1399: Bail Reform | Skeptical Sunday

1399: Bail Reform | Skeptical Sunday

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Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host, writer, and researcher, Jessica Wynn.

On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people. Our mission on the show is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker. During the week, we have long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers.

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That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com/start, or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today we're talking about bail reform.

This is one of those topics where half the people hear criminal justice, the other half hears crime, and everybody immediately stops listening. Hopefully not everybody. All at once we have to discuss public safety, poverty, due process, and who should be locked up and kept there.

It's one of those topics that's right up there with teaching history accurately, and maybe everyone should have health care, in terms of controversy. So what is bail reform? Joining me to help break us out of the confusion is writer and researcher Jessica Wynn.

Jessica Wynn: Hey Jordan, so I wouldn't say break us out, because this system is designed to keep people in.

Jordan Harbinger: That's right. Jail's already dark. So what's going on with bail?

I think a lot of people probably don't even know really what this is. You pay money, you get out of jail? I don't know.

Jessica Wynn: In theory, we have a criminal justice system built on one simple idea. Innocent until proven guilty.

Jordan Harbinger: Very noble, very constitutional, fireworks, bald eagle, Toby Keith somehow starts playing.

Jessica Wynn: And yet at this very moment, about 500,000 legally innocent people are sitting in jail waiting for trial.

Jordan Harbinger: Right. Right. Because innocent until proven guilty.

And they're waiting because why? Because they're poor.

Jessica Wynn: Bail is supposed to let you go home while you wait for court. But your freedom comes with a price tag that can depend on how much money you can get your hands on. Rich guy accused of fraud, home by dinner.

Poor guy accused of stealing a backpack, jail for weeks or months, possibly years.

Jordan Harbinger: Come on, but nobody's getting years for allegedly stealing a backpack, right?

Jessica Wynn: That's exactly what happened to Kalief Browder. He was 16 years old when he was arrested in New York for allegedly stealing a backpack. He couldn't afford the $3,000 bail.

So he spent nearly three years on Rikers Island awaiting a trial that never happened. Two years after he was released, he died by suicide. He was 22 years old.

Jordan Harbinger: Because he didn't have $3,000. That's legitimately insane. That is not a fair system.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, that's why there are exactly two countries that use commercial bail bonds, where you pay a private company to front your bail money.

Jordan Harbinger: And we're one of those countries.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, we are. It's us and the Philippines. That's it.

Every other developed country decided there had to be a better way.

Jordan Harbinger: Right. In America, we were just like, no, thanks. We're going to monetize innocence.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, pretty much. And that's bail.

Jordan Harbinger: OK. So this system is clearly broken if a kid can wait in jail for three years for a trial that just before trial and then the trial never happens and they go, well, you aren't going to get more than this for stealing that backpack. Go on out.

I mean, that's crazy. So we've since fixed this a little bit. Right?

That's what bail reform is.

Jessica Wynn: I wish. But no, people hate bail reform because every time crime goes up for literally any reason, politicians blame bail reform. Pandemic, bail reform. Economy collapse, bail reform. Mercury in retrograde, totally bail reform.

Jordan Harbinger: I mean, that's — yeah, it is a convenient scapegoat, right, because you can say we're letting all the bad people out.

Jessica Wynn: It's true. And crime really did rise during COVID. Bail reform also happened to be rolling out in a bunch of places.

So suddenly everyone decided bail reform must have caused the increased crime. Now everyone's pointing fingers. The data is a mess and politicians are running away from bail reform like it's radioactive.

Jordan Harbinger: Even though the current system is demonstrably jailing innocent people based on their bank account balance.

Jessica Wynn: And we're holding people longer than we used to. So in 1983, the average stay before trial was about two weeks. Today it's closer to five.

And federal data shows roughly 70 percent of people sitting in local jails haven't been convicted of anything. They're there for different reasons. But a huge part of that population is simply waiting for their case to be resolved.

And for many, whether they wait at home or behind bars comes down to whether they can afford bail.

Jordan Harbinger: I am already angry and we are three minutes in. OK, so when people say bail reform, what does that actually mean? Because there are headlines about everything from eliminating cash bail to algorithms decide your fate.

And it sounds like the choices are Sweden or, like, The Matrix. I don't know. This is crazy to me.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. I mean, it is a spectrum. So on one end, some places like Illinois eliminated cash bail entirely for most offenses.

As of 2023, Illinois basically said, you know, we're not making freedom before trial depend on whether you can afford it. Judges can still detain people if they're a genuine danger or if they're a flight risk. But it's not about money.

And different states try different versions. New York took a middle approach in 2020. They said cash bail is only allowed for violent felonies and serious charges.

So most misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies, there's no bail. And some places just require judges to consider whether someone can actually afford the bail they're setting. Like, hey, judge, you know, maybe don't set bail at 50 grand for someone who makes $20,000 a year.

Jordan Harbinger: OK, but there are obviously a lot of people I don't want walking out of court. Somebody accused of murder, somebody who threatened a witness, somebody who's already taken off once, like the guy I caught breaking and entering who couldn't be bothered to go to trial, got nabbed jaywalking. What an idiot.

Anyway, what happens? Yeah, I know. And then gets off with time served.

That's what juries in San Francisco are like. Oh, he didn't do anything except for pull weapons on cops while breaking into a building and trying to steal a bunch of bikes from a garage. And it's like, well, you deserve the city you live in.

Anyway, what happens to these people who don't walk out of the — the dangerous people? What happens to those people?

Jessica Wynn: They can still be detained. Right. And sometimes with those who should be detained, the opposite happens.

Because like you're saying, they're set free because they can afford bail. So that's the part that gets lost in this argument. Getting rid of cash bail doesn't mean getting rid of jail before trial.

A judge can still hold someone who poses a serious danger or is likely to flee.

Jordan Harbinger: Then why involve money at all? If somebody's dangerous, 10 grand doesn't make them less dangerous. There's a Feedback Friday letter where a guy had repeatedly threatened to kill people and had also beaten his — it was either wife or girlfriend — over and over and over.

But he'd be out of jail before she was out of the hospital. Eventually he went to prison for like 25 years because he tried to burn down the house with her, all of her pets and elderly family in the house at the same time. So he went to jail for attempted murder.

