Bond to reform: One woman’s story inside North Carolina’s bail system

Story by Jessica Snouwaert.

Photos by Jeremiah Rhodes.

Dreama Caldwell turned herself in.

The warrant was out for her arrest in Alamance County, and she wanted to show she was not a threat.

But as she walked inside the police department – she broke down crying. She knew she was going to jail.

The officer who met Caldwell tried to console her.

“I’ve looked at your record, it’s OK, you’re probably not going to have a large bond, maybe about $4,000,” the officer said.

But when Caldwell stood before the magistrate and heard her bail would cost $40,000 her knees buckled.

“Are you sure? 40,000 or 4,000?” the officer asked.

“I said what I said,” the magistrate responded.

That was 2015 and Caldwell, now 42, was working at a child care facility in Orange County when an employee at the school left a child on one of the facility’s buses for hours.

As the facility’s manager, Caldwell was charged with felony child abuse. She lost her job and was funneled into the bail system.

Caldwell was bailed out on a $40,000 secured bond. A secured bond is a financial condition for pretrial release, one of the most common in North Carolina. Among those detained, 95% are issued a cash or secured bond, according to a 2016 study by the Pretrial Justice Institute.

But cash and secured bonds pose serious threats to public safety and fairness within the criminal justice system, according to UNC’s School of Government Criminal Justice Innovation Lab, which works on bail reform in North Carolina. The Innovation Lab argues that this money-based system criminalizes the poor by detaining those who cannot afford to pay.

Caldwell was one. And like many who enter the bail system, the imposition of her bond cost more than just money.

“It’s a trickle-down effect,” Caldwell said. “It’s not just keeping that person in jail, but they may lose their job. It affects their children in school.”

Not only does money dictate whether someone can walk away despite his or her actual risk to society, but those detained pre-trial experience worse outcomes, such as convictions and longer sentences than those who are released, according to the Innovation Lab.

Even a short period of time in jail can have lasting effects for defendants and their families such as the loss of their jobs, housing, custody of children and disruption to family support.

In 2016, N.C. Chief Justice Mark Martin recommended reforming the bail system. Since then, changes have slowly unfolded. For some in North Carolina these changes can’t come soon enough and for many like Caldwell, they didn’t. But that’s why she and others across the state are working toward reforming the system.

—

Yolanda Kirby worked 12-hour shifts every week. But the day her sister, Dreama Caldwell, called from jail, Kirby bolted from work early to help her sister.

Kirby knew she couldn’t pay her sister’s bond. But Kirby also knew she wasn’t going to let her sister spend the night in jail.

“Most people just don’t have several thousand dollars laying around to put towards bail,” Kirby said. “Fortunate enough, a good friend of mine is a bail bondsman.”

The bondsman covered the bail without Caldwell having to spend the night in jail. But the struggle to pay the costs didn’t end that night.

Kirby owed the bondsman several thousand dollars, she had to pay for a lawyer, support Caldwell’s family and her own. As the expenses stacked up, Kirby fell behind on bills and resorted to taking money out of her 401K.

“Even though she (Caldwell) was the one that was in trouble and went to jail, it literally affected everybody in our immediate family,” Kirby said.

—

North Carolina’s bail system is meant to determine whether a person is going to show up to court and whether he or she is a threat to public safety while they await trial.

Susanna Birdsong, senior policy counsel for the ACLU North Carolina, said the system does neither.

“It’s a system that is really only assessing how much money you have in your wallet or how much money you’re able to borrow,” Birdsong said.

According to the Innovation Lab, secured bonds fail to prevent rich but dangerous individuals’ from engaging in new criminal activity because they can pay to walk free under supervised, which undermines public safety.

Instead, those who are low risk, poor and unable to pay a secured bond, end up in jail.

A Harris County, Texas, study showed that those detained pretrial for misdemeanor offenses are 25% more likely to be convicted and 43% more likely to be sentenced to jail.

