() President Donald Trump said he hopes cities with cashless bail will abolish the policies as a way to “self-clean” crime, calling the practice a “disaster.” 

Trump made the comments Monday as he moved forward with putting the Washington, D.C., police department “under direct federal order” and deploying the National Guard to patrol the nation’s capital. 

The president said he hopes other cities will take note of the takeover, especially those with no cash bail. 

“They’re all watching and maybe they’ll self-clean up, and maybe they’ll get rid of the cashless bail thing. The things that cause the problem. If you go back to this whole thing with cash, it’s a disaster. So many problems came up that we never had before,” Trump said during a briefing. 

What is cashless bail? 

Bail is the policy of allowing a person who has been arrested to pay money to be released from jail before their trial or hearing.

It was designed to encourage people to come back to court for their trial, as money is returned when they return, according to the Constitutional Accountability Center. 

While this has long been the law of the land, in the last decade, several cities and states have eliminated the practice. 

Illinois was the first state to abolish cash bail entirely. New Jersey and New Mexico have largely eliminated cash bail, while others like California and Washington, D.C., have implemented reforms to reduce their reliance.

Under the policy, defendants in some cases are released under the same promise that they will return, but it is not secured with money. 

The goal is to ensure that individuals are not held in jail simply because they cannot afford bail and that pretrial release decisions are based on the individual’s risk to public safety and likelihood of appearing in court rather than their financial resources, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a justice reform organization.

No cash bail generally doesn’t apply to defendants accused of violent crimes or serious felonies.  

Judges may have discretion in making the call and can still decide to hold a defendant pretrial in a detention facility. 

What are the pros of cashless bail? 

Supporters of no cash bail say it promotes more fairness and equity in the justice system by eliminating money as the bar for release. 

They say the bail system effectively “punishes poverty by creating a two-tiered system where ability to pay, rather than public safety, determines who stays in jail and who goes free,” the Brennan Center for Justice stated. 

They add that it also perpetuates racial disparities within the bail system. Black and Latino defendants are frequently assessed higher bail amounts than white defendants charged with similar crimes. 

Systemic inequalities make it even harder for people of color to afford bail, contributing to disproportionately high rates of pretrial detention among these communities, the organization said. 

“You’ll have cases where a wealthy person can go free, but an innocent, poor person could not, and that’s not justice,” said Illinois State Sen. Elgie Sims Jr., who pushed for the law in the state.

The American Civil Liberties Union has said cash bail violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and the ban on excessive bail found in the Eighth Amendment. 

By reducing the number of people unnecessarily incarcerated pretrial, no cash bail may contribute to a decrease in overall recidivism and improve community safety, according to the Brennan Center. The group analyzed crime rates in cities with and without bail reform policies and found no evidence that bail reform significantly impacts crime rates one way or another. 

Also, the Center for American Progress found no evidence linking cash bail reform to high crime rates, instead reporting “those who await their trial in the community are no more likely to be re-arrested after bail reform was passed than before.”  

What are the cons of cashless bail? 

Opponents of no cash bail have argued that it becomes a public safety concern and that it limits judicial discretion in determining appropriate release conditions. 

Critics argue that eliminating cash bail could allow individuals who pose a risk to public safety to be released, potentially leading to more crime.

No cash bail “will have serious ramifications for law-abiding citizens and give drug cartels free rein on Illinois’ streets,” former Illinois state Rep. Jim Durkin wrote in a 2022 opinion editorial opposing the Illinois law in the Chicago Tribune. 

Because some crimes automatically fall under no cash bail policies, they say it hinders oversight by judges.  

They also argue that defendants will be more likely to reoffend if they know they will not be detained with financial penalties.

In Illinois, the state Supreme Court commission that studied cash bail reported in 2020 that “simply eliminating cash bail at the outset, without first implementing meaningful reforms and dedicating adequate resources to allow evidence-based risk assessment and supervision, would be premature.”