this.
How should they vote?
RS: So I'm not so bold as to say that.
I may be audacious, but I'm not that audacious.
But what I will say is, educate yourselves.
Understand what you're voting on.
Understand what it means to hold somebody in jail who hasn't been convicted of a crime simply for their poverty, right?
And ask yourselves, do we want to have a criminal legal system that incarcerates people before they've been convicted of a crime?
Do we want to have a criminal legal system that continues to target communities of color and low-income communities across this country, do we want to continue the damage and the devastation that we have created through mass incarceration?
So I'm not taking position on which way you should vote, but take that into account.
MZ: She told me backstage, "I'm not sure how I'm going to vote yet."
I mean, it's that difficult, right?
RS: Well, it's a little more complicated.
It's the form of SB 10 as it exists is not a bill that most of us would support, right?
But eliminating cash bail is critical.
MZ: Alright, 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?
RS: 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 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, 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, the context of our criminal legal system is we have turned our back 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.
MZ: It's not the answer.
RS: 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.
MZ: So I want to ask you finally -- (Applause) You've got some of the smartest women in the world here, surrounding you.
They're energized, they want to know what to do with that energy when they go back to their communities.
And actually I know you took some of them to see a local jail yesterday, right?
RS: I did.
MZ: Can you tell us about that?
RS: So, here's what we need to understand.
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.
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.
So what you need to do, is as I said, you need to get educated, you also need to get proximate to this.
And by getting proximate, I mean you need to go and see how our criminal legal system operates.
That may mean go to a local criminal courthouse, sit in the back of a courtroom, and I promise you will never be the same, it's what made me become a public defender all those years ago.
And yesterday, I took a bunch of people from the TED conference to the local jail here.
I have been coming in and out of jails for 38 years.
And I have never not been shocked, and yesterday was no exception.
I was shocked, I was horrified.
The conditions were dehumanizing and degrading and horrifying -- and incomprehensible if you don't actually see it with your eyes.
It was shocking.
And I saw it on the faces of the people that I was with.
So we have to know that's what we're doing in the name of justice in this country and stand up against it.
But the only way you're going to do that is if you fight back the narrative of fear that enables that to happen.
And what do I mean by that?
I promise you, every single time you get into a conversation about bail reform or criminal justice reform, here's what happens: everybody starts talking about the scary case.
"But what about the guy who did X?"
So here's what I'm here -- to rest -- Just have you rest a little bit and sit with this, right?
Despite the fact that we have used our criminal legal system and destroyed millions of people, that we have harmed people, exposed them to trauma and violence, day after day after day, the truth is, when people come home, bad things happen rarely.
It is the exception, not the rule.
It is the extraordinary, not the normal.
But if you don't know that, if you don't hold on to that, if you can't support that with data, which we can, you will be drawn into the narrative of fear that will lead us to justify the kinds of horrors we have inflicted upon communities of color and low-income communities and people that become ensnared in our criminal legal system for far too long.
So get educated -- (Applause) Get educated, proximate, stay vigilant, do not be drawn into the narratives of fear, which are wildly and grossly racialized anyway.
Check it when you hear it, question it when somebody says it to you, ask for the data, "Why do you say that," right?
And don't get drawn into that.
And if you do, 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.
MZ: It's a very worthy goal.
(Applause) I mean, did I hit the jackpot with my first interview, or what?
She is badass.
Robin Steinberg, the Bail Project, thank you so much.
RS: Thanks.
MZ: I'm Manoush Zomorodi, I'm the new host of the TED Radio Hour, and I'll see you in the spring.
(Applause)