Photo by Jason Farrar/Flickr

Premier Doug Ford announced last month that he wants cash bail to be the law of the land in Ontario. But this is not bold new policy. It is a recycled idea from failed experiments in the United States. Across America, courts have repeatedly ruled cash bail unconstitutional. I know this because I was one of the lawyers who argued to end it.

My legal career began in St. Louis, Missouri, where I worked to shut down a notoriously abusive jail known as “The Workhouse” and challenged Missouri’s cash bail laws as part of a national movement to stop punishing people for being poor.

Just think for a minute about what cash bail means—you can be arrested for a crime and presumed innocent, but whether you wait for the years before your trial at home or in jail depends entirely on the size of your bank account. If you can pay, you go home, prepare your defence, keep your job, support your family. If you can’t, you sit in a cage. You lose employment. Your kids may end up in foster care. Your family may be evicted. A person without money is no more “dangerous” than the person with it. This is simply wealth-based detention.

When I moved to Toronto I worked as a government-funded defence lawyer in Brampton’s bail court. While the situation here is marginally better than what I saw in the US, it is nothing to celebrate. Pre-trial release in Ontario is already difficult to get, particularly if you are working class, Indigenous, or Black. Even without cash bail, our system often demands a........

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