What You Can Do: Bail Funds & Food Security

image of a empty ceramic plate on an orange background

Hello! If you’ve come to this post from my Instagram page, I want to thank you for taking the necessary steps to learn + educate yourself about crucial issues in our society, as I did and am continuing to.

Now, amidst the unrest, I would like to focus on one key thing: bail funds and the impact they have on POC family’s food security, especially on children.

1. What is a Bail Fund

Bail Funds are “organizations, often charitable, community and volunteer-driven, or both, that collect money for the purpose of posting monetary bail for those in jail or pre-trial detention.”

2. What is the impact?

Everyday in the US, half a million of people are held in local jail even though they have not been convicted. This capture often has a conditional release, which is the bail. Research from the Bureau of Justice Statistics has shown that “since 2000, pretrial detention has increased by 31% to make up about two-thirds of the overall jail population, while the number of convicted people held in jail has actually fallen.” I want to focus on the harm of this detention for families & the children:

54 percent of inmates are parents with minor children (ages 0-17), including more than 120,000 mothers and 1.1 million fathers. (PewTrust)
One in 9 African American children (11.4 percent), 1 in 28 Hispanic children (3.5 percent) and 1 in 57 white children (1.8 percent) have an incarcerated parent.
66% of parents trapped in unaffordable money bail are mothers of children under 18. (PewTrust)
During a 16 years period from 2000, incarceration rate for women has increased by 16% while male has decreased by 5%, this is crucial given that women are statistically the primary caregivers of children.
The CAP found that two-thirds (64.4%) of mothers were primary, sole, or co-breadwinners for their families. Of this, 70.7% of black mothers & 40.5% of Latina mothers were primary or sole breadwinners* in 2015, compared with 37.4% of white mothers.
Previous research by the Economic Mobility Project stated that family income and children’s educational outcomes, which are heavily influenced by parental incarceration, have direct implications for children’s future upward economic mobility. This includes their ability to access a food-secure life.
Not to mention, formerly incarcerated people can be prohibited from receiving food stamps and educational benefits.

*A breadwinner is a colloquial term for the primary or sole income earner in a household. Breadwinners, by contributing the largest portion of household income, generally cover most household expenses and financially support their dependents.

3. I have the facts, now can you give me a real-life story to empathize?

You bet. Read this story from MIC:

“There was a client we had recently who was arrested for stealing food to feed her children,” Cain said. “Her charge was stealing groceries out of the supermarket, and instead of releasing her on her own recognizance, the judge gave her $1,000 bail. At that point, all her children were taken by the [Administration for Children’s Services]. She languished on Rikers Island for about two months before we were able to bail her out. At this point, she’s still in the process of trying to get back her children.”

4. What can I do?

I cannot press this enough, please donate to bail funds + BIPOC children funds. I’m going to list the links to some funds below. Further reading resources are available below as well if you’re interested!

Funds: