大象传媒

The is fundamental to our legal system; however, hundreds of thousands of legally innocent people without a conviction nationwide. They are disproportionately Black and Latine, languishing in , separated from their families and communities, and losing their jobs, their homes, their children, and even their . Punishment comes before their day in court, due to , and a lesser-talked-about driver: the unchecked . 

Now, a national movement for bail reform has gathered momentum with concrete wins in and and, recently, in compels courts in the state to . But beneath the surface of these victories, judges continue to exercise their unlimited discretion to . Now, organizers across the country are mounting coordinated resistance. 

The movement for judicial accountability is an outgrowth of the bail reform movement. It is beginning to gain steam by seeking to limit , , collect , and These collective efforts pose a significant threat to the carceral machine and are unlocking new strategies for anti-carceral organizers across the country.

In the early hours of the morning in July 2021, in the heat of summer to inform the community about a new tool that allowed them to publicly judge the judges who determine their fate or the fate of their loved ones: . 

Inspired by the student-driven tool Rate My Professor, RMJ was the brainchild of , an organization I founded in 2019 with my comrade Eunisses Hernandez, now a . We are who have spent our lives seeing our families and communities criminalized, and have spent years leading abolitionist campaigns to . It was through these campaigns that we identified a gap in our organizing: the need for judicial accountability. 

We built RMJ to serve as a 鈥淵elp鈥� reviewing site for judges, allowing community members to anonymously provide feedback on judges in the L.A. County Superior Court, rating them on everything from their demeanor to their lawfulness. Since its launch in summer 2021, RMJ has had over 6,000 visitors engage with the site, and has informed both advocacy and electoral strategy in L.A. County. 

The community鈥檚 feedback is helping organizers identify which judicial seats should be challenged in upcoming elections. Data on judicial conduct鈥攕uch as refusal to implement the Humphrey decision, and the racial disparities of court decisions鈥攂olsters demands for policies to limit judicial discretion and curtail racial bias. 

La Defensa is not alone in holding judges accountable. Organizers across the country are developing , and . But challenging the most unaccountable branch of government has all the trappings of David and Goliath. 

The power of the bench reverberates through every facet of our social system, yet it remains largely unexamined and unchallenged. The expansion of judicial power over the past 30 years has given rise to the incarceration of legally innocent people through 鈥減reventative detention,鈥� or the imprisonment of a person awaiting trial under the assumption that they are likely to commit crimes if they were released. 

The authorized judicial officers to exercise preventative detention and to consider the characteristics of the accused鈥攊ncluding their psychology, history, and physical state鈥攖o predict the defendant鈥檚 likelihood of committing crime. The effects of the act were almost immediate: In the four years that followed its passage, , compared with only 7% before the act. 

This practice then spread from federal to local courts, fueling the rapid expansion of prisons, immigrant detention centers, and jails across the country to warehouse the increased number of people held pretrial. In fact, the number of people jailed without a conviction has since the 1980s. 

According to research by the , nearly two-thirds of people in jail across the country are detained without a conviction. The growth in the total jail population over the past 25 years is the direct result of an increase in pretrial detention, rather than an increase in the number of convicted people held in jails.

The 1984 act also propelled the development of , algorithms that take discrete facts about an individual, such as their age and employment status, to . RATs produce a risk score, like a credit score, that determines the risk of being rearrested and is used by judges to make detention decisions. 

Although data experts from leading academic institutions have that the data used in RATs are 鈥渄istorted鈥� and functionally serve as proxies for race, these predictive tools and standards continue to be weaponized by judges, evoking the chilling world of the 2002 dystopian film , in which individuals are punished by the state before they commit a crime. 

In response to this technocratic judicial overreach, organizers throughout the country have and that do not rely on racial profiling or expanded judicial power, but instead focus on assessing the needs and strengths of an individual and providing them the support needed to return to court. 

There are numerous examples of these new models of public safety. Simple solutions, like for people to report to court, have resulted in dramatic reductions in failure-to-appear rates in and . Further, the national model鈥攚hich pays for an individual鈥檚 bail, provides a case worker, and connects them to services鈥�. 

In San Jose, California, , a program developed by families impacted by incarceration, empowers individuals, their families, and their communities to partner with public defenders to impact the outcome of their case; this model has seeded similar programs across the U.S. 

The success of these community-driven models is proof that an , rather than racial profiling and a presumption of guilt, leads to better public safety results. However, judges continue to dismiss . 

While challenging judicial power at the federal level is limited by the appointment process, at the local level, communities have an untapped advantage: judicial elections. Unlike the federal system, , but most voters are uninformed about the importance of those races and the candidates on the ballot. This lack of voter engagement has allowed the political right and pro-law-enforcement interests to shape the makeup of local courts, even in the most progressive counties, like L.A. 

Courts across the country also , as well as diversity of legal background and experience. The , further entrenching . 

Now, a new wave of progressive candidates and organizers are not only exposing judicial behavior and challenging the systems that empower judges, they are challenging their very seats of power. Inspired by the success of progressive and abolitionist judicial candidates, like in Harris County, Texas, and the in Pittsburgh, La Defensa formed a PAC in 2022 to support progressive judicial candidates in L.A. County. 

The results were historic. The helped , the first Black public defender ever elected to the L.A. County Superior Court. , until last year, L.A. County had also never before elected a public defender to the judicial bench, exclusively . 

For decades, candidates with prosecutor backgrounds have had the advantage of and the , but the emergence of progressive groups like ours, which are recruiting, training, and running , offer voters an alternative to the status quo. 

贬补苍肠辞肠办鈥檚 of the prosecutor-to-bench pipeline, and it cracks open the door for future progressives who seek judicial office. But it鈥檚 important to understand the limitations of this strategy. While electing progressive judges serves as a harm-reduction measure that disrupts power, it can only be effective as part of a broader abolitionist strategy鈥攐ne that builds out community-led models of safety we all deserve.

Abolitionist thinker teaches us, 鈥淐ages confine people, not the conditions that facilitate their harms or the mentalities that perpetuate violence.鈥� Every time a judge condemns someone to a cage, it is a collective failure of society, so it will take collective action to end incarceration in all its forms. Disarming judicial power is just one tool in our arsenal, but it is one we have only begun to explore. My hope is that all who are passionate about systemic change can imagine the possibilities with us, because we who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.