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Late one night in February 2019, the Houston police knocked on Terranisha Collins’ front door. When she opened it, her life nearly turned upside down.
Collins was charged with a misdemeanor. Earlier that day, a neighbor had accused Collins of damaging her truck.
“I said, ‘No, if you tell the police I did anything to your truck, I’m gonna beat your ass.’ I said it, plain like that,” the single mom of eight recalls years later.
Collins went to jail for making the threat, but she didn’t stay there as long as many Houstonians have in the past.
She got out of jail on a personal recognizance bond. It didn’t cost her anything. She just had to show up for the next court date.
And it’s a good thing. Collins didn’t have money for bail and couldn’t afford to stay locked up.
“I probably would have went insane,” she says. “I probably would have been in one of their little psych wards because I’m never away from my kids.”
Tens of thousands of people just like Collins have avoided longer stints in jail because of court-mandated changes in Harris County.
It used to be that if you were charged with a misdemeanor in the Houston area, a judge would set your bail. If you couldn’t afford to pay, you’d have to wait behind bars until your case went to trial.
That changed after a sweeping federal class-action lawsuit filed in 2016 by a woman named Maranda ODonnell. She’d been arrested for driving on a suspended license but couldn’t afford the $2,500 bail. The lawsuit argued that cash bail violated people’s civil rights and destabilized their lives.
“The scale made it unprecedented,” says Sandra Guerra Thompson, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center and deputy monitor for the ODonnell consent decree. It’s the agreement that Harris County entered into in 2019 that ended cash bail for most misdemeanors in one of the most populous cities in America.
“This is the third largest county in the country,” Guerra Thompson says. “You’re talking about it affecting an awful lot of people.”
Before ODonnell, two people in Harris County could be charged with the exact same misdemeanor. One would get out of jail immediately because they could afford to pay bail. The other could stay locked up for days — or even weeks — because they couldn’t afford to pay.
“That’s the unfairness,” Guerra Thompson says. “Punishing someone not because of what they’ve done but because they lack the money to get out of jail.”
Defendants were often so desperate to get out of the crowded jail they’d plead guilty to a charge that stood a good chance of getting dismissed. Five years later, the ODonnell settlement has fundamentally changed a key part of the criminal justice system in Houston.
“One of the biggest results is that we’ve seen — in misdemeanors — virtually no one being held in jail because they can’t afford bond,” Guerra Thompson says.
Part of the monitor’s job is to keep track of the data and the reports have shown consistent themes. Misdemeanor cases in Harris County have fallen sharply — from 61,000 in 2015 to 50,000 last year.
And according to the monitor, the number of people arrested for misdemeanors who had new charges filed within one year declined.
The real problem is keeping people in jail, Guerra Thompson says.
“It’s traumatic. It can cause people to lose their jobs, to lose their homes” she says. “There’s so many destabilizing things that can happen to people that could lead to more crime down the road.”
A different jail population
It’s an argument that resonates with advocates that work for criminal justice reform.
On a swampy morning in August, workers for the Texas Jail Project are waiting near the Harris County jail complex in downtown Houston. It’s a building with well-documented problems of overcrowding.
Krish Gundu and her colleagues are stopping people who’ve spent the night in jail’s processing center as they walk out the door. The team hands out plastic bags stuffed with granola snacks, a bottle of water and hand sanitizer.
Some people ask for a cigarette or a bus fare to get home.
It didn’t take long before Gundu’s team found a woman who’d been arrested because she hadn’t shown up to court on a previous misdemeanor prostitution charge. She’d been released on a no-cost personal recognizance bond, thanks to the ODonnell consent decree.
Misdemeanor bail reform has made the system more fair, Gundu says. In Harris County, about 20% of the population is Black, but Black residents make up 40% of misdemeanor arrests, according to the monitor’s data.
“Prior to ODonnell, you would have seen a lot of Black and Brown folks who were stuck in jail because they couldn’t pay for their bond,” Gundu says.
ODonnell hasn’t fixed everything. Fewer people are locked up now on misdemeanors, but the number of serious felony cases has driven the jail population higher, according to Harris County reports. People are staying in jail for longer.
Overcrowding at the jail complex has many causes, including a backlog of cases after Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and the COVID-19 pandemic a few years later. But Gundu also blames pressure from political and economic forces that benefit from being tough on crime.
Because of misdemeanor bail reform, “The unintended consequence of that has been overcharging. So we have way more felonies now,” Gundu says.
The jail complex is short staffed and dangerous. This year, seven people have died in Harris County jail custody.
Bail-bond industry slugged
One of the biggest critics of misdemeanor bail reform is the state’s powerful bail bond industry.
“I would be lying to you if I said it didn’t impact all of us,” says Mario Garza, president of the Professional Bondsmen of Harris County Association. “My profits were cut in half.”
His bail-bond office sits next to a busy Houston freeway, the phone number plastered in large font across the building.
The industry does have political and financial clout in Texas. Garza’s group filed a legal brief against the ODonnell settlement in part because it was bad for business.
“We knew that from the get go,” Garza says. “But because we’re bondsmen it was always like ‘You’re just greedy. You’re just worried about your bottom line.’”
Bail bondsmen make money by charging clients a fee. If a judge sets bail at $10,000, the family will typically fork over 10% to make bond.
After ODonnell, a lot of the bread-and-butter misdemeanor cases just vanished and the results rippled out across the industry, Garza says.
This summer, dozens of people tied to a local bail-bond company were indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice for allegedly using fraudulent information to get people who weren’t qualified out of jail.
“Because they were desperate,” Garza says “they started doing things that were wrong. Lying to people, promising them payment plans that were not true. It’s like when things get tight — like draining the swamp — you start to see the bodies that float up.”
Garza says he’s all for second chances, but he’s less generous to people who commit multiple crimes. Misdemeanor bail reforms offer no incentive to change, he added.
“When people call my office, they’re like ‘Well, won’t they just get a PR bond?’ I’ve been in trouble myself in my life. I’ve been to jail for misdemeanors, but always when I look back on those years, I got reformed because I was held accountable,” he says. “I probably did more time than I should have for a little misdemeanor. But in the scheme of my whole life, it worked.”
A ‘second chance’ with family
However, a jail sentence won’t work for everyone.
Back at her Houston home, Terranisha Collins says her life could have gone much differently had she spent more time in jail for making a threat against her neighbor in 2019.
In the end, she wasn’t convicted. The case was tossed out last year.
Now she’s watching six of her kids flipping and flying through the air on the backyard trampoline.
“I wouldn’t want it any other way,” she says. “As long as it’s not harmful to anybody or society, I think everybody deserves a second chance. Thank God for the jail reform because without [it] many people would be sitting in jail doing time that’s very undeserving for what they done.”
This reporting was supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Peter O’Dowd and Wilder Fleming produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Ciku Theuri. O’Dowd also adapted it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
