Activists give jailed moms a Mother's Day gift: bail.
Paz Lopez was set to spend Mother's Day behind bars. The 42-year-old mother of six had been locked up in a Phoenix jail for the past month on forgery and other charges. She couldn't post her $2,050 bail.
Lopez had her bail covered by Living United for Change in Arizona, or LUCHA, a social and racial justice group. The organization said they were inspired to do this for a second year by an initiative known as"Black Mamas Bail Out," which is posting bail for dozens of mothers of color for the third straight year.
Mary Hooks, co-director of Atlanta-based Southerners On New Ground, came up with the idea in 2016. She joined with Law For Black Lives, a female-led network of lawyers and legal advocates, to bring together a collective of organizations. It's been difficult at times to get sympathy, she said, because people often think someone sitting in jail pre-trial must have done something wrong.
Organizations choose who to assist based on referrals from attorneys and other activists. They don't take into account whether a woman is accused of a violent or non-violent crime. According to the collective's organizers, the mothers they help show up at court at"high rates" but the majority of the money they've handed out for bail hasn't been returned.
Several studies suggest that bail amounts are set sometimes as much as three times higher for people of color, said Shima Baughman, a criminal law professor at the University of Utah College of Law. Even a $200 bail for a misdemeanor crime can be beyond what's in a person's bank account. "When women are the ones that bear most of the burdens in the family, their kids are the ones that are going to suffer," Baughman said."Because in many families, women are responsible for working outside the home and also for child care, they can face dire circumstances with their children when they are forced to serve even a couple of nights in jail."
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