03/31/2026
Three people. Same number. Completely different stories.
$7,500 for a 20-year-old with no record who was scared, ran, and was tased by police.
$7,500 for a 60 + year old man in a spousal dispute.
$3,000 for a 40-year-old battling addiction, charged with PWID.
All of them would be sitting in jail right now if Lancaster’s community & the Lancaster Bail Fund didn’t step in. Not convicted. Not sentenced. Just held because of money.
And that’s the part people don’t want to sit with… bail isn’t about guilt, harm, safety or consistency. It’s a number. Assigned. And if you can’t meet it, you sit.
According to the Prison Policy Initiative, about 70% of people in jails are pretrial, legally innocent and locked up simply because they can’t afford to pay.
So how does a scared 20-year-old, a man in a domestic dispute, and someone battling addiction all get translated into a dollar amount? And why is freedom something we’re expected to buy back?
This week alone, we paid over $18,000 to bring people home. Not because the system worked, but because we refused to let money decide who stays caged.
Lancaster is preparing to invest millions more into incarceration while we’re out here paying for people’s freedom one life at a time. This is what it means when we say freedom is priced, and poverty is punished.
