Yolanda Johnson was detained in 2020 on a $20,000 bond, an extraordinary amount of money that left her with no sense of how or when she would be able to secure her freedom. She spent four months in Jefferson County Jail awaiting news on her court date until she received an unexpected call that altered her life.
“I thought I was going to see my lawyer, but it was actually Faith & Works,” said Johnson in an interview with Prism. “I guess it was just meant to be. They spoke with me, and I told them what I was in for. They listened, and I was one of the people that they chose. I was excited, and I’m still glad about it, and I’m thankful for it.”
Faith & Works is a statewide civic engagement collective based in Alabama. The group selected Johnson as one of the women they paid bail for as a part of their #FreeBlackMamas campaign. The annual campaign raises money to bail out Black mothers and caregivers who are detained pretrial—just in time for them to spend Mother’s Day with their families.
“I didn’t have money to get bonded out, and certainly my family didn’t,” said Johnson. “I didn’t know anything about Faith & Works, and I didn’t know how I was gonna get out. I was just waiting on a court date. But out of the blue I was one of the women that they selected, and we went forth. I didn’t believe it at first, but everything worked out for the good for me, and I’m glad about it. It changed my life.”
After her release, Faith & Works connected Johnson to Birmingham, Alabama’s Lovelady Center for immediate rehabilitation services, an example of the wraparound services Faith & Works helps direct mothers toward after securing their freedom. In past years, Faith & Works has also helped mothers pick up their cars from impound and provided assistance with buying groceries and clothes.
Since 2017, Faith & Works has helped free 20 Black mothers and caregivers as part of a larger coordinated effort of bail funds nationwide that raise money to free Black mothers, caregivers, and pregnant people who cannot afford to post bond. These network of bail funds also receive support from the National Bailout Collective, which spearheads the #FreeBlackMamas Campaign and is hoping to meet a fundraising goal of $500,0000 by May 12.
#FreeBlackMamas
Nationwide, 60% of women detained in local jails have not been convicted of a crime, and many spend months, if not years, awaiting their trial. Often it’s out of the realm of possibility to pay bonds—some of which creep into the tens of thousands of dollars—leaving women to languish in jail. The burden of bail also disproportionately falls along racial lines, as Black people are incarcerated at a rate of nearly five times that of their white peers.
Eighty percent of women held in jail pretrial are mothers or the primary caregivers in their households. National Bailout Collective and other organizations partnering on the Mother’s Day Bailout use an expansive definition of “mother,” including “all Black women and femmes that self-identify as a Mama—including cis and Trans women, femmes, gender nonconforming people, and non-binary folks—who parent and care for their families and communities in various traditional and nontraditional ways.”
While women remain an overlooked demographic within the carceral system—despite being among the fastest-growing population inside—the impacts of their detainment are immeasurable. When caretakers are detained, entire families become destabilized, and women themselves must navigate the toll that incarceration takes on their mental and physical health.
Cara McClure, founder and director of Faith & Works, said many of the women inside whom she meets through the Mother’s Day bailout campaign are navigating mental health challenges that require medication or other forms of critical support that jails fail to provide. The fact that such negative outcomes are based solely on a woman’s ability to pay makes every case that McClure comes across disheartening and critical, including the case of Johnson.
“All this time, she hasn’t been found guilty of anything, and she’s sitting in the county jail,” said McClure. “Months and months and months go by, and she’s found not guilty. If another person had been accused of this same exact crime but was rich, that person would be at home taking care of their affairs until court. But here is a mother away from her family, not being able to take care of housing, not being able to take care of all the things that you do as a mom.”
The Black Mama’s Day Bailout began in 2017 as a seed of an idea planted by Mary Hooks, former co-director of Southerners On New Ground, during a strategy meeting facilitated by the Movement for Black Lives, Law for Black Lives, and Color of Change. Hooks’ idea to organize a tactical mass bailout by raising funds to quickly secure people’s freedom blossomed into what would become the first Black Mama’s Bail Out.
When McClure first heard whispers of this plan, she knew she wanted in—even though she’d never organized a bail fund before. She contacted Hooks to learn how she could get involved, used the National Bailout Collective’s toolkit to learn best practices, and then hosted a 12-hour telethon on Facebook Live that featured local entertainers and shared public education about the importance of the bailout. McClure says the event raised close to $15,000.
In the years since, Faith & Works has folded the Mother’s Day bailout into its larger suite of work and has streamlined the process of identifying detained mothers and caregivers in Alabama’s Jefferson County jail system. This includes interviewing women to assess their needs post-release, learning about whether they have support networks at home, figuring out what larger gaps they can potentially help fill in the woman’s life, and, ultimately, paying her bond.
