Defund Bail Providers

On the evening of February 15, 2023, Stephen Fleck was walking his dog on Schroeder Road on Madison’s Southwest Side. The father of five and Marine Corps veteran, “Steve was known for his towering height, quick wit, intelligent dialogue, lyrical writing, intricate art, philosopher’s mind, and compassionate counselor heart,” according to his obituary.

Tiambra Walker had, allegedly, just left a party where she had consumed Percocet. Impaired by drugs, she struck and killed Fleck and his dog, then fled the scene and hid her car. Later she tried to blame a passenger.

It took police almost a year to track Walker down in Peoria. After she was arrested there for obstruction of justice and destroying evidence, escape, theft and assault of an emergency worker, it was discovered that she had also fled Madison amid charges in the hit and run that killed Fleck and his dog.

Tiambra Walker is a danger to society and she should be in prison. (She is now, only being incarcerated in late April of this year and only because she violated conditions of her parole in another case.) And, in fact, she should have been in jail when she killed Fleck, but she wasn’t thanks to an organization calling itself Free the 350.

According to a report in the Wisconsin State Journal on April 2nd of this year, when Walker was picked up in Peoria: “About nine months before Fleck’s death, on May 3, 2022, she had been bailed out of the Dane County Jail on a different hit-and-run case stemming from an incident in October 2021. No one was killed in that crash but four people were injured and Walker pleaded guilty to two felonies in the case on April 10, 2023. The man who bailed her out, Liam Manjon, posted bail 139 times from 2020 to 2023 for people being held at the Dane County Jail, according to Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Elise Schaffer. Some of them also went on to be arrested for other crimes.”

In a Sunday story, Wisconsin State Journal reporter Chris Rickert looked into Free the 350 and discovered that Walker was among 345 people charged in 646 cases since 2016 that were bailed out by the organization. All told, they put up at least  $742,105 for bail and ended up getting only about $520,000 back, forfeiting the other $220,000 because the defendants didn’t show up for their court dates or violated some other condition of their release. The organization says explicitly that it doesn’t care if the people they bail out return to court as ordered.

It’s fair to say that Free the 350 is out of the mainstream. Here’s how the organization describes its mission on its own website: “Prison abolition is the ultimate goal, free them all!”

And they mean to “free them all” regardless of their criminal records, what they’ve been charged with or their propensity to show up in court or meet other conditions of their release. They’ve worked to free those accused of murder, domestic violence and child abuse, no matter how strong the evidence against them.

I’m skeptical that nonprofits bailing people out of jail is a good idea in the first place because, in Dane County, 70% of defendants are released without bail. If a Dane County court orders bail they almost always have a good reason. But, if you still think this is a good idea, there are more responsible ways of doing it. