The Cash Bail Crisis in Allegheny County

Photo credit: Daniel Schwen

by Danitra Sherman

When we started the Campaign for Smart Justice a few years back, we knew that a cornerstone of the work to reduce incarceration by half and to challenge racism in the criminal legal system would be a vast reduction of the use of cash bail and pretrial detention.

Pretrial detention — the practice of incarcerating a person before they have been…