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0:00I worked with the Asheville Community Baal Fund as well, and the Asheville Community Baal Fund was started in the aftermath of the George Floyd uprising in 2020 when a lot of people who were involved in protesting were getting repressed. There was a lot of people mobilized to provide support for people who were getting arrested and then after that kind of subsided, we wanted to spin off that effort into a community Baal Fund that could provide support to the general community and not just to activists. So we kind of just started collecting money and soliciting people who needed to get bailed out of jail. And for anybody who doesn't understand what cash bail is, I want to explain that just a little because I think most people actually don't know that when police arrest you, you're being accused of a crime and then you are held in jail pre-trial. And there are pre-trial release conditions for you to get released before your court date. But oftentimes people, especially poor and unhoused people and marginalized people or people

1:04facing certain charges, are not able to raise the funds in order to pay the ransom payment that's required to get them out of jail before their trial. And people who are held in jail before their trial have much worse outcomes in their trial generally. Over 95% of cases are disposed via plea deals, plea bargaining, which means that somebody is agreeing to plead guilty to a crime that they may or may not have committed, kind of in order just to get the ball rolling. And we have people that have been held in our local jail for months, for years without a trial. And part of the reason that so many cases are disposed via plea bargaining is because once you've been held in jail for such a long period of time, you might be able to just plead guilty to the crime that you're accused of and then get time served for that. So the bail fund exists to kind of help try to push back against this predatory usage

2:06of pre-trial detention in the criminal system. Yes. And to that, we are able to postpone for people, as Jeremy was saying, who don't have economic means to do so. The other option largely for people that is offered is the for-profit exploitative bail bonds industry. That's what most people think about as how cash bail gets paid is through essentially hiring a service, which that service is simply that you pay a smaller amount to an exploitative bail bondsman who keeps that fee for themselves and then basically is responsible for ensuring you show up at court. And the cash bail bonds industry is almost unique to this country, the only other country that permits this exploitive industry is, I believe, the Philippines. So it's not a common system, but it is, I would say, very American in its ability to create

3:07an industry off of people's misery. And so, again, the role of community bail fund plays is to reject that logic of turning people's misery into profit, leveraging the financial solidarity of community to do that because we're raising our funds largely just through donations from community members and fundraisers and things. And so really, it's a grassroots attempt to leverage the resources of the community to support the community. So we do see it as a form of mutual aid. I've got a couple of immediate follow-ups if you all are good with that. Yeah, so that raises a bunch of questions. Some listeners might be familiar with some of these questions or topics and some of them might not. But so, the eighth amendment of the Billow Rights offers a protection from cruel and unusual punishment. And I'm assuming none of us in this room are lawyers just to get that out of the way. But it seems like punitive. It seems like a punishment to have someone stay in place, stay in a jail cell until they

4:12decide to give up a plea or pay money. The amount of money that is the bond is related to, I imagine, relates to some kind of standardized amount of money that's decided by some official for what the crime is and not necessarily reflective of the ability of the person to pay it. So a rich person who's carrying one of these charges seems like they could get out of it pretty easily, which doesn't seem very fair from a justice point of view. But I mean, there's a lot to go into there. But yeah, I'm wondering, like, what about what are the motivations for the courts and police to get these plea deals? What precedent is there for deciding what amount of bond is assigned to a person and is this kind of like what you're describing, what's happening in Bunkam County and North Carolina? I imagine this isn't like exactly the same everywhere in the US, right? I imagine there's gradations to it. And yes, we are not lawyers. And there may be people who can answer this more precisely who have more of a legal background.

5:13There's several questions you've passed. So I'll just kind of try to address some of them. I think overall, although there is probably differences between different jurisdictions, this is a fundamentally American criminal justice system problem. The fact of plea bargaining being not just a way, but truly the way that cases are disposed cuts across the entire American justice system or injustice system as we may characterize it more accurately. So yeah, I would say without having a bunch of statistics to offer, like, it's across the board. Do you want to say anything about the amendments, the ACE and the fifth and all that? Yeah, yeah. So I mean, I think that people should understand that there's this idea that we are entitled to a right to a fair and speedy trial by a jury of their peers that we are not supposed

6:15to have excessive bail, excessive fines or cruel and unusual punishment. All of these things that we're supposed to have a right to legal counsel when we're accused of a crime, we don't really have any of these rights effectively in this system. We have a two tiered justice system that the wealthier able to use to do what they will with and where anybody who's not wealthy is effectively denied their rights unless they can mount the resources to wage a really, really long fight to try to advocate for themselves, which most people just cannot do. So pretrial detention is used as a punishment. Police and the court system know that they are using it as a punishment for people that they want to target before they're ever convicted of any crime. So part of the motivation, and we can get into, I'm going to get a little bit into some of the motivations later, but part of the motivation for resolving disposing cases via plea deals

