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The Democratic presidential candidate and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders recently said that "some 200,000 people are in prison for poverty and inability to pay bail."
He made this statement during a campaign speech in Sacramento last week, just a few blocks from the State Capitol of California, where former Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law last year aimed at removing the bond and adopting a system of risk assessment.
Sanders introduced a bill in the US Senate in 2018 to end the financial bond across the country. This is part of its criminal justice reform platform. But the question remains unresolved, including California.
In January, the bond industry called the state-sponsored referendum in November 2020 to give voice to the opinion on the elimination of the bond.
Given the attention paid to this, we wanted to know if the figure of "some 200,000" of Sanders is accurate.
Our research
In the past, PolitiFact reported that there was no official national tracking of this number, although researchers have used data from the US Bureau of Justice Statistics to extrapolate the number of people likely to be involved. incarcerated because they can not pay bail.
They refer to the 2018 office report that uses the 2016 data. It is said that there were 458,600 "unconvicted" people in prisons across the country. Some, however, were detained without bail and others were waiting for their commitment to a mental health facility.
For these reasons, PolitiFact attributed to Half True a similar statement made by California Representative Ted Lieu last year. The Deomocratic representative overestimated the total when he said: "Every day more than 450,000 Americans spend in jail not because they were convicted, but because they are too poor to pay their bail and that they do not have powerful lawyers. "
The Sanders campaign said its figure of 200,000 is "a safe estimate," based on a December 2018 report by the Hamilton Project, a branch of the Brookings Institution, a non-partisan research group. But this report puts the figure much higher.
"There are more than 400,000 people in jail that a judge would have allowed to release if they could get bail," he said.
Ryan Nunn, one of the authors of the report, told us that the figure of 400,000 "is certainly a rough estimate". He said his report was based on 2009 data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Shima Baradaran Baughman is a law professor at the University of Utah, where she has written extensively on cash bonds.
"It seems like a low estimate," she said of Sanders' figure.
Darren Hutchinson, a law professor at the University of Florida, who also studied the subject, pointed out that all figures are estimates.
"I do not know of any national database that indicates the number of people incarcerated because they can not pay their bail," Hutchinson said in an e-mail. "Most recent studies on this issue continue to rely on projections comparing the average income and disposable assets of prisoners in prison and an estimate of the average amount of the bond."
"It is quite possible that the number of detainees who can not pay their deposit is higher than the figure indicated by Sanders," he added.
Sanders was quoted last year in an article from The Guardian placing the number at "400,000 people", which is consistent with estimates from recent studies.
Our decision
Senator Bernie Sanders recently said that "some 200,000 people are in prison for poverty and inability to pay bail."
Experts say there is no national database to track this figure, only estimates. According to the report quoted by Sanders, this figure is close to 400,000.
Yet the experts told us that Sanders' case was correct: many Americans languish in jail for the sole reason that they can not afford to pay bail.
In the end, we found that his claim was partially accurate but underestimated the total.
We evaluate this half-true.
HALF TRUE – The statement is partially accurate but omits important details or gets things out of context.
Click here to learn more about the six PolitiFact assessments and how we select the facts to check.
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