When Nia Thomas was arrested in Bartow County on drug trafficking charges in October 2021, it came at the worst possible time. Georgia’s Pandemic-era eviction moratorium was just lifted and the 30-year-old mother of three at the time had just gotten an eviction notice on her door.
After being denied bond, Thomas sat in the Bartow County Jail as a judge first set her bail at $100,000 before her lawyer was able to get it cut in half. Either way, she didn’t have the money to get out.
“Usually when somebody in my family gets arrested, the family comes up with the money or puts their house up,” she said. This time, her family wasn’t able to pull the cash together.
However, months after her arrest, Thomas got connected with Barred Business, an Atlanta nonprofit that participates in Black Mama’s Bail Out, a national effort to post bail for Black mothers who cannot afford it.
Two days before Mother’s Day in 2022, her bail was posted. Since then, she has begun a GED program, started taking parenting classes and sees a therapist once a week as she awaits her trial date.
“They give you a support system behind you so when you are in a rough situation like I was, with your back up against the wall, you’ll have somebody to turn to or somebody to push you to do better,” she said.
Now a bill that would put major restrictions on bail funds like the one that helped Thomas, and which expands cash bail in Georgia, is just one signature away from becoming law despite evidence that pretrial incarceration does not improve public safety.
If Gov. Brian Kemp signs Senate Bill 63, which passed both chambers of the Georgia legislature earlier this year, it would add 30 charges to the list of crimes that require judges to impose cash bail. It would also prevent any individual or organization from bailing out more than three people in a calendar year unless they comply with the legal requirements to be a bail bond company.
Around 85% of criminal defendants in Georgia rely on a state appointed lawyer because they are too poor to pay for their own defense. As is too often the case, Black people — who already make up a disproportionately high percentage of Georgia’s prison and jail populations — will bear the brunt of this legislation.
For example, the Bail Project, a national nonprofit that pays bail for low-income people, bails out hundreds of Georgians each year, with the vast majority in Fulton and DeKalb counties. Last year, 87% of the people they bailed out in Georgia were Black, versus 56% nationwide.
“Who is it going to hurt most? Poor folks, Black folks and folks that are already on the margin,” said Fallon McClure, deputy director for policy and advocacy at the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia.
The ACLU of Georgia has already promised to sue if the governor signs the bill into law.
Charitable bail funds have existed for over a hundred years, so why this bill now?
Even though this legislation will roll back some of former Republican Gov. Nathan Deal’s criminal justice reform measures, it also allows Georgia Republicans to tout their latest “tough-on-crime” policies.
The bill is also widely seen as a direct response to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, which has posted bail and found attorneys for dozens of activists arrested in the past few years. Many of the people bailed out by the solidarity fund were charged with domestic terrorism for protesting the construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, an 85-acre, $109 million facility that activists have nicknamed “Cop City.”
Domestic terrorism is one of the new charges that would require cash bail.
“We know that they weren’t letting anyone get out on domestic terrorism on a signature bond anyway,” McClure said.
The bill attempts to fix things that aren’t a problem while perpetuating overcrowding in jails across the state, she said.
Dorothy Hinton-Adams was 71 when she was arrested for shoplifting peanuts from her local Publix in 2017.
Hinton-Adams said she had recently run out of her prescribed antipsychotic medication at the time of her arrest.
Her bail was set at $500, but she said no bail bondsman would help her because the amount was too low.
“I didn’t think I was ever going to get out, so I just gave up hope,” she said.
After 15 days in jail she found out that Southerners on New Ground, another Atlanta nonprofit that participates in Black Mama’s Bail Out, had posted her bail.
When she returned home she said everything was exactly how she had left it, the door was unlocked, her TV was still on and her phone was sitting on the bed.
Stories like Hinton-Adams’ are not uncommon. Evony Thomas was locked up for eight days in Fulton County because no bail bondsman would take her $500 bail.
She was arrested for driving with a suspended license, which she said stemmed from an unpaid ticket for not wearing her seat belt.
“It was a $15 ticket; I completely forgot about it,” she said. Around that time, she moved and didn’t get the summons sent to her house.
“My mistake — that never ever is going to happen again,” she said. In the end, she just had to pay a fine.
Though she had the money in the bank, she said no one in her family knew where she was when she got arrested. At the time only the youngest of her three kids was living at home and her husband, a long haul truck driver, was in California.
“[Bail funds] are essential,” she said. “This program allowed me to come out, be free, and continue my life.”