7:20is because our court system literally could not handle all of the people that we're criminalizing if we were to get the rights to a trial that we're supposedly entitled to. The court system just wouldn't be able to handle the sheer volume of cases. And so just to your point about wealthy people being able to pay this, we had like, we had an example of this, maybe I'll try to go into it very briefly. There was somebody a few years ago who was a wealthy person. I believe they were a former cop who had a millions of dollar bond condition that he was able to meet and he got out and he murdered somebody and three people, he murdered three people, and there was a big moral panic about this particular case because everybody was asking, why was this person led out of jail pre-trial? But this person had also been waiting on a trial for years, or at least I can't remember over a year, and this person should have already, if they were guilty, they should have already

8:21had a trial and been convicted of the crimes they were accused of before they would have ever had a chance to do this. And that's an example of how this bond system lets wealthy people get away with stuff that other people wouldn't be able to do. Exactly. And just to use that example, encounter point, because this was a high profile incident, that ironically I think has been used in the mainstream media narrative to imply that we need more and deeper penalties, but ultimately all it does is reinforce our point, which is that cash bond does not have anything to do with public safety, right? It just has to do with the resources that people have to pay those bonds and that those are different. And then encounter point to another high profile example that was kind of brought up in concert with this incident was almost like the exact opposite because the example that Jeremy just gave is the anomaly, right?

9:22Most of the people who are on cash bonds are not hyper wealthy, white ex cops. And so if you compare that to what is much more than normative experience, there was very tragically a man who killed his partner after getting out and he had been on pretrial release. And his bond was still pretty high, but not nearly as high and his partner was able to pay it. And she did. And then he got out and he killed her. And the argument from kind of tough on crime criminal justice advocates was that basically he didn't have all of his charges served on him. He actually that there was a case manager that didn't bring a court order to a magistrate bubble-bots in the weeds, but basically that if all of the charges had been served on him simultaneously, his bond would have been higher and he wouldn't have been able to get out because she would have been too poor to pay it. And so the message there being that if only people were just a little bit poorer, they

10:27wouldn't be able to pay these bonds. It makes no sense. And actually this is kind of a little bit of a side note, but it's just so wild. The example of the cop who or the ex cop who killed those people actually led to a lawsuit against the county for running a corrupt and incompetent pretrial services program, which we can talk about later, has now been modified as a result. The main accusation or the basis for that lawsuit was that the reason that the pretrial services program was not able to prevent this oversight. It wasn't able to properly manage the defendant who was out on pretrial release and prevent him from connecting further crimes, was that the pretrial services program is too focused on DEI and arguing that the funding for the program was being diverted to DEI and the

11:28program was too focused on reducing racial disparities in the jail. And so it didn't actually do what it was supposed to do or should have done, which was prevent violent criminals from committing further crimes. It was too busy trying to address racial disparities in the jail, which is first of all incorrect in terms of the way that they've conflated these things and I can break that down further, but also funny because the racial disparities in the jail have been getting worse since that program came online. And he was a white ex cop. And he was a white ex cop, right? It's like every aspect of it makes the least sense possible. And yet that's what we have if you were to read The Citizen Times or Listened WLOS, that's the narrative you're hearing. And if you don't have the context to understand all of the like in the weeds minutia of it, you're just hearing that and you're believing it and that's the narrative you're fed. To return to your question about how and who sets bond, bond also is to be clear not

12:33supposed to be a fine bond is supposed to be a surety that ensures that you return to court for your court date. And then you are supposed to get that money back when you make your court date and you forfeit it if you miss the court date. And so when you get arrested, a magistrate depending on the nature of the charges and some elements of your criminal history, a magistrate who is a judicial official or a judge will review your charges and then based on some amount of law and policy and personal discretion on the part of the judicial official, they'll determine what your pretrial release conditions are, which can include bond and also things like ankle monitors or other conditions. The bail bonds industry in the US, I'm not sure how it operates in the Philippines, but a company ends up paying the full amount of the bond, you pay a portion of it, right? And then that is just given to the company in order to pay the rest of it.

13:35If you run out, if you don't show up for court, then they end up chasing you down. Is that about how that works? That's correct. And so it's 10%, so if the secured bond is set for a thousand dollars, then you would pay a bail bondsman a hundred dollars. And then they would, I don't think they actually pay any money, they have some kind of agreement with the state, but when the case is disposed, that bail bondsman gets the full thousand dollars and you don't get anything back. And it's also helpful to know that bail bondsmen won't work with every defendant. So even if you want to be exploited by this system because, hey, everyone wants to get out of the jail, there are some people who don't have this option. Oftentimes, bail bondsmen won't work with people who have what former failures to appear. So if you've had court matters previously and you haven't appeared for court dates, sometimes

