By Brian Chapman, DVP for Analytics and Business Strategy
I’m Taking a Stand to address a major problem in the criminal justice system: how bail works.
A few years ago, I read a story about a young man from the Bronx named Kalief Browder, who was arrested and charged with stealing a backpack. Because he didn’t have the money for bail and wouldn’t plead guilty to something he didn’t do, he was sent to Rikers Island. He was 16 when he was arrested, 20 when he got out of Rikers, and 22 when he killed himself, broken by a system that works very differently for poor people than for rich people.
I was (and still am) so angry that I sought out a way to get involved. I started volunteering and later became a board member of a nonprofit called the Bronx Freedom Fund, which uses philanthropic money to bail out people who otherwise will be sent to jail or forced to plead guilty. Our model was so successful that we expanded to Queens, and then we got really ambitious and dreamed up with a plan for national expansion. As a result, we raised $40 million to start a new organization, called the Bail Project (bailproject.org), that is up and running in 7 communities in 6 states, with much more to come.
Our CEO’s TED Talk on the subject (https://www.ted.com/talks/robin_steinberg_what_if_we_ended_the_injustice_of_bail) has been viewed more than 1.1 million times.
So I’m Taking a Stand because I believe we all can have impact in ways that change people’s lives, which ultimately changes the way the world works.
