Washington Says This Bail Proposal Helps the Poor. Poor Victims Disagree.

Let me tell you who actually gets hurt when the court system stops working.

It's not the software engineer in Bellevue whose bike gets stolen. He'll file an insurance claim and move on. It's not the retired couple in Mercer Island dealing with a vandalized mailbox. Annoying, sure. They'll survive.

It's the woman working overnights at a convenience store in Tukwila who got shoved by someone stealing beer. She filed a police report. She took time off work to go to her court date. And now the person who shoved her posted $20 to a court clerk, walked out, and has no reason to come back.

Nobody's checking on him. Nobody's calling. If he doesn't show, a warrant gets issued and goes into a pile. Her case freezes. She shows up again. He doesn't. She shows up a third time. He's gone. Eventually the prosecutor moves on to the next case because the docket is overflowing with defendants who didn't bother coming back.

That's who gets hurt by this proposal. Not wealthy people. Poor people. Working people. The same communities these reformers claim to be protecting.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics publishes victimization data every year. The pattern never changes. Lower-income households experience higher rates of violent crime. Black Americans experience violent crime at elevated rates compared to white Americans. The people most likely to be victims of the exact offenses covered by this proposal — theft, assault, harassment, trespass — are disproportionately low-income and disproportionately people of color.

So here's the question the four public defense organizations pushing this rule never asked: what happens to those victims when the system they depend on becomes voluntary for defendants?

The proposal has 84 footnotes. Eighty-four. Studies about jail conditions. Studies about pretrial detention. Studies about racial disparities in bail-setting. Studies about how incarceration damages families.

Know how many of those footnotes address the impact on crime victims?

Zero.

Not one. They wrote an 18-page proposal to restructure the criminal justice system for an entire state and forgot that crime has victims.

Or maybe they didn't forget. Maybe victims just weren't the priority.

Here's what real reform looks like. You invest in court reminders so people don't miss dates. You fund transportation assistance so people can actually get to the courthouse. You build pretrial services so there's a human being checking in. You do that first. Then you reduce financial bail.

That's what New Jersey did. They spent $45 million a year building the infrastructure. Then they reformed. It worked.

Washington's proposal does it backwards. Tear everything down. Build nothing. Hope it works out. And when it doesn't, the people holding the bag will be the poorest, most vulnerable victims in the state — the ones who needed the courthouse to be the one place where someone actually showed up for them.

Comments are open until April 30, 2026. rulescomments@courts.wa.gov.