Friend –

Last year, we released a report about the misuse of cash bail across the commonwealth, Broken Rules: How Pennsylvania Courts Use Cash Bail to Incarcerate People Before Trial. The report examined bail data from 2016-17 (the most recent data available) from all 67 Pennsylvania counties and uncovered an epidemic of judges setting unaffordable cash bail that led to the pretrial incarceration of countless Pennsylvanians.

To continue to make use of this data for judges, advocates, journalists, and others, we have launched a new website with interactive visualizations for all the data featured in the Broken Rules report.

We hope that this interactive data tool will help diverse stakeholders better understand how bail is set across Pennsylvania. By making the data accessible and transparent, the launch of this site marks the ACLU of Pennsylvania's most recent effort toward bail reform.

That's why we want to invite you to a webinar, Making Bail Visible: A New Interactive Data Tool, to learn more about how this website works and how you might use this data. The webinar will be on Thursday, October 6, 3 p.m. RSVP for the webinar.

Unaffordable cash bail is a statewide crisis. Across the commonwealth – in counties blue and red, urban and rural – judges systematically set bail that keeps people in jail because they cannot afford to pay it, often in violation of the law.

Your generous support makes it possible for ACLU-PA to continue working for cash bail reform.

Thank you,

Jessica Li
Pronouns: She, her, hers
Criminal Justice Policy Associate, ACLU of Pennsylvania