14:35they'll say you're just too much of a risk. You might not show up to court and they don't want to deal with you. Very often folks who are from out of state, they don't want to deal with having to go cross state lines to get you. And then people with mixed immigration status, they may not want to deal with. And there's a variety across different bail bondsmen, but that's just to say that this isn't even a system that is available to every defendant, even if they had the means to pay. And we have heard from some people which seems to be borne out by what we see going on in the court system that sometimes magistrates will set an artificially high inflated bond payment, sort of as like some kind of perceived favor to the person who's being charged with the crime because then it's more likely that a bail bondsman would actually be willing to work with somebody to pay that bond payment. So like they might set a $5,000 bond when they could just set like a $1,000 bond or like a $100 bond because a bail bondsman might not want to bother bailing somebody out for

15:38such a low bond payment. And then we didn't see that get reduced later, like initially set a super high bond and then like a week later it'll get reduced. So which is basically a handout to the bail bonds industry as well. So the bail fund, you decide who you're going to bail out, get the money together, make the payment, assuming that somebody shows up for court after the fact that money comes back in and rotates back in to help someone else get out. And I guess could you say a few words about unless you're planning on going into more detail about it later. Jeremy had mentioned the outcomes of people who spend their pre-trial time in jail versus not. I don't know if you all want to like talk about what those outcomes look like and how class features into that. Absolutely. So the average pre-trial stay for misdemeanors in the detention center is about 30 days.

16:40And the average stay for felonies is about 90 days. This is pre-trial, which almost certainly means that those bonds were paid or they pleaded out because no one has ever disposed their felony case in 90 days, right? As we were saying earlier, these are not, now they went to trial and finished after 90 days. So imagine in that time period, 30 days, 90 days, what you would lose if you were just absent from your life. And there's statistics on this, you know, even 48, 72 hours in pre-trial detention can have a significantly negative impact on your life. You're missing days of work, you're missing school. You have child care responsibilities, elder care responsibilities, pet responsibilities, you know, maybe you're missing paying your rent, maybe you're missing medical treatments. We've had people who were pregnant in pre-trial detention who had their next court date set so far out that they would be in a different trimester by the time they ever got into a courtroom

17:44that's insane. So those kinds of outcomes are immediate punishments that happen regardless of whether you ever end up pleading guilty to anything, ever had committed any crime, like that is an immediate impact of criminalization that simply has no relationship to crime criminality or any sense of justice. It's just something, it's like bad luck, right? And then there are the differential impacts on case outcome, which as we were saying earlier, when you pleade out, you're pleading guilty. So that can look different for different people, but the ramifications of pleading guilty to a crime having that on your record are many, especially if it is a felony. You're carrying all kinds of consequences from that for employment opportunities, educational opportunities, the list goes on. But for people who do stay inside and actually attempt to fight their case from inside,

18:45they have way worse outcomes. They get convicted much more often. They have longer sentences, even, because think about it. Think about everything you need in order to properly defend yourself. You need to be able to be going around and talking to witnesses, you know, gathering your own evidence, looking at your own discovery, everything that you need to do, which is a lot like being a defendant in a case is a lot of work. It's functionally impossible to do from behind bars. You don't have access to your lawyer whenever you want. You don't have access to the internet whenever you want. You can't just call someone and be like, hey, what did you see? I don't know which one of those outcomes you were talking about, but all of the above, right? I think for a lot of folks that haven't had to think about this before, like thinking through the implications of the day to day, as you said, and all the cascading, like affects that being out of work or being being unable to provide care or like whatever that

19:46looks like, plus what you said, like building your own defense and, I mean, keeping your property, like your house, all the stuff in it, if, yeah, I think all this stuff, if you haven't had to think about this, you haven't had to think about this. And it may be kind of a little bit, hopefully, you should be a little bit mind-blowing about like how devastating this is on so many different levels. And this is like such a side note, but I mean, we think about, okay, if you're out of work, you lose your job or at least you lose income during the period that you're gone, which is bad. But we've actually had, on the flip side, employers calling us being like, hey, can you get our employee out of jail? We need them at work. Like, this is impacting a whole ecosystem of people. This is leaving a whole in a community, and it is deeply felt on both sides. So I just, you know, that's probably less the thing that people focus on understandably, but yeah, we're all connected. Yeah. And again, to restate, this is pretrial.

20:49This is before someone's been duly convicted of a crime or pled out to it or whatever. So after 2020, a narrative spread across the US, particularly in right wing media, about the crime levels in Asheville specifically, which is kind of crazy. I remember staying at a hotel and seeing like one American news or something like that was on the TV now. I was flicking through and I was like, Asheville in like images of flames. And I'm like, what the hell's going on? So this narrative was like all over the place. And I wonder if you have any knowledge of what has become of the smoldering ruins of the city of Asheville. And how does this narrative that was coming up relate to the state of the police at the time, their like high attrition rate, the money that the police were spending on the PR firm and grassroots groups, like absolutely grassroots groups, like Asheville Public Safety Coalition? Yeah. I love talking about this because it's so ridiculous. But yeah, after the George Floyd uprising in 2020, you know, and with COVID and everything

21:53that was going on with that, there was a, a campaign to defund police departments all over the United States, which was largely unsuccessful. The police were not defunded in Asheville or in Bunkham County. In fact, they're funding only increased, but there was a recruitment problem. There were the police department was seen as under staffed and had like an unusually high amount of vacancies, which resulted in them getting more money. But nationwide, there was a crime wave narrative that spread around the media. And part of what contributed to this situation, particularly in Asheville, is the FBI Annual Crime Report, which I think is a really interesting, weird report. So they published this report annually. And if you go read the report, it says in the report that the report is not useful for measuring year-to-year trends in crime.

