Cindy F. Friedman was elected to the Massachusetts Senate on July 25, 2017, to represent the Fourth Middlesex District, which includes Arlington, Billerica, Burlington, Woburn, and precincts 1-2 and 4-7 of Lexington. Prior to becoming a state Senator, Cindy worked as a public school teacher, an executive in the high-tech industry, and later served for nearly a decade as chief of staff to the late Senator Ken Donnelly.
Our current criminal justice system’s pretrial incarceration rate is disturbing and has a disparate impact on poor people and minorities who cannot afford to pay their bail, and as a result, must spend weeks or even months in jail awaiting trial. At any given time, up to 5,000 people in the Commonwealth are sitting in a jail cell, not because they’ve been convicted of any crime, but because they simply cannot afford to post bail. Today, 60% of those in the prison system in the United States have not been convicted of a crime. This is morally reprehensible and economically irresponsible. The availability of money should not determine whether someone is released from jail before trial. We need to move the Commonwealth away from a cash-based bail system to a system where the court would determine whether a person is likely to return to court based upon an objective risk assessment tool.