Thank God everyone was OK, except for one of the cats. But yeah, this guy, bail doesn't make a guy like this less dangerous.

Jessica Wynn: Right. Right. But he — if he was getting out of jail, he could afford it.

So the system doesn't work both ways. Right. And that's the whole argument.

Either there's a reason to hold you or there isn't. Your bank balance shouldn't be the thing that decides it.

Jordan Harbinger: OK, that makes a lot more sense than the way this often gets framed, which is bail reform: we're just letting everybody out of jail now. I guess, you know, crime has no punishment is basically what they're trying to make it sound like.

Jessica Wynn: Right. Because the headlines are confusing. And then there's the algorithm approach, which is, you know, when instead of using cash, you use a computer program to assess someone's risk of not showing up to court or committing another crime.

And you make release decisions based on that.

Jordan Harbinger: So we replace the bias of humans with the bias of computers, which, I don't know. I'm going to jokingly say progress. Yeah.

But maybe it is. I don't know.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. I mean, who knows? It depends how we're training those systems.

Right. You know, Utah passed a bipartisan bail reform bill in 2020. It cleared the state Senate 25 to 1.

Then within months, crime happened, as crime always does. And suddenly everything was bail reform's fault. Crime, bail reform. Car accidents, bail reform. Locusts, probably bail reform.

Right. And COVID made the whole thing even messier because courts were using something called penny bail.

Jordan Harbinger: Is that as ridiculous as it sounds?

Jessica Wynn: It's literally what it sounds like. So bail set at one cent, which — pennies don't even exist anymore.

Jordan Harbinger: Sorry, we need exact change. You're in jail for three years.

Jessica Wynn: So during COVID, courts were trying to keep jail populations down. So nominal bail was being used as a workaround in some cases. So people were being released under this emergency pandemic policy that had nothing to do with the new bail reform law.

But when someone released that way committed another crime, guess what got blamed?

Jordan Harbinger: OK. Bail reform, even though the release was tied to an emergency COVID policy that was essentially unrelated. That's a pretty important distinction.

Jessica Wynn: Right. But instead, bail reform took the political hit. And in March 2021, one year after it passed and just five months after it went into effect, Utah repealed it.

Jordan Harbinger: Five months is definitely not enough time to collect meaningful data on criminal justice policy.

Jessica Wynn: It definitely isn't. But that's the pattern. You need years of research to pass reform.

You only need one scary headline to kill it.

Jordan Harbinger: I think you just described our entire political system.

Jessica Wynn: OK, I might have. But another example is in 2016, Alaska passed bail reform. Around this time, shoplifting went up in Anchorage.

Jordan Harbinger: Because of the bail reform?

Jessica Wynn: Nobody knows.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh.

Jessica Wynn: Crime was rising before the law took effect. But business owners panicked. The media panicked.

Politicians started running on repealing bail reform. So now Alaska's pretrial detention is higher than before the reform. They're holding more people in jail without any clear evidence that it's made people safer.

Jordan Harbinger: So we blamed reform for crime, rolled it back, didn't solve the crime problem anyway.

Jessica Wynn: That is basically bail reform in America. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: OK, let's talk about the data, because every headline says something different. Bail reform causes crime. Bail reform has no effect on crime.

Bail reform stole my catalytic converter. I don't know.

Jessica Wynn: It just doesn't. I mean, this is just, you know, social science.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Jessica Wynn: It all depends on which study you read. One report from the Yolo County District Attorney's Office looked at zero bail policy during COVID and found crime increased 163 percent. Violent crime went up 200 percent.

Jordan Harbinger: That's a pretty damning result, isn't it?

Jessica Wynn: Maybe. Until you really look at this study. So it came from the district attorney's office in Yolo County.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Jessica Wynn: Really, really small.

Jordan Harbinger: That's a small county on the way to basically Sacramento or Lake Tahoe. And when you look out from the highway, it's like a lot of swampy land and you go, where do the people live?

Jessica Wynn: Where do the people live?

Jordan Harbinger: Who lives in Yolo County? Yeah.

Jessica Wynn: The county probably has one post office, you know, like it's very small.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Yeah. It's a very small, rural-looking place.

Jessica Wynn: And they also looked at it during the single weirdest year in modern history, 2020, and compared just 200 cases.

Jordan Harbinger: That's a lot of asterisks for a study. So it's — I mean, crime's up 163 percent, right? So someone shoplifted from a roadside tomato stand twice that year instead of once.

Jessica Wynn: I mean, I don't know.

Jordan Harbinger: Like, statistics with a sample size that small are really bizarre. They can be all over the place. So I'm not — look, I'm not saying throw this data out, but 200 cases during COVID, not the most reliable sample or data set.

Jessica Wynn: Right. And then the Brennan Center looked at 33 cities over several years and controlled for other factors. It found no overall relationship between bail reform and increases in crime.

So which one is right? OK, so probably pieces of both. Crime really did rise during COVID.

That's true. Police departments were stretched thin, courts were backed up and social services were overwhelmed. So untangling what was caused by bail reform versus everything else happening at the same time is incredibly difficult.

So the real answer is: it's complicated. You know, lock them up fits on a bumper sticker.

Context-dependent social policy analysis does not. And New York is a perfect example. So the evidence there is genuinely mixed.

Some studies found rearrest rates went down after reform. Others found they went up. Why the difference?

So partly resources. New York City has extensive pretrial supervision programs, people checking in, monitoring and support services. But a lot of upstate counties don't have that infrastructure.

So you're releasing people without any support system and, surprise, it doesn't work as well. You know, you can't just eliminate bail and then walk away. You actually have to replace it with something.

Jordan Harbinger: OK, something that bugs me is that there's this entire industry making money off this and it's a lot of money.

Jessica Wynn: Oh, yeah. I mean, the bail bond industry is worth over two billion dollars a year.

Jordan Harbinger: Two billion dollars. So people probably don't really know what these people do. What do they do?

What does a bail bondsman do exactly?

Jessica Wynn: OK, so say bail's set at 10 grand. You don't have it. So you call a bail bondsman.

You know, if you've ever driven through certain neighborhoods, you've seen those giant Aladdin Bail Bonds signs.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes.