22:54And for their 2020 report, they also specifically changed some of the criteria that they were using to measure what they were considering as violent versus nonviolent crime. And there, if anybody is interested in learning more about this, there's a great talk from Haymarket Books that you can find on YouTube that's titled Counting Crime, a lecture on the politics of crime data and its uses by Tamara Kay Nopper that I recommend. And so in 2020, when the crime report came out, a bunch of right-wing media seized upon it. And this crime report uses data that's voluntarily reported by individual police departments. So this FBI crime report doesn't include any data from notoriously high crime cities, such as New York City, Chicago, or Los Angeles. And this was used to write, like by some malicious media, to write, there was an article, I think

23:56it was the outlet was called 247 Wall Street, that published an article that listed Asheville as one of the top 10% of highest crime cities in the United States, which for anybody that is familiar with Asheville or crime in this country, that's an absolutely ridiculous claim and it's like pretty funny. But this claim was reproduced in local news media, WLOS quickly ran a story, reproducing this, talking about how Asheville was in the top 10% of crime in the country. And then in a series of other articles about crime in Asheville around the time, the police would reproduce that narrative by citing that story and they would interview police and articles and police would be like, yeah, Asheville is one of the top 10 highest crime cities in the country, and as far as I saw during that time period, none of the local media was doing any facts checking or any critical analysis of this claim, which is egregious. And this claim also was seized upon by certain local business interests and the wealthy

25:03who wanted to advocate for more resources to the police and for crackdowns on the unhoused population. And that was the big thing that motivated the Asheville Public Safety Coalition, which formed at the time. And they basically, this was a collection of wealthy people and certain business owners, not all business owners, because a lot of local business owners recognized this group as kind of a wingnut fascist organization. But they would say things in meetings like, I shouldn't have to see an unhoused person or I shouldn't have to interact with an unhoused person, the police should be cracking down on these people and getting them out of here. And in a meeting with the DA, the DA was hearing their complaints about panhandlers and unhoused people downtown and alluded to a law that was in the works that was called the pretrial integrity act that would make it harder for people to get out of jail, basically. And he alluded that, yeah, when this law passes, we'll be able to use this to round up on

26:05the house people and keep them in jail for longer to appease this group. So that's where the moral panic came from. It was really manufactured and it doesn't have very negative consequences. And it's making this comparison between somebody who's asking for help and maybe not promoting your business interest with criminality somehow. And I want to like name that it's easy to kind of over-correct and fall into this narrative of like, oh, of course it's ridiculous to say that there's violent crime in Asheville it's this idyllic tourist town. There is violent crime here and by that, I want to reframe that as people do harm to each other here, there is gun violence here and I don't want to like dismiss or belittle the reality that communities are experiencing harm and the impacts of that harm. But we know that the responses to that both to intensify like criminalization, to intensify

27:07the severity of legal consequences and certainly the narratives that, you know, kind of flatten all of this and vilify people does not help that underlying reality. And there I think are probably people with good intentions who want to see those social issues addressed and want to see the harm reduced and they're not, they're not being given options that would authentically address those problems, they're only being given this crime way of hysteria narrative that ultimately only achieves the opposite. And I also would add in addition to the kind of misuse or misapplication of or misinterpretation of federal crime data, I think you also have to look at what was happening after 2020. Yes, there was a desire to kind of reinforce the importance and legitimacy of law enforcement. There was a kind of unprecedented willingness to critique law enforcement, but then that

28:12wave rolled back and there was a backlash and there was a desire once again to uphold the need for this violent presence in our society. So that was part of that narrative. But also economically, people were trying to come back from COVID, right? Businesses were trying to come back from COVID. And the last thing that anybody wanted was any kind of threatening to the sanitization of central business districts. There was a need to have commercial corridors feel as unthreatening to capital and to tourism as possible. And I personally think that that's one of the reasons that we see at that time that desire amongst business interests to really try to, you know, so-called clean up the streets, which I always like remind people, when people talk about cleaning up the streets, they're talking about putting people in a trash can called a jail. When you hear clean up the streets or doing sweeps, you're talking about sweeping people

29:16into cages. So part of why we're here is to talk about the status of the Bunkham County detention facility, the jail in Asheville. Could you tell us a bit about the jail, its capacity, who's being held there and what part of the legal process that many of them are in? There was a desire on the part of some people to build a new jail back around like 2016, but fortunately that didn't happen. But yeah, it's a fairly modern facility as jails go. So yes, the super quick, just jail versus prison, just to kind of set that terminology, a jail or detention center is run by a county, a county sheriff's office, and it is where people are taken pre-trial and sometimes serve sentences of, you know, shorter amounts of sentences up to, I think, like a year. And then prison is where you are sent if you are convicted in, you know, a state of federal jurisdiction, so just to kind of get a sense of like what a jail is.

