Laramie Wheeler walked into a dim room at the Walter L. Bailey Jr. Criminal Justice Center at 201 Poplar Ave. She paid $2,500 to bail out a man accused of harassment.
“There’s nothing quite like going to the bail window, paying cash and getting a receipt for a human being,” she said. Wheeler manages the Memphis Community Bail Fund for Just City, a local criminal justice reform organization.
She has paid $2,500 for someone accused of stealing dish soap; $2,000 for someone accused of stealing chips and juice; $4,000 for someone accused of stealing vitamins and reading glasses; $1,000 for someone accused of stealing a jar of petroleum jelly.
“That bottle of Vaseline was worth more than this person’s life from a capitalistic perspective,” Wheeler said. “It’s like a caste system at this point.”
The circumstances of the 2,713 men detained at the Downtown jail — and the 299 women detained at Jail East — have become the center of an ongoing policy debate about bail.
In recent years, Tennessee lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have proposed and passed several bills targeting bail, changing who can be released and who must stay in pretrial detention. In this year’s legislative session, one of the proposed changes is Tennessee Senate Bill 1708, sponsored by Sen. Brent Taylor, a Republican from Shelby County. At first, the bill was written to prevent any “entity” from paying bail for more than three people a year.
What is bail?
The Tennessee judiciary compares bail to an “insurance policy” that ensures a person appears in court. “(Bail) is based on risk. Just like any insurance, the higher the risk, the higher the bond,” the judiciary states in a document.
Typically, the two risks considered are whether a person will flee or whether a person is a danger to public safety. If so, a judge or judicial commissioner may set a higher bail amount or hold a person without bail.
This piece provides more information about how bail works in Shelby County.
Now, with a new amendment to the bill, there’s a different cap. These organizations are limited to paying no more than $5,000 in bail per person, and they cannot post bond for the same person more than once a year.
Lawmakers say they’re focused on the public’s safety. Wheeler and other advocates in Memphis say state politicians are “detached from reality” and “misinformed” by a “tough-on-crime” agenda. Other Southern states, like Georgia, have passed anti-bail laws, some of which are being challenged in court.
Meanwhile, bail amounts are going up in Shelby County, and more people are being taken to jails where conditions are known to be inhumane.
“It’s vindictive,” Wheeler said. “You don’t lose your humanity card when you are accused of a crime.”
‘This targets everybody’
If passed, the bill could impact the four bail funds in Tennessee, two of which are in Shelby County: the Memphis Community Bail Fund and the Official Black Lives Matter Memphis Bail Fund.
“This (bill) is aimed at gangbangers who show up and try to bail their compatriots out so they can go back out and commit crimes,” Taylor said during a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting.
“This targets everybody,” Sen. London Lamar, a Democrat from Shelby County, responded. “It doesn’t actually work well. It creates a system of classism.”
How to support bail funds in Memphis
Community members can donate to the Official Black Lives Matter Memphis Bail Fund here and via Cash App: $OfficialBLMMemphis.
The Memphis Community Bail Fund accepts donations here. In the drop down menu, select the bail fund.
Both funds rely on support from the public to stay afloat.
A study by the University of Memphis shows median bonds set by Shelby County judicial commissioners have increased. The study doesn’t point to a specific reason why bail amounts are going up, but it highlights changes to state bail laws in recent years.
In 2024, Republican Gov. Bill Lee signed a bill that prevents judges and judicial commissioners from “considering a defendant’s ability to pay when determining the amount of bail.” This law undercut the Standing Bail Order, which Shelby County government officials passed in 2022. The order established a bail hearing room and a bail calculator to provide defendants with the fairest possible amount.
Since then, activity in the bail hearing room at 201 Poplar has slowed, Wheeler said. Plus, “judicial commissioners no longer (have) access to (the) affordable bail calculator,” the study states. In the last few years, bail amounts for felony offenses went from $8,000 to $12,000, and bail amounts for misdemeanor offenses doubled, the study shows.
For many people in Memphis — where nearly one in four people live in poverty — community bail funds are one of the only ways to receive no-strings-attached support to free a loved one from jail. Without cash on hand, people must turn to bail bond companies, an industry known to be predatory and profit-focused. Or, people stay in jail while their cases move slowly through the criminal justice system.
“If your kin may not have the money for the mother who went to jail for stealing diapers because she’s poor, then she has to sit in jail,” Lamar said. “I think it’s a slippery slope because one family can afford to post bail for somebody, but the other one can’t.”
Conservative lawmaker Rep. Charlie Baum from Murfreesboro, who sponsored the House bill, repeatedly cited three-year-old reporting by CNN in House committee meetings. In 2023, CNN investigated charitable bail funds in Minnesota, Seattle and other places across the U.S. for posting bonds for people who were accused of committing violent crimes. Bail funds in Memphis mostly support people accused of nonviolent, low-level crimes.