Jessica Wynn: That's the business we're talking about.

Jordan Harbinger: I know those signs: Aladdin, Bad Boys Bail Bonds. They always have names that sound like they're open until four o'clock in the morning and you might score a lap dance.

Jessica Wynn: So let's say you call Bob's Bail Bonds and Bob says, OK, I'll cover the ten thousand dollars, but you pay me one thousand dollars. That's my fee. That's how I make money.

Jordan Harbinger: And you do not get that one thousand dollars back.

Jessica Wynn: It's nonrefundable. Even if you're found not guilty, even if charges are dropped, even if it turns out they arrested the wrong person, you paid Bob a thousand dollars and Bob keeps it.

Jordan Harbinger: OK, but in Bob's defense, he is providing a service. He's putting up 10 grand for somebody that he doesn't know who possibly is a degenerate criminal or not or totally innocent. And he's taking the risk that they just don't bother to show up for court.

Jessica Wynn: So yeah, I mean, that's fair. The bondsman did not invent cash bail. And if this is the system we're going to have, you know, there's a reason Bob's business exists.

The problem is what happens to the person who can't afford Bob either.

Jordan Harbinger: OK, so they just stay in jail.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. I mean, if you're really poor, like you don't have anyone who can scrape together even a thousand dollars, then Bob can't help you. You stay in jail.

Their ideal customer isn't rich. It's someone who's too poor to post $10,000, but just rich enough to scrape together $1,000.

Jordan Harbinger: In America, you're innocent until proven guilty, unless you're poor, in which case we apparently accept Venmo. Here's something you can afford: our sponsors.

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Now back to Skeptical Sunday. Okay, so we privatize the presumption of innocence. And let me stop you right here, because you don't have to get a bail bondsman, right? I mean, if you have a bunch of money and your bail is 10 grand and you've got a hundred thousand in a savings account or checking account, you just write a check for 10 grand and when you show up to court, you get that money back.

But most people don't have a spare 10 or 50 grand or whatever it is just lying around that they can afford to not use for a month or however long it takes for this thing to get wrapped up. Exactly. Oof.

Okay. So yes, that's oof.

Jessica Wynn: And here's the kicker. The bail bond industry fights reform viciously.

Jordan Harbinger: Of course they do, right? Because bail reform would cut into their business. There'd be a ton of people that no longer need their services that are actually in their target market. People who've committed maybe a small crime or not committed any crime and need a thousand bucks, 500 bucks, 10,000 bucks — not people who need, well, I guess really, really wealthy people probably don't need them.

And if you've committed a serious crime, your bail is so high, it's probably hard to even get the 10% of it together, right? If you've got a million-dollar bail.

Jessica Wynn: Right, exactly. And you can see how this all played out in California when they tried to end cash bail in 2018, but the replacement was controversial. So the bail industry immediately spent millions to stop it.

And civil rights groups opposed it too, because it relied on that algorithmic risk assessment. So the law never took effect. And in 2020, voters rejected it.

Jordan Harbinger: So it got squeezed from both sides. Everybody agreed cash bail was broken, but nobody agreed on the replacement policy.

Jessica Wynn: Correct. And some people wanted to keep cash bail because they made money from it. Others thought replacing it with a biased algorithm was just trading, you know, one unfair system for another.

Jordan Harbinger: So the for-profit bail bond industry killed a reform to protect the system that makes them rich. OK, obviously, the industry has a pretty enormous financial incentive to keep cash bail around for sure.

Jessica Wynn: And they lobby hard, putting money behind lawmakers and tough-on-crime candidates who will fight reform. So the more politically toxic bail reform becomes, the better it is for business.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, because if we fix the system, they lose billions of dollars a year. Who wants that?

Jessica Wynn: Black defendants are routinely assigned substantially higher bail amounts than white defendants charged with similar crimes. The exact same crime?

Jordan Harbinger: So is the law racist?

Jessica Wynn: The law doesn't say charge Black people more. That's not how it works.

Jordan Harbinger: So where does the disparity come from? Obviously, that was not in any of my legal textbooks.

Jessica Wynn: Thousands of individual decisions. And the judges making them may honestly believe they're being completely objective. But that's the problem with institutional bias.

It's very hard to see. And nobody has to consciously decide to discriminate for the outcome to still be discriminatory.

Jordan Harbinger: So whether an individual judge is consciously biased or not, you can still end up with the same disparity.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. And then poverty compounds it. So Black Americans are statistically poorer for well-documented historical reasons.

So higher bail means more detention. More detention means lost jobs, lost housing and more instability. And Latino defendants face similar disparities.

And even when researchers control for criminal history, charge severity, employment, community ties, the gap persists.

Jordan Harbinger: It's a doom spiral. The disparities create more instability and then that instability gets used to justify the same system that created it. OK.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. And it's not even modern. You know, this is the continuation of a very old tradition.

After the Civil War, Southern states passed these vagrancy laws. Basically, if you were Black and unemployed, you could be arrested for vagrancy.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, OK. So being poor was also a crime, essentially, back then? Yeah.

Jessica Wynn: I mean, being Black and poor was effectively illegal. And then they'd set bail amounts that newly freed people couldn't possibly pay. So they'd sit in jail until they were convicted and then they'd be sentenced to forced labor or something.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. So Southern states essentially used the bail system to re-enslave people.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. And the 1960s bail reform movement was part of the broader civil rights push. Activists recognized that cash bail was being used to keep Black protesters in jail to punish them for demanding their rights.

And that tough on crime meant tough on specific people.

Jordan Harbinger: So today's bail debate did not appear out of nowhere. It's the latest chapter of a very old argument.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. I mean, the tactics have gotten more sophisticated, but the disparities haven't. I've had some experience with this in my past where I was out of state.

I was arrested. I had to not only spend money on bail, but I had to spend money flying back and forth from the state I lived in to the state I got arrested in. I had to spend money on lawyers.

It costs money to get those dash cam footage videos, all of these things that, you know, if I couldn't afford it — luckily I had a husband at the time who was a rock star and got to waste a bunch of his money on the legal system. But if I couldn't afford that, I would have sat in jail for years. And I think about that sometimes.