30:17And so because of the nature of what a jail is, it is typically largely pre-trial as we've been talking about detention population, people who have not been convicted of a crime yet. But there is some wiggle room there. There are other types of prisoners in jails. One category is federally housed inmates, so when there's overcrowding in the federal prison population, they will actually offer money to counties to house federally. And so in Buncombe County, the official jail capacity of the whole jail is 524 people. But that's all told. And so that includes like differences between different sides or parts of the jail, right? So like they, for instance, they have like the so-called men's and women's side. So the capacity for the men's side is higher than the capacity for the women's side because they anticipate more people who they think are men being incarcerated, right? So if you look at the population of the jail and it says 500, because you can go online and see, you know, a jail raster, if you look at the population and says 500, you might

31:22think, okay, we're under capacity, that's good. Not really. When you see that number hit 500, not only are you getting close to total capacity, but if you actually disaggregate that by like different types of prisoners, you are more than likely already seeing overcrowding, doubling up the bad conditions that result from that. We are seeing that now. We'll talk more about that later. So just to say, to come back to the federally housed versus pretrial, so the vast majority of our jail population is in pretrial detention, which again is common, but the level has changed over time. And it's very important to look at that because in 2017, the jail population had been rising and the narrative was that, you know, we might need to build a new jail. Unfortunately, there was not enough political will for that at the time, and people actually wanted to try to see what we could do to reduce the jail population. But at that time, in 2017, the share of the jail population that was pretrial, so of

32:24the people in the jail at that time, there was about 500, which was again hitting, you know, capacity. And that's why they were talking about building another one potentially. So when it was spiked up that high, 65% of those people were pretrial. The rest were federal, house inmates, people serving short sentences. In 2024, it was 86%. So between 2017 and basically now, or in the last couple of years, the share of the jail population that is pretrial detention went up by 20%. And that matters a lot because basically the number of federally housed inmates is really up to the jail administration. They can decide whether or not to take on those prisoners based on their capacity, based on whether we want the money. And so now, that kind of like flexibility is gone.

33:2585% of the people in the Bunkham County detention center are now pretrial, which means that they don't really have the ability to modulate their own overcrowding, or set another way. The people that they're housing, they kind of like have to be housed there, which is again a recipe for overcrowding, which is what we're in. I guess I can also speak about the racial disparities in the jail. And also like that presentation that you gave at Firestorm, not that long ago, in reference to the swelling of the population, like seeing an email from the sheriff to other sheriff's department in the area, sheriff departments asking for help in housing, the already overcrowding populations. Pretty incredible. But yeah, just to just a sort of attention that if you wanted to reflect on that, that's great. But also if you want to talk about the racial disparities and the changes in that that would be important. I will say just that the the racial disparities, we live in a white supremacist society, our criminal justice system is just thoroughly racialized and racist from bottom up, top down.

34:31So that's nothing different in Buncombe County. We have about 6% of our population in the county is black, and historically about 25% of our detention population has been black. So obviously you see a huge disparity. And actually that disparity for black Americans have been getting worse over time in Buncombe County. And I know maybe we'll talk a little bit about that later. But just to say that when we think about who's in the jail, overwhelmingly it's poor people and unhoused people very disproportionately, it is people of color. So that that almost feels so obvious, but it has to be said. I mean, for people who pay attention to to criminal justice issues, we know that racial disparities are just deeply part of the system, but it's certainly bear saying that that is the case

35:32here. And to restate also greatly majority pre trial, not having been convicted of a thing. Right. And then the function of many factors, I mean, obviously the criminalization of people of color is more intense, but also, again, this tracks with class, right? Like more people are unable to get out of pre-dial detention if they have less access to financial wealth. Again, going back to our juxtaposing the rich white ex-cop and the black man who this guy was able to pay $1.6 million bail by putting up his eight properties that he owned, you know, as collateral versus this woman who was, you know, living in public housing and was not able to pay. The FileStraw Radio is a proud member of the channel's ear network of anarchists podcasts, and here's a jingle from another member of CCN. KiteLine is a weekly 30 minute radio program focusing on issues in the prison system. You'll hear news along with stories from prisoners and former prisoners as well as their loved

