California’s so-called “bail crisis” has dominated headlines for years. The story goes that recent court rulings threw a working system into chaos. But what if that story is exactly backwards?
This explainer digs into the analysis from attorneys Eric Schweitzer and Rick Horowitz, who argue that the crisis isn’t new at all — it’s a decades-long failure to follow a constitutional command that has been on the books since 1849. Before California was even a state, its constitution established a presumption of liberty: release before trial was supposed to be the default, and pretrial detention the rare exception.
What happened instead was a drift toward wealth-based detention — fixed bail schedules that have nothing to do with actual risk and everything to do with your bank account. A dangerous person with money goes home. A harmless person without it stays in jail. That’s not public safety. That’s economic sorting.
The landmark Humphrey decision didn’t invent new law. It just forced courts back to what the Constitution has always required. This isn’t a call for reform. It’s a call for compliance.