And even when I did the plea deal, I still had to serve what they call hard labor and fly up to — I was living in the Bay Area at the time — I had to fly up to Seattle and, like, report to prison and go out on these, you know, daily cleanup crews and things like that. It wasn't even the time. It was the expense.

I mean, I gave that court system tens of thousands of dollars just to get my freedom for a very silly incident when I was on vacation.

Jordan Harbinger: I won't ask what happened to you or what you did. It didn't hurt anybody? Okay.

All right. All right.

Jessica Wynn: Just an idiot on tour.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Okay. How much of the disparity today can we really pin on bail, poverty, crime, employment, all that stuff?

All this stuff is tangled together in a lot of ways and it gets murky.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I would have lost my job if I couldn't afford to keep coming back to my home, and I would have lost my job and been in jail. I mean, it's crazy.

So bail didn't create those disparities, but it can compound them. So if two people pose the same risk and one can afford to go home while the other can't, now that second person is also more likely to lose any stability. And obviously people who commit serious crimes should be detained.

Nobody disputes that. The issue is that cash bail doesn't sort people by danger. It sorts people by money.

Jordan Harbinger: So whether somebody gets out just has way more to do with their bank account. Having 10 grand tells you I have 10 grand. It doesn't tell you whether I'm actually dangerous, like we said before.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. And that's the fundamental problem with cash bail. It's not a new idea.

In 1975, French philosopher Michel Foucault argued that modern prisons aren't mainly about punishment. They are about sorting people. Sorting them how?

So into safe and dangerous. And once the system labels you dangerous, it follows you everywhere. Probation, background checks, housing, employment.

I just got a new apartment recently and those charges crept up on me. It's humiliating. It's like, okay, I was stupid once 15 years ago and now, like, I have to pay an extra deposit to get an apartment.

The costs still add up. And you're marked long after you've served your sentence.

Jordan Harbinger: Jeez. So less justice, more permanent record. It's almost like China's social credit score system kind of thing.

Jessica Wynn: Bail does the same kind of thing. It looks neutral, just money, but really it sorts people by class. If you can pay, you're safe.

If you can't pay, you're dangerous. You lose your job, your housing, your stability, which makes you more likely to commit crimes in the future, which makes the system's original judgment look correct, but it's just this weird feedback loop.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy at some point.

Jessica Wynn: And the philosopher Foucault would say that's not a bug, it's a feature. You know, the system isn't broken. It's working exactly as designed, maybe.

Jordan Harbinger: If we all know this, why can't we fix it?

Jessica Wynn: Because bail reform is political kryptonite. The minute crime ticks up for any reason, whether it was the pandemic, the economy, whatever, bail reform takes the blame and politicians start rolling it back before there's enough time to know whether it worked. New York weakened its reforms three times.

Alaska repealed theirs within months. And Utah, you know, gave it five months before pulling the plug.

Jordan Harbinger: So it's like states sign up for a free trial, panic a few months in, and then cancel before the invoice comes in.

Jessica Wynn: Right, right. The politics move a hell of a lot faster than the evidence.

Jordan Harbinger: Sheesh. And both parties do this, right?

Jessica Wynn: Oh, yeah. I mean, even Democrats run away from it. So former New York City Mayor Eric Adams, he came into office with support from a reform-minded coalition, then became one of bail reform's loudest critics.

The second crime became a political liability.

Jordan Harbinger: Amazing system we built over here. Dang.

Jessica Wynn: In the 2022 midterms, Republicans hammered Democrats nationwide on bail reform. It was a huge issue. In New York, Kathy Hochul, the incumbent Democratic governor, almost lost.

And a lot of analysts blamed the bail reform attacks. What did she do in response?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, she just backs away like, I don't need to deal with this.

Jessica Wynn: Right. Exactly. And she actually pushed for more amendments to weaken the reforms.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, of course she did.

Jessica Wynn: That's the political cycle, right? Crime's low, politicians pass reforms to look progressive and address racial injustice. Then crime goes up for any reason, does not matter why.

They blame bail reform. Politicians then gut the reforms. And then we're back where we started.

Rinse and repeat every, you know, five to 10 years.

Jordan Harbinger: And nobody ever points out that crime goes up everywhere, including places that didn't reform bail. So maybe bail reform isn't the problem. I don't know.

What about the reforms they don't gut?

Jessica Wynn: Sometimes the reform survives and people just find another way around it. California, again, is a perfect example. In 2021, the state Supreme Court ruled that you can't jail someone solely because they can't afford bail.

Jordan Harbinger: Seems like a pretty straightforward and basic constitutional principle.

Jessica Wynn: You'd think. But judges just started issuing more no-bail holds.

Jordan Harbinger: What does that mean? No-bail hold? Just you have to stay here no matter how much money you have?

I don't know.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. They just eliminated the option entirely. So instead of setting bail at an amount you can't afford, the judge just says you're not eligible for bail at all.

You stay in jail until trial. Same outcome, different paperwork.

Jordan Harbinger: So the whole judgment from the Supreme Court doesn't apply because there is no bail. So it doesn't matter if you can't afford it.

It doesn't exist in this case. That's just malicious compliance, essentially. Right?

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. And it gets worse. You know, California wasn't the only place this happened.

Maryland changed its rules to keep more people from being detained just because they couldn't afford cash bail. And it worked.

Fewer people were held on cash bail. But guess what else happened?

Jordan Harbinger: More people got held without any bail at all.

Jessica Wynn: Right. Yeah. And the percentage of people held on cash bail went down.

But the percentage of people held without any bail went from 13.6 percent to 22.6 percent. So same number of people locked up, just renamed.

Jordan Harbinger: So instead of figuring out what people could afford, judges increasingly took bail off the table altogether to avoid the whole mess and the fact that what they were doing was essentially against the spirit of the law.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. And then there's another problem called net widening.

Jordan Harbinger: What's that? That sounds bad.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, it is bad. So the idea is instead of cash bail, we'll release people with supervision. So check-ins, drug tests, those ankle monitors, you know, whatever.

Jordan Harbinger: So as an alternative to jail. That's good then, maybe.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. Well, except some judges started ordering supervision on people they used to just release outright.