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37:37Finally, if you'd like to hear us on your local radio station, visit tfsr.media slash radio to find more info or reach out to us for some help. Thanks for listening. Yeah, so I remember in 2020, there was a call from a bunch of community organizations and individuals in the community for decarceration, for a change in the way that people were being held because the jail was housing people during a pandemic and during the height of a pandemic, especially when we weren't quite understanding about how the disease was spread, and the facility is not set up to be able to safely house people. And so for these reasons and more, the county and the sheriff's department that runs the jail as well as patrols in the police department, and I'm sure the city manager ended up changing the way that people interfaced with the jail. The population inside of the jail of people facing pre-trial detention decreased, there were changes in citation versus arrest that occurred, and there was this big decrease

38:42in the amount of people being held in the jail, which kind of occurred to some of us like, huh, I wonder, why can they do this now and still say that they've got a functioning justice system? They can choose to decrease the amount of people they're in the jail at any time. But anyway, like authority said at the time that they were still housing people that were they were considering to be a public danger, or danger to other people around them. And this is a lot of heavy listening in what I'm saying right now is based on a presumption that we can trust what public officials and police are saying about what they're doing and why. But so the population has jumped up since 2020 inside of the jail, and I'm wondering if it has there been a big increase in violent crime? Is this reflective of the misreading of those FBI statistics? Yeah, absolutely, and thank you for honing in on this because there is so much here. So as you mentioned, the only time really that we have seen a significant drop in the detention

39:44center population at least since, let's say, like the last decade, you know, I mentioned that in 2017, it was high, people were talking about whether we needed a new jail. The only time between then and now that the population of the detention center has gone down appreciably was during COVID and, you know, for the reasons you mentioned. That being said, it wasn't just, well, it was just because of COVID that the population went down, but there was actually a pre-existing effort and narrative about the need to decarcerate the jail that they were able to actually kind of, I think, disingenuously fit that dip in 2020 into because what they started in 2018, I'm going to talk about something called the Safety and Justice Challenge, which is a grant program nationally through a partnership of the MacArthur Foundation, the Vera Justice Institute, maybe some other, you know, kind

40:46of nonprofit foundation players, but basically this attempt to throw money at the constant problem of jail overcrowding and racial disparities. And so starting in 2018, the county started securing funding from this program, and the goals of that program were to reduce the jail population and reduce the racial disparities in the jail. There was a couple other ancillary goals, but those were really the two main metrics. They did not make any progress, right? They started in 2018, they did not make any progress until 2020, because of all the reasons that we've just been talking about, right, that the narratives about crime and wanting to crack down all this. And then 2020 hits and the measures that were taken to mitigate the crisis because of the virus were taken, like you said, showing that it's possible to take truly decarcerative measures, but abolitionist measures.

41:47There were still tons of people in jail, but, you know, to reduce the population. And it was at that point that all these articles started rolling out about, suddenly everyone was talking about the safety and justice challenge and how Bunkham County was in this program, and they were making such strides and look at our numbers. Well, it turned out that the exception proved the rule. And as soon as that wave rolled back, we started to see the jail population start to go back up. Again, because of this crime wave hysteria that really intensified, it was, you know, it's always there. It's always a desire to just vilify people who are down on their luck, but it really took off as we've been talking about after 2020. And so not surprisingly, the numbers started going up. And it didn't matter that they were getting millions of dollars. So since when we started in the jail, there was about, I think the population was stabilizing around 480, 490 at the time.

42:48And at this point now, we've gone for eight years and we've gotten five million dollars. And today, the population of the jail is higher. It is, you know, depending on what day you check. It's between 18% and 21% higher today than when we started this program. The racial disparities are worse. When I talked about the racial disparities earlier, I said that we had 25% lack in the detention center. Now it's actually more like 31. So, you know, that's what eight years and five million dollars gets you in Bunkham County when you're supposedly focusing so hard on addressing these issues. You end up with worse outcomes. I think that says everything you need to know. It's a self indictment. That is, you can't characterize that as anything other than an abject failure. And I would argue that you can't characterize the reason for that failure as anything other

43:49than if not intentional, just neutral, you know. They spent the time, they got the money and they were not ever really committed to it because the crime wave hysteria narrative always won out. And so to your question, you know, no, this has nothing to do with crime levels. They don't explain the changes in the jail composition or size, but what does explain it is, again, that crime wave hysteria narrative, legal changes that have led to, you know, more draconian laws that cause people to not be able to get out of pretrial detention, enforcement priorities. They shifted marginally during COVID and then they shifted back and they've never gone down since then. And in moments when the narratives we've discussed are really being pushed out, we see that increase in scooping up vulnerable people. And in 2023, when I think you can kind of argue this crime wave hysteria narrative really like reached its height, property crime was actually down 32%. It didn't matter.