The bail industry and attacks on solidarity
Faith & Works posts bonds directly to the court, choosing to avoid bail bond companies that levy predatory fees and often lobby against bail reform measures. While cash bail is returned to the accused person at the end of trial, many families are unable to post the full amount of their bail. Instead, they turn to bail bond companies, often paying just 10% of the original bond. In exchange for this nonrefundable fee, the companies post bail to the court on their behalf. When clients can’t pay the full 10%, however, bond companies offer payment plans that can quickly drive families into debt via interest rates that can reach as high as 30%.
The bail bond industry brings in a revenue of $2 billion a year, siphoning enormous amounts of money from largely impoverished communities of color, all while funneling money into campaigns that lobby against policies that would regulate the industry and, in some cases, abolish the cash bail system overall. For example, in 2018 when California passed historic legislation that would have made the state the first to eliminate cash bail, a powerful lobby of bail bond companies known as the American Bail Coalition filed a veto referendum, ultimately leading the law to be vetoed in 2020.
Utilizing bond companies would allow the money raised by bailout groups like Faith & Works to stretch farther, but McClure said relying on these predatory companies would be pouring money into the same system that harms the very mothers and caregivers the group seeks to support. And while working with local bondsmen would mean paying less up front, it would also mean losing out on the nonrefundable payments.
“This is why when we bail a mom out, we don’t use a bail bondsman where you just pay the 10%. We pay the full amount of the bail. [Johnson’s] bail was $20,000,” said McClure. “So we were able to get back the full $20,000 and help someone else.”
Efforts to entrench the current bail system have only intensified in recent years, with some policymakers directly targeting community bail funds and bailout projects. In 2022, Indiana legislators signed House Bill 1300 into law, restricting nonprofit bail organizations from bailing out anyone charged with violent crimes or previously convicted of a violent crime who is charged with a new felony.
Earlier this month, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed into law a bill that adds 30 charges that make a person ineligible for release without property or cash bond, limiting judges’ ability to use their discretion to release individuals on their own recognizance. This Georgia law also restricts any individual or organization from bailing out more than three people per year. Such legislation impacts groups like Southerners On New Ground, which organizes Black Mothers Bailout in jails across Georgia. Similar legislation in Kentucky also restricts the work of bail funds. The Kentucky bill was initially vetoed, but the conservative legislature overrode the veto this year.
To McClure, seeing this legislation crop up in other states feels like a harbinger for similar policies to come in Alabama.
“I hate to speak something into existence, but normally when something is happening in states like Georgia and Tennessee and surrounding states, it’s on the way here,” McClure said.
In an interview published last month by Waging Nonviolence, reporter Justin A. Davis spoke with Pilar Weiss, director of the National Bail Fund Network, to discuss recent attacks on bail funds and some of the historical trends and context preceding this new crop of legislation.
Weiss explained that the seed for much of this legislation was a 2012 law passed in New York that highly regulated bail funds. Attacks on bail funds only escalated in 2020 due to the swell of support they received in the wake of the nationwide uprisings after the police murder of George Floyd. However, Weiss also explained how these policies are situated within the larger push to criminalize solidarity and mutual aid—tenets at the heart of what bail funds represent.
“People are very much talking with each other about how not to exceptionalize the moment,” said Weiss. “I think increasingly people are finding that it’s not about bail funds: It’s about the state wanting to criminalize community care, to remove any avenues towards freedom. There are attacks on abortion funds, attacks on Food Not Bombs; there’s many forms of solidarity that are being attacked. Sure, there’s gonna be unique things about bail, but the lesson is people situating and fighting back against the attacks on solidarity—and really naming that.”
Bail funds as solidarity work, not charity or philanthropy. This distinction is crucial for recognizing the place of bail funds within a larger nexus of work aimed at dismantling the entire carceral system, as opposed to individual acts of relief. Advocates like McClure see cash bail as one cog in a larger system of mass incarceration and argue that mass bailouts gradually chip away at the larger system.
Faith & Works recently released an updated toolkit designed for organizers who want to run their own bailouts. According to McClure, nationwide bailouts are also planned for Juneteenth weekend. Part of the goal of the Juneteenth bailouts is to illuminate the connection between how enslaved people pooled money together to pay for each other’s freedom and how present-day Black organizers raise funds to free people who are detained pretrial.
“Deep down we are abolitionists,” said McClure. “We’re definitely reading books on abolition, [discussing] what abolition is to us, and imagining a different world free of jails and prisons. We’ve got to be able to imagine those worlds—and then work backward.”