Jordan Harbinger: Ah, OK. So people who would have normally walked free with nothing now have an ankle monitor that goes off when they go to Carl's Jr. for a burger.

Jessica Wynn: Exactly. And that affects your day-to-day life, too. And so, you know, we didn't shrink the system.

We just gave it a bigger net.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. We traded one form of control in jail for another form of control electronically, except now it's applied to way more people because it's probably cheaper and jails fill up. But maybe you can make — I don't know, maybe they can lease ankle monitors from whatever contractor for cheaper.

I don't know. Although, I don't know, if somebody's been arrested, isn't some monitoring better than none? I don't know.

Jessica Wynn: Not if they're people we already decided did not need monitoring.

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Come join us on the Jordan Harbinger subreddit. Now, back to Skeptical Sunday. What about resources?

Doing any of this stuff well costs money? I mean, I said that ankle monitors are cheap, but they're probably not actually cheap and somebody has to pay attention when it goes off and call the police or whatever, right?

Jessica Wynn: It absolutely costs money. And a lot of reforms fail because nobody funds them. So states say release more people, then they forget to fund the people responsible for making that release successful.

Jordan Harbinger: So we underfund the reform, we watch it struggle, and then we blame the reform for that struggle.

Jessica Wynn: Yes.

Jordan Harbinger: Amazing. Amazing. No notes.

Well, if you release somebody without any support system, without any supervision, without any resources, yeah, you're going to have a big fail rate, obviously.

Jessica Wynn: Of course. Yeah. Some of them are going to fail, not because bail reform is bad, but because we half-assed the implementation.

So during COVID, courts released more people instead of holding them in jail before their trials because they were trying to stop jails from becoming infection factories. Critics predicted chaos, crime waves, people fleeing, like the collapse of civilization.

Jordan Harbinger: And what actually happened?

Jessica Wynn: Most people showed up to court. Crime followed the same national trends. The apocalypse did not occur.

Jordan Harbinger: So we had evidence that releasing people doesn't cause society to collapse, and we just ignored that evidence.

Jessica Wynn: Worse than ignored it, we learned nothing because it's politically convenient to blame soft-on-crime policies rather than addressing the actual disruptions of a global pandemic.

Jordan Harbinger: The economy collapsed, millions of people lost their jobs, schools were shut down, social services broke down, but somehow the villain of the story is bail reform, not putting people with COVID in close proximity with a bunch of other people that maybe didn't do anything.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. And now we have those risk assessment algorithms as a solution to bail. Instead of using money, we're using AI and computers to decide who's dangerous.

Jordan Harbinger: Are we really doing that? I kind of — look, I assume the idea was to take the bias out of things. But that stuff is not there yet.

I mean, you can basically just automate racism accidentally.

Jessica Wynn: That's actually pretty accurate. So the idea is, if you get arrested, instead of a judge looking at you and making a gut decision about bail, a computer program assesses your risk. It looks at factors like your age, your criminal history, your employment, and your zip code.

Jordan Harbinger: Ah, yes. The famously race-neutral zip code algorithm.

Jessica Wynn: Right. And then it gives you a score. You come up either low risk, medium risk, or high risk.

And judges are supposed to use that score to make release decisions objectively. But in 2016, ProPublica found that among people who didn't go on to commit another crime, Black defendants were nearly twice as likely as white defendants to be incorrectly labeled high risk.

Jordan Harbinger: Twice as likely. Wow. So not even just like 5% more.

Oh, that's really unfair. No, 100% more. And this is what happens with AI, right?

You train an AI model on data that might have racist bias in it already. And then the AI itself becomes racist. And it's not because — yeah, you're training it on all this data that's also biased.

I mean, the natural conclusion it's going to come to is like, oh — and the thing is, you can't look at how AI makes decisions very easily. So it's not going to say, I decided that since this person lived in a zip code with a bunch of African-Americans, anybody who lives in that zip code is more likely to flee because of their skin color. Like, it's not going to tell you that.

It's going to calculate 10 zillion different things and not tell you what those things are or how they're weighted, necessarily. And it's going to come up with a conclusion, and you just have to trust it sort of blindly. And there's probably ways to fix that with different data, but you have to debias that data first.

So that's really tough to do.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, it's really tricky. And it works the opposite way, too, because white defendants are more likely to be incorrectly labeled low risk, meaning they were actually more likely to reoffend. But the algorithm predicts they're safe.

Jordan Harbinger: What we should have tried to find here — I would love to compare the AI to actual human judges. Are our human judges even more racist than the AI? Because if so, it's actually progress. We just can't pretend the problem is solved, because I interviewed this guy who was a Mormon drug dealer and he had — I don't know, he got caught with like a bunch of meth in bags and scales. And he was like, he was a drug dealer.

And the guys before him that were in court getting arraigned had gotten caught with like smaller bags of weed and they got something like three years in jail. And he was going, oh, my God, I'm so screwed. I have way more drugs than them.

And it's meth. It's not weed. And I was intending to distribute it or they caught me dead to rights.

And the judge was like, you go to college at such and such? Oh, well, go Buccaneers. Hey, ha ha.

Well, you're going to keep your nose clean from here on out. Right, buddy? And then, like, let him go with probation and like no bail and whatever it was.

I can't remember exactly. But basically he was like, holy smokes.

Jessica Wynn: But the AI would probably likely make the same decision. And the thing is, because, again, we're looking at the zip code and their whole history. And the thing is, the judges are then using the AI's scoring to make their final decision. So it's all just tangled up together.

Jordan Harbinger: Sure. OK, so the algorithm is racist, but the algorithms are objective, right? They're just math.

They can't be biased. Right. So, I mean, we kind of just talked about why that's not the case.

Jessica Wynn: Exactly. Exactly what you just said. So we're training it on a century of biased data.

And we took all that bias and we just put it into a spreadsheet.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Wow. Except now the spreadsheet comes with this number attached to it.

So it looks objective because the AI is like, I'm super smart and unemotional. How could I possibly be racist? And then that makes the bias a lot harder to challenge.

Meanwhile, like you said, Black defendants are sitting in jail because a computer program encoded centuries of racism into its decision making. And most criminal cases don't go to trial.

Jessica Wynn: Right. About 95 percent of criminal cases end in plea bargains.

