Courts: Something Mother Would Like

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It is one of the proudest tenets of American law that any accused person is innocent until proved guilty. Yet each year thousands of Americans who have been charged with a crime but not yet brought to trial spend weeks and sometimes months in prison. They stay behind bars simply because they cannot afford the price of bail. In an effort to correct the inequities of a practice that, in effect, discriminates against the poor, 450 judges, district attorneys, lawyers, and police from all 50 states gathered in Washington for the first National Conference on Bail and Criminal Justice.

The conferees were all too familiar with the problems. Most judges set bail according to the crime. They give little consideration to a defendant's background, character or financial status. And the man who holds the key to freedom is not even a member of the court; he is a professional bondsman, in business to make money, understandably leary of poor defendants who can neither put up collateral nor pay the usual fee: $100 for each $1,000 of bail. But what to do about it? By far the most impressive answers came not from a lawman but from a retired chemical engineer named Louis Schweitzer, who reported on a bold new experiment that may soon revolutionize the U.S. bail system.

Interview Through Bars. It all started 31 years ago when Schweitzer, now 65, met New York City Prison Commissioner Anna Kross, who took him to visit a Brooklyn detention prison. He was shocked by the large number of pre-trial prisoners and donated $70,000 to set up the Vera Foundation, which he named for his mother (because "I thought she would have liked what I was doing"). In cooperation with the New York University Law School, Schweitzer's foundation set up the Manhattan Bail Project, which has been operating for 31 months on a trial basis in Manhattan Criminal Court. Each morning, after the newly arrested prisoners are herded into the detention pen to await pretrial hearings, a team of Vera staffers, who by night are N.Y.U. law students, conduct interviews through the bars. If a prisoner scores well on a four-page, detailed questionnaire—job, family status, previous convictions, etc. —Vera staffers quickly verify his story by telephoning friends and employer. If it checks out, they rush a one-page recommendation to the judge, asking that the prisoner be "released on his own recognizance"—freed on his own promise to return for trial.

In the project's early months, Vera staffers cautiously recommended the release of only 30% of the prisoners interviewed; now they intercede for 60%. At first the judges followed the foundation's advice in only half of the cases, but now they turn loose 70% of the prisoners for whom Vera vouches. This remarkable trend is based on equally remarkable results. Of the 2,300 prisoners—ranging from muggers to embezzlers—that Vera has recommended for release, less than 1% have failed to show up for trial v. a 3% no-show rate in Manhattan for defendants who were free on regular bail.