Los Angeles residents jailed because they can’t afford to pay bail have filed a class-action lawsuit challenging the system that often keeps low-income people behind bars before they’ve been charged.
The complaint was filed on Monday on behalf of six people in LA jails who were recently arrested but have not yet seen a judge, been arraigned or assigned a public defender.
The case is the first to challenge LA’s “bail schedule”, the county’s formal guidelines for the cash amounts based on alleged offenses.
LA county is home to the largest jail system in the US, which has recently been mired in scandals involving claims of widespread physical abuse against incarcerated people and “barbaric” conditions where people are chained to chairs for days and made to sleep on concrete floors. Bail leaves thousands of poor people behind bars, according to Public Justice’s Debtors’ Prison Project and the Civil Rights Corps, two non-profit groups that filed the suit.
The consequences of this bail system can be fatal, lawyers said. The complaint lists 10 people who died in LA jails while they couldn’t afford to pay bail and before they were arraigned and formally charged.
The bail they faced ranged from $500 to $100,000.
One plaintiff, Phillip Urquidi, 25, lives in his pickup truck and makes $500 a week at a temp staffing agency. He was arrested by the Los Angeles police department (LAPD) on 9 November for a charge of vandalism alleging damage of $400 or more, the suit says. He was told he would be released the next morning, but instead has remained in jail with his bail set at $20,000.
Urquidi has not been given a public defender or seen a judge. He has been housed in a bedbug-infested cell and unable to take his medications, the suit says. His girlfriend has been left alone in their truck and has no money for gas. Two days after his arrest, he was told that the district attorney did not plan to prosecute him, but he still hasn’t been released, according to the complaint.
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