Jordan Harbinger: That is crazy. So we don't really have a trial. So this is one of the biggest critiques of the legal system that I have as well.

We don't really have a trial system anymore. We have a plea bargain system. I think we probably should explain this a little bit further, actually.

Jessica Wynn: Right. Sure. I mean, pretrial detention is the pressure point, right, that makes the entire plea bargain machine work.

So imagine, again, you're arrested for something you did not do. You don't have money for bail. You don't have money for Bob to get you out.

You just sit in jail. The days turn into weeks. The weeks turn into months.

You haven't been convicted of anything yet, but you've lost your job. Maybe your apartment. If you have kids, you're missing their lives.

Maybe you're losing custody.

Jordan Harbinger: And all this before you've been convicted of anything. And then your lawyer offers you a way out. Plead guilty.

The prosecutor is going to reduce the charge. You get probation. You get time served.

You can go home today. I mean, I would take that deal even if I was innocent, I think, at that point.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, I think most people would. And most people do take that deal because the alternative isn't justice. It's waiting in jail for months or years, hoping the jury eventually believes you.

Jordan Harbinger: At some point, you're not even choosing between guilty and not guilty anymore. You're choosing between going home and staying in jail.

Jessica Wynn: Right. Exactly why people take the deal. And studies show that people in pretrial detention are four times more likely to be sentenced to jail time.

And they receive sentences that are three times longer than people who were released pretrial, even when you control for the charges and criminal history.

Jordan Harbinger: So even though you're supposed to be presumed innocent, being in jail before trial makes you more likely to go to jail after trial.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. I mean, think about the difference. So if you're released on bail, you can keep your job.

You can meet with your lawyer. You can help gather evidence and actually prepare for trial. If you're detained, you're trying to do all that from a jail cell while your job, your housing, your family life is most likely falling apart.

Jordan Harbinger: And at some point taking the plea basically looks like the only way to make the pain stop. Yeah.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. And prosecutors know this. So pretrial detention gives them enormous leverage.

It's like a threat. And this is exactly what happened to Kalief Browder, the kid we talked about with the backpack. He was offered plea deals repeatedly over those three years he sat in jail.

Jordan Harbinger: So he held out because he refused to lie and it basically destroyed his mental health and he ended up killing himself. That's so tragic.

Jessica Wynn: Exactly. And most people can't hold out that long. Most people don't have Kalief's strength or his stubbornness, I guess, or his belief that the system would eventually recognize his innocence.

No, most people break.

Jordan Harbinger: Because the system is designed to make them break. So bail isn't just about whether you're free before trial. It's about whether you have any leverage in the trial itself.

Jessica Wynn: It's about power. If you're out on bail, like I said, you can help prepare your defense and you can meet with your lawyer easily and frequently, you know, helping to get all that evidence and fight the charges without sitting in a cell while the clock runs out on your life.

Jordan Harbinger: In many ways, we really don't have a justice system. We just have a processing system.

Jessica Wynn: We have a processing system wearing a justice system costume, I guess.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, sure. And bail is the gears in that machine. OK, give me one thing that actually works.

Jessica Wynn: OK, I've got one. So Washington, D.C., has operated without commercial bail bonds or cash bail since 1992.

Jordan Harbinger: D.C., our nation's capital, figured this out more than 30 years ago.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, our nation's capital. It has one of the longest-running alternatives to cash bail in the country.

Jordan Harbinger: All right. How does that work?

Jessica Wynn: So after you're arrested, they assess whether you're likely to flee or pose a danger to the community. About 90 percent of people are released, sometimes with check-ins, drug testing or whatever level of supervision is appropriate.

Jordan Harbinger: And the other 10 percent of people, those are held in jail until their hearing because they're a flight risk or whatever?

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, I mean, they can be detained if the court finds they're a flight risk or they pose a serious danger. But the key is that the decision is based on risk, not money. And about 88 percent of people released pretrial show up for court, comparable to or better than many places that use cash bail.

Jordan Harbinger: This is pissing me off. We've had a working model in our nation's capital for more than 30 years and we just haven't copied it anywhere else. Why?

What the hell? This is insane to me.

Jessica Wynn: I know. Well, the politicians look at it and they say, you know, D.C.'s special. It's a unique jurisdiction, because calling it an exception is easier than asking what the rest of the country could learn from it.

Jordan Harbinger: Also, Bob's Bail Bonds would lose billions.

Jessica Wynn: Right. And another thing that works is almost embarrassingly simple. Text message reminders for court dates.

Jordan Harbinger: That's it? It's that simple because it's mostly people forgetting to go to court?

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, it really is. I mean, that's it. In New York City, they tested text reminders for people with low-level court summonses and failures to appear dropped 26 percent.

So it turns out for a lot of people, a reminder worked better than any threat of punishment.

Jordan Harbinger: That's amazing and also infuriating. And I cannot believe it was this easy the whole time.

Jessica Wynn: I know. A lot of people who miss court, they're not fleeing. They just forgot the date. They went to the wrong place.

They couldn't afford child care or bus fare or, you know, whatever.

Jordan Harbinger: So what about other countries? You said only the US and the Philippines use commercial bail bonds. What are functioning democracies doing?

Jessica Wynn: It's pretty simple. The basic principle in many countries is release unless the government can justify detention. You go home unless there's a specific reason to hold you.

That's it. In the UK and Canada, the police can hold you for 24 hours. Then you're released unless there's a specific reason they can prove to keep you locked up.

You have to prove that reason. It's not automatic.

Jordan Harbinger: So you have to show why the person needs to stay, not prove that you can actually afford to buy your freedom.

Jessica Wynn: Correct. And Germany treats pretrial detention as an absolute last resort. You basically have to be a flight risk or a serious danger to be held.

Jordan Harbinger: Which, to be clear, some people are. I've got a friend of a friend, I'll say, in pretrial detention in Poland right now. And she's been there for like, I don't know, seven months because she's from a country that doesn't have extradition treaties and she's being held on espionage charges.

And so, like, they know she's just going to flee and never show face for trial. And I would imagine it's a national security thing. I would not want to be in that position.

Jessica Wynn: Of course, there's things like that going on. But, yeah, the argument isn't that nobody should be held before trial. It's that being broke shouldn't be the reason you're there.