44:50It didn't matter. The reality didn't matter. The central business districts were trying to bounce back from COVID and they needed to sanitize that commercial space for tourism. And so that is what we saw. We see tons of unhoused people, we're kind of semi-housed people coming through this system. And I believe that we're also seeing this crest a little bit again after Helene. It's a little bit different, but, you know, we know we already had a housing crisis. And obviously, Helene made it so much worth, I forget the statistics, but like something like 400,000 units of housing stock were damaged or destroyed. Obviously, there was also high unemployment last year. Everyone was set back individually. The town was set back. And so again, you're seeing that this is just going to lead to warehousing people because we have a system that encourages that process of deciding that the way that we bounce back from these crises is to get a certain type of people who are seen as disposable out

45:57of view. And on the point of Helene, I think it is worth noting that Helene was a time when there was kind of like a temporary leveling, everybody was kind of the same in a way that is unusual. You could go and walk down the street, if you are in the urban area, you could go walk down the street, you could go find food. There were unhoused people and house people hanging out together. It was very unusual. And then when infrastructure was somewhat restored, we started hearing messaging from public officials that the unhoused people downtown have become too comfortable. They've become too used to being able to exist into public space and that we have to roll that back. And that's what they did. I personally heard that narrative being stated explicitly, certainly behind closed doors and maybe also publicly. I think that it's important that people consider functions of the state that have budgets

47:01and that have workers such as police and jails as being machines that have an interest in self-sustaining, that have an interest in increasing their budgets, that have a vision of as businesses how they continue to make themselves profit-making and getting funding and continuing to employ people through their own self-interest. And so even if there's a decrease in measured crime in an area, like harm between people, it makes sense in this culture that these institutions would attempt to, they'd still be on the path to make themselves look necessary, not diminish that. And so even if there's less crime, they're going to have more arrests because they'll find other things to pull people in for because those beds in the jail are already built. The staff needs to have a reason to go to work of a morning.

48:02Yeah, and it's so, everything you're saying is true. And it's really sad because I mean, even like it was already a messed up system, but you want to believe or think that like especially in the wake of crises that are so deep and so broad that, you know, they're literally world-changing, like COVID and Helene, you know, that remake people's daily lives for a significant period of time, that at least in those situations, people would be like, oh, maybe people are struggling really badly right now, like that there would be some grace, that there would be some, I don't know, just like centering of the humanity of people at least for like a little time. And yeah, I think that's like a takeaway is that like the poly crisis is not only real, but it will always continue to feed into our pre-existing systems and exacerbate them and make them worse, even, Helene even more so than than COVID.

49:05I mean, it's unconscionable that people can be clamoring for cleaning up the streets when you know who's on the streets, like, you know, you know why people can't find a home, you know why people are struggling, we've all just been through this thing together and I don't know, it's just, it's really sad. Yeah, and when you think of government agencies as organizations that have an interest in self-sustaining and increasing their budget perpetually, that's one of the reasons I think it's so important to prevent them from building a new jail, because if they build a new jail, they will fill those sales, and that is just, you know that will happen. Yeah, so I guess getting back to the Sheriff's Department and the jail, but for most of the last couple of decades, the Sheriff's Department and Bunkham County who run the jail have publicly said, like, the sheriff's at least who have been elected have said that they wouldn't actively cooperate with federal immigration policing. What has changed with normally mundane interactions with law enforcement escalating into ice

50:09holds in Bunkham County? What changes are we seeing in people's access to bail who do get put on an ice-related hold, and is this, like, a preemptive compliance, or is it legally mandated? Because I know that your presentation talked about a few state house and senate bills that have come up relating to pretrial incarceration, right, or to collaborating with federal immigration authorities. All the above, they're all just tangled up together, all these massive bills. Yeah, so I think that it's important to be specific with what the county's message messaging has been about their cooperation with ice, because there's this notion floating around that has been reproduced by the current presidential administration that, like, Asheville is a sanctuary city or something, which is nonsense, unfortunately. But what the county has not done to their credit is the Sheriff's Office has not entered into a 287G agreement with ice.

51:12This is an agreement that has existed for a while, that is what it basically does is it deputizes local police to act as ice agents and to serve ice warrants on people. And our Sheriff's Office has not entered into that. Other county sheriff's offices around the area have, at some points, entered into 287G agreements, and at other points have not. Because it's an unfunded agreement that is just really, I think, it's like a red meat for a reactionary constituency who is excited about having their local police arrest immigrants. And we don't have that here, fortunately. However, also what they have said is that they are going to abide by the law, which has changed in North Carolina recently with some of the bills that we can go into more specifics about later. But last year, there were some bills which were passed in North Carolina that require the Sheriff's Office to honor ice detainers. So what that means is when somebody is arrested, the Sheriff's Office is making a determination