“When you show up to trial and you’re wearing an orange jail jumpsuit instead of a suit, because you are coming from the jail and not from your home, there are worse case outcomes for you because of that appearance to the judge and to the jury,” Birdsong said. “You appear guilty, you appear already incarcerated and that visual perception actually matters.”

For those who are low risk and detained pretrial for misdemeanor offenses there is a 30% increase for new felony charges and a 20% increase in new misdemeanor charges 18 months’ post hearing.

While secured bonds incapacitate those who cannot pay in the short term, they lead to more crime down the road, Innovation Lab research shows.

—

For Caldwell, the following months proved difficult, not only because of the cost of her bond, but because of the conditions it imposed, such as not being around felons, people on probation or having encounters with the police.

These conditions were suffocating for Caldwell whose husband had a felony record and some of her other close friends and family members were on probation.

“I literally became a hermit in the house because I was so afraid that if they locked me back up, they were going to double the bond,” Caldwell said.

Caldwell continued to go to court for 18 months. She was drained of energy, money, and it was going to cost her $5,000 to go to trial. The lasting burden of Caldwell’s secured bond pushed her and her family into a precarious financial situation. Unable to afford more legal fees, the cost of bringing Caldwell’s case to trial was unfeasible. She decided it was time to take a plea deal.

In her plea deal, Caldwell was convicted with the highest level of misdemeanor and sentenced to three days in jail.

The day Caldwell went to serve her sentence, she and her sister spent the day together, but when it was time for Kirby to take Caldwell to the jail, she cried the whole way there.

Three days later when Kirby came to pick her up, Caldwell looked broken.

“The number one thing that stood out to me was at night listening to women cry,” Caldwell said. “Laying on that floor, and listening to all those women cry every night. That was a really traumatic.”

Since her time in jail Caldwell has experienced a series of collateral consequences, including the trauma of jail. But perhaps the most prolonged consequence has been her difficulty finding jobs.

When Caldwell took the plea deal she didn’t understand her conviction was unable to be expunged. And now, she relives the consequences of criminal record with every job search.

“I have 20 years of management experience, I have education, a degree and I can’t get a job at a fast food restaurant,” she said.

Caldwell has also been denied loans and housing because of her criminal background.

“It’s a continual challenge,” Caldwell said. “It doesn’t ever end.”

—

Innovations Lab, which works on bail reform in North Carolina, researches and works toward implementing a variety of changes within the criminal justice system pretrial.

Some of the foremost changes include officers giving citations instead of making arrests for low-risk defendants, magistrates preferring nonfinancial conditions for pretrial release during an initial court appearance, requiring ability to pay determinations before imposing a bond, and offering appropriate pretrial services (e.g., mental health, transportation) and supervision (e.g., check-ins) with no upfront costs to defendants.

These are few of the many options taking place within North Carolina, which aim to create a fairer and safer system.

But state level reforms aren’t the only place where change is coming about.

After Caldwell served her jail time and finished probation she wanted to find an organization that was working on bail reform. She wasn’t sure there would be such an organization, but felt that what she went through was not right.

Eventually Caldwell found Down Home.

At Down Home, a grass roots organization where community members take action on social issues, Caldwell became part of the stop criminalizing the poor working group where she focuses on bail reform. The Alamance County Bail Fund, one of the foremost projects she helps with, seeks to make sure poor individuals don’t get stuck in jail for being poor.

“I really want to give credit to Down Home for helping me find my voice,” Caldwell said. “I’ve always struggled about what my purpose was.”

For most of her life Caldwell found her purpose in working with children. But when that was taken away she discovered non-profit work at Down Home and helping those in the bail system was her new purpose.

“I’ve always heard people say, your purpose is whatever you would do for free, even if you’re not getting paid for it,” Caldwell said. “And fighting for people, helping other people find their voice and telling my story has become the thing that I now see that I want to do.”