And Japan has its own problems, including some pretty questionable detention practices during interrogation. But they don't have commercial bail bonds either.

Jordan Harbinger: We've somehow turned due process into an escape room with a cover charge. We'll be right back. Thank you so much for supporting the show and our sponsors.

All of them are searchable and clickable on the website at jordanharbinger.com/deals. Now, for the rest of Skeptical Sunday. So every developed country looked at commercial bail bonds and said, no, we're absolutely not doing that.

Everybody except for us and the Philippines. It's funny, my friend was in — I feel like I'm really outing myself as a person with questionable friends.

But my friend went to Japan and he was in prison there for several months. Pretrial detention, I should say. They ended up letting him go basically on his own recognizance at that point and saying, like, you know, you were in jail for three months for this thing that probably wouldn't have gotten you that much time, basically time served.

Anyway, he was in prison in Japan. And it's funny because he's an Asian guy, but he's not Japanese. So he learned Japanese really well because the only people in prison were like Yakuza guys and gang members and stuff like that, really.

And so he was in Japanese prison with all of them. And they had already been — I guess in Japan, it's weird. I think they mix people who've been sentenced and people who haven't.

He was in pretrial detention in a jail. And the other guys, like his cellmates, were, oh, no, I'm here for years for murdering another Yakuza member. And the stories are crazy, right?

Because first of all, he had to learn Japanese, but he had to learn like gangster Japanese to communicate with these guys. And they got tons and tons of extra food, because if you have money in Japan — this is probably one of the problems you found — you can just buy better food. They're totally happy to accommodate if you have money for buying better food.

So he bought better food and he would trade his better food with the other better food that the Yakuza guys have. Because if you're Yakuza, then the gang gets you your better food and your benefits there. And he gets his stuff from, like, I don't know, the US embassy and/or just shelling out cash. So he's doing pretty well in this Japanese jail. He's basically at a cultural immersion program in a very awkward environment. Right.

He's learning the language really well. There's no English anywhere. There's no English media.

Right. There's no Internet. And he's just sitting there with his Japanese dictionary, gambling with Yakuza members, gambling sushi rolls or whatever the hell it's like with Yakuza members.

I have no idea how we got to this. All right. Because Japan has its own problems, including some questionable detention practices during interrogation, but no commercial bail.

Jessica Wynn: I'd love to look more into food in prison because I'm just thinking of that scene in Goodfellas where the gangsters get all the good food and they cook these huge dinners. You remember that?

Jordan Harbinger: Vaguely, yeah. Maybe you can't do that anymore. I don't know.

That's starting to look like El Chapo stuff, right, where he builds his own wing of the prison and it's like super nice and he's got parties there and there's a kitchen and like he's got — basically he lives in a mansion inside a prison. And he still escaped from there, by the way, if memory serves. So every developed country looked at commercial bail bonds and said, no, we're absolutely not doing that, except for us and the Philippines.

Jessica Wynn: Exactly. It's our policy twin.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. So somehow we're one of the two countries doing this and we talk about getting rid of it like it's some kind of radical experiment with totally unknown consequences.

Jessica Wynn: I know. It's just bizarre how powerful those political headlines are. Like questioning cash bail somehow became synonymous with being soft on crime.

Jordan Harbinger: Even though it jails legally innocent people by the dozen compared to the actual guilty ones based on their bank account balance.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. And it's wildly expensive. I mean, keeping one person in jail costs taxpayers somewhere between 80 and 150 dollars a day, depending on the jurisdiction.

And pretrial detention costs the US billions every year.

Jordan Harbinger: So taxpayers are paying to jail people who haven't been convicted. That's what I think people really need — we really need this to sink in.

If you haven't been convicted, you're still innocent. If you're not violent and you haven't been convicted, you're literally just like anybody else out there. If you've been accused of murdering somebody, killing somebody, I'm OK with a little extra caution for sure.

Maybe monitoring and/or pretrial detention. But yeah, I don't know, man. There's people in jail for doing stuff like accidentally shoplifting or probably things like ticketable offenses like jaywalking.

But you haven't paid your tickets because you don't have the money. Those people are in jail instead of working.

Jessica Wynn: There's a lot of people in jail who then are found innocent, like, oh, no, we have the guy, you just looked like him. That kind of stuff happens all the time.

Jordan Harbinger: I mean, it's like the backpack kid.

Jessica Wynn: I mean, he didn't — like the backpack kid. And then, because life on the outside doesn't wait, some people get out and they end up in need of public assistance.

So taxpayers are funding the detention and then funding the damage caused by the detention.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes. And there's some impressive cognitive dissonance there. We don't want to spend money helping people stay on their feet, but apparently we will spend a fortune knocking people off their feet.

Jessica Wynn: And the alternatives are cheaper. Properly funded supervised release programs cost far less than jail. Electronic monitoring can be used when someone genuinely needs oversight.

And then there are, you know, community bail funds.

Jordan Harbinger: Community bail funds. That's a thing?

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, that's a thing. You know, nonprofits raise money to post bail for people who can't afford it. And when someone appears in court, the fund gets the money back and uses it for the next person.

Jordan Harbinger: So it's a revolving freedom fund.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, essentially. And studies show that people released through these funds generally appear in court at rates comparable to or often higher than people who post their own bail.

Jordan Harbinger: Really? I guess because most people want to resolve their case and maybe nobody wants to be the asshole who stiffed the neighborhood freedom fund.

Jessica Wynn: And they aren't trying to disappear. They're not trying to avoid justice. They just can't afford to buy their freedom while they wait for their day in court.

Jordan Harbinger: So we have a 30-year model in D.C., a simple reminder system, supervised release and community bail funds. Simple solutions that already exist. Yeah, we have all of that. And we've just chosen not to do any of it at scale.

Is it only the lobbying? I mean, why? What's going on here?

Jessica Wynn: Because the system isn't only deciding who might be dangerous, it's deciding whose dangerous behavior matters. So during the protests after Freddie Gray's death in Baltimore, a teenager accused of breaking a car window was held on five hundred thousand dollars bail.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow. Half a million bucks for a broken window. That's insane.