52:19about whether or not the person that is being booked into the jail is a citizen. And if they are not, then they report them to ice. And then ice can issue an administrative warrant, which will cause the person to get an ice hold. And what it means when somebody gets an ice hold is that the county has to hold them in jail. And at the point in time at which that person would be released, so maybe their cases dismissed or maybe their cases resolved and they are found innocent or guilty, or they pay bond, or they pay bond, or they go to prison and serve out their sentence. At the point in time, they would be released a 48-hour hold goes into effect where they are required to be held for ice to come pick them up. So the county is sending people to ice. They are abiding by that law and we are sending people to ice on a weekly basis. Oftentimes, that's people who have been arrested for minor traffic violations, maybe driving

53:23without a license or driving impaired, get picked up. Get triggers and ice hold and now they are going to be held in jail until ice can come pick them up. So this is a state mandate. This is not preemptive compliance and this is not them going out of their way as far as we know to cooperate with ice. The variable here that we don't really know, and I think is sort of impossible to know other than to speculate upon, is to what extent individual police officers or other police departments outside of the county are maybe motivated to act in different ways considering that this law is in effect. So the people who end up getting processed by the Bunkham County Sheriff's Office and put into jail and reported to ice are not necessarily arrested by the Bunkham County Sheriff's Office. Anybody who is arrested, any of the cities in Bunkham County, be that Asheville Police Department, Black Mountain Police Department, Woodfin Police Department and others. We know that police arrest people oftentimes on nonsense charges because there is, there

54:25is no accountability for individual cops. We often hear from people, you know, that they just get picked up, you know, sometimes people, the cops will decide they wanted to tame somebody and then decide what they're going to charge them with after the fact. So there's, you know, really nothing stopping a racist cop from racially profiling somebody arresting them on some bogus charge. And then once they've been arrested, now they're stuck in the system. If they, if an ice hold gets issued, then they're likely to get picked up by ice. So that is, I think, where if the county or the city or any government body here wanted to actively resist cooperation with DHS, they could instruct their police departments to refrain from arresting people in minor charges and try to hold their cops to that. And to my knowledge, they're not doing that, but that would be a way they could legally sort of resist that mandate. Has the jail been sticking to the 48 hour hold period?

55:27As far as we can tell, yes, it's unfortunate, but ice does seem to be coming within that 48 hour window. Now I can't say we don't have, I want to say perfect, we don't have good systematic data about this, but from the amount of tracking that we as the bail fund have done and just individuals and our relationships with organizers in the immigrant community, it does seem that they are holding to that 48 hours simply because ice is coming before that 48 hours elapses. Now, if they didn't come within 48 hours, I can't say whether they would hold them beyond that or not, but so far it hasn't at least in a widespread way been tested, really. Yeah, I just wanted to say a little bit from the organizational side of the bail fund, how we have kind of been interacting with the reality of assaults on the immigrant community.

56:27First of all, there's a lot of talk about like bond funds and immigration bonds, so I just want to clarify that our bail fund is totally separate from the immigration bond system. Immigration bonds are bonds that are placed on people who are in immigrant detention already, so there's kind of there's two different bail fund or bond fund entities and goals as a community bail fund. We don't post bail in the immigration system, but we were hoping that we would be able to use our community, knowing that people were being transferred from the detention center. There was a window of time in which we were hoping that us kind of partnering to maybe post bail quickly for people as a tactic to avoid them getting transferred to ice custody would be unfortunately that was like quickly foreclosed because of how HB10 the law was written,

57:27and then especially after a subsequent law HB318 closed some loopholes, so basically that at Tactical Avenue was foreclosed, which was a huge disappointment for our collective because we really wanted to be able to leverage like our organizational infrastructure to like help out in this particular situation, and on top of that, so now moving over to the immigration bond system, once people are actually in ice custody, we've also seen unfortunately immigration bonds be, I won't say totally foreclosed, but really, really sideline as a tactic that people who are interested in liberation can use because and this is like super arcane legal challenges and everything's changing. I don't have all the information and if you ask tomorrow, the answer will be different because this is literally being worked out in courts and circuit courts and appeals courts as we're speaking, but basically very, very few people are being offered

58:31the ability to pay bond within the immigrant detention system. That used to be a major way that people could at least get out of ice custody while there are cases which oh my gosh, I mean, we've been talking about how long case has taken the criminal justice system, you know, put that on steroids for the asylum cases, immigration cases, I mean, they just stress on like literally for decades. So, you know, it was just tragic to see the tactics that we've developed over time really be foreclosed and sideline, and just to say that we have organizationally been able to be in kind of like deep relationship with local immigrant organizers and are in constant communication about the people that we see going into and out of the detention center, sharing information and trying to, you know, share resources to support folks because people are being taken every week. This is something that I want people to understand that just because there aren't

59:32raids on workplaces, just because they're not outside of schools, just because it doesn't look like what we've seen on TV doesn't mean that people aren't being taken. They're being taken in custodial transfers, which is when they're taken from the detention center and it's happening every week. And I think it's really important to recognize that like people who are loved and valued in this community are being kidnapped every week through these custodial transfers and it doesn't have to look like Chicago.