“I thought you would like CNN, so I used that one,” Baum said when Rep. Gabby Salinas, a Democrat from Memphis, questioned the data.
When Democratic lawmakers asked Baum why he is sponsoring a bill that could impact bail in Tennessee, he responded: “It isn’t a problem in Tennessee, but it has been a problem in other parts of the country.”
People supporting people
A 2024 study by the University of Memphis found 7% of defendants failed to appear in court in Shelby County. Nationally, about 17% of defendants fail to appear in court, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Lawmakers in Tennessee are “looking for a boogeyman,” said Josh Spickler, Just City’s executive director.
Changing Bail Laws in Tennessee
Since 2023, Tennessee legislators have passed nearly a dozen laws that have changed how bail works in the state. The bills — mostly sponsored by two Shelby County Republicans — have made bail harder to get and easier to lose. This piece breaks down each law and its meaning.
People in Memphis who are bailed out by Just City’s community bail fund appear in court at a rate of 98%, Spickler said. Once people show up in court, 60% of those cases are dismissed, he said. They pay bonds for people whose bails are no more than $4,000. They respond to referrals from the Shelby County Public Defender’s Office and other court-appointed attorneys.
The Official Black Lives Matter Memphis Bail Fund sees similar trends of success. Staff, volunteers and organizers with both funds put in several hours of time and energy to make sure people feel supported once they are released from jail.
“We believe — truly — that a person is proven innocent until proven guilty,” Shahidah Jones said. “I want for everyone what I want for myself: I want the right to come plead my case,” she said. Jones is the lead organizer and a key architect of the Official Black Lives Matter Memphis Bail Fund.
Jones and Marquita Brown have spent years supporting people being released from jail. They’ve paid bail for people across the Mid-South, including Arkansas, Memphis and DeSoto County. Regardless of the charge or the amount, “we bail folks out as soon as we get the money,” Jones said.
Brown is a trained therapist and clinical social worker. She’s also the supportive services manager with Official Black Lives Matter Memphis. Brown and Jones have given people grocery store gift cards, access to transitional housing, stipends to cover utility bills, transportation to court dates and more.
Recently, the Official Black Lives Matter Bail Fund paid $1,500 to bail out people who were arrested at a No Kings protest in Memphis in March. Usually, the amount is closer to $500, Jones said.
“We help them attain things they might’ve lost: IDs, Social Security cards, things of that nature,” Brown said. “Being a listening ear is important.”
‘No longer human’
Studies show that putting more people in jail doesn’t improve public safety. Instead, it maligns people who “have unmet medical and mental health needs, and are economically marginalized,” according to a report by Prison Policy Initiative.
“We talk about (jail) like once you become ‘criminal,’ you’re no longer human,” Jones said.
The most recent Shelby County jail report card shows more than 3,000 people are being held in pretrial detention in Memphis. Nearly 75% of them have a bail set but have not been released. It could be due to their cases having holds from other jurisdictions or multiple cases ongoing at once, Spickler said.
Or, it could be because bail is unaffordable. Judges and judicial commissioners have been prohibited from considering a person’s ability to pay when setting bail amounts since 2024, when Tennessee Senate Bill 2565 was signed into law. At a recent candidates’ forum in Cooper-Young, Shelby County Commissioner Erika Sugarmon said at least 30% of people in jail are there because they can’t afford to pay bail. “That number came from the sheriff’s office,” Sugarmon said.
“We’ve somehow become OK with having a building full of 3,000 people,” said Wheeler, who manages the Memphis Community Bail Fund. “We’re not seeing them, so we don’t care. It’s become such a tall order to ask people to care about people they don’t know.”
A 2022 report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights highlighted the trend of expensive bails across the country. The Eighth Amendment of the United States Constitution prohibits “excessive bail.” However, 60% of the hundreds of thousands of people in jails across the country are there because they cannot afford to pay bail, not because they have been convicted of a crime.
“Pretrial detention presents a number of negative consequences for the detainee population, including an increased likelihood of being convicted, lack of access to housing, detrimental effects on employment status, and increased recidivism,” the report states. Wheeler described jail as a “black hole.” People come out “more devastated than when they go in,” she said.
“Just think about the way mass incarceration is creeping into every aspect of our life,” Jones said. “The response to everything is ‘lock them up’ as the only answer.”
When questioned by Democratic lawmakers in March during a Senate committee meeting about whether his bill is restricting people’s right to bail, Taylor responded: “We have to presume it’s constitutional until the courts say otherwise.”
Brittany Brown is the public safety reporter for MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. Email her at brittany.brown@mlk50.com
This story is brought to you byMLK50: Justice Through Journalism, a nonprofit newsroom focused on poverty, power and policy in Memphis. Support independent journalism by making a tax-deductible donation today. MLK50 is also supported by these generous donors.