Jessica Wynn: And do you want to know what bail was set at for the six police officers charged in Freddie Gray's death?

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, no, I don't want to know.

Jessica Wynn: Lower, much lower. Every single officer charged in Freddie Gray's death received way lower bail than the teenager accused of breaking that window.

Jordan Harbinger: And so that's the whole problem, right? We say bail is about danger. But when a teenager accused of breaking a window, which is essentially just vandalism, not dangerous — when that kid gets higher bail than police officers charged with killing somebody, money clearly is not actually measuring risk.

Jessica Wynn: Right. It's measuring something. It just isn't danger.

Jordan Harbinger: Feels like we're doomed over here with this kind of stuff. I hate this.

Jessica Wynn: We might be doomed.

Jordan Harbinger: All right. So bottom line, does bail reform work? Trick question, probably.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, right. I mean, the best research shows bail reform doesn't increase crime.

Jordan Harbinger: OK, good.

Jessica Wynn: It doesn't appear to reduce crime either.

Jordan Harbinger: How is that possible?

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, I mean, from a public safety standpoint, it's largely crime neutral, although in all the studies I've read, it just doesn't seem like we've given it enough time to really collect enough data. But it seems to be crime neutral.

Jordan Harbinger: So what does it actually do?

Jessica Wynn: So it reduces the number of legally innocent people sitting in jail simply because they can't afford bail. That's what it does.

Jordan Harbinger: OK, good. That's the point.

Jessica Wynn: I mean, that's absolutely the point. But bail reform doesn't solve poverty, addiction, homelessness or the mental health crisis.

Jordan Harbinger: All these things driving a lot of crime in the first place, arguably.

Jessica Wynn: I mean, it corrects one specific injustice. It doesn't cure every social problem around it. Then why does it inspire this much backlash again?

That's the confusing part for me. Because "does bail reform cause crime?" is probably the wrong question we're asking.

Jordan Harbinger: So what's the right question?

Jessica Wynn: Should we be jailing people before they've stood trial?

Jordan Harbinger: Because we claim to believe in innocent until proven guilty.

Jessica Wynn: We claim to believe in innocent until proven guilty. Yet roughly 70 percent of people in local jails have not been convicted of anything. So on any given day in America, that's around half a million people being held before they've been found guilty.

Jordan Harbinger: And for many of them, the difference between home and jail is just purely money.

Jessica Wynn: Purely. And that's where I keep coming back to the same question. Is the system broken or is it doing exactly what it was built to do?

Jordan Harbinger: Meaning what?

Jessica Wynn: So we tell ourselves bail is about court appearances and public safety, that detention protects the community. But in practice, it also sorts people into categories of deserving and undeserving, safe and dangerous, free and controlled. And the people marked for control are disproportionately poor, Black and brown.

Jordan Harbinger: So the cruelty is kind of the point. And I'll admit my instinct with this stuff is still if somebody's dangerous, I don't want them back on the street at all. But yeah, we're talking about people who haven't been convicted essentially being punished.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. Cash bail punishes people before the verdict, then disguises that punishment as a neutral financial decision.

Jordan Harbinger: And that's why the backlash is so fierce.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. Because this isn't only a fight over crime statistics, it's a fight over who gets freedom by default and who has to prove they deserve it.

Jordan Harbinger: That's bleak.

Jessica Wynn: I mean, it's accurate, though.

Jordan Harbinger: OK, so even when reform passes, the system can recreate the same outcome: detention without bail, or supervision for people who once would have just been released outright. But we also know what helps. D.C.'s pretrial model, court reminders, properly funded supervision and release decisions based on risk instead of on wealth.

And I know, properly funded supervision, people are like, aha, money. But remember how much it costs to incarcerate these people before they've been convicted. It's way, way more, way more.

Jessica Wynn: And yet we've kept one of the only commercial bail systems in the world, a system that costs billions of dollars, produces enormous racial and economic disparities and still can't prove that money makes us safer.

Jordan Harbinger: Because in America, you're innocent until proven guilty. Unless you can't make bail, then justice is apparently paywalled. Thanks, Jess, for bailing us out of this one.

And thanks to you all for listening. Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday to me, jordan@jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers, deals, ways to support the show on the website at jordanharbinger.com/deals. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram.

You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. You can find Jessica on her Substacks, Between the Lines and Where Shadows Linger. We'll link to those in the show notes.

Her work is on Instagram at Never Met Jessica's. This show is created in association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Tadas Sidlauskas, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird and Gabriel Mizrahi.

Our advice and opinions are our own. And I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. Also, we try to get these as right as we can.

Not everything is gospel, even when it's fact-checked. So consult a qualified professional before applying anything you hear on the show, especially if it's about your health and well-being. Remember, we rise by lifting others.

Share the show with those you love. If you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the skepticism and knowledge that we doled out today. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn.

And we'll see you next time. How could a war halfway around the world affect what you pay or what you can buy? Here's a preview with Peter Zeihan on what happens when the countries making our everyday essentials can't keep delivering.

Peter Zeihan: Since 1989, there's really only been one large military industrial complex in the world that's been American. And most of our allies buy our equipment. And what we're discovering now is a lot of these new technologies are really effective at destroying some of these types of equipment in certain environments.

The technology is evolving so quickly, the rules of the game are changing, the goalposts are moving, and every state in the Persian Gulf and every front and second line state in NATO against the Russians has already broken ground on mass manufacturing facilities to make Ukrainian drones at scale. So it's entirely possible that two years from now, every ally we have is not going to be buying meaningful military equipment from the United States because it's just not applicable anymore and we won't deliver anymore. We are seeing de-globalization accelerating at the same time the United States is de-industrializing.

If anything, we need to be sprinting in the opposite direction. We're no longer building ourselves out for what is coming. We're just kind of waiting for the world to happen to us now.

To keep it going, you need the United States to maintain the military structure that allows global trade to happen. It never occurred to me that we could have an administration so out of touch with reality that we would do this on purpose. This conflict is going to go down in history as the moment where the United States lost the ability to influence the Eastern Hemisphere.

Jordan Harbinger: To hear how working with Canada and Mexico could help America weather the chaos and what's standing in the way, check out episode 1370 of The Jordan Harbinger Show with Peter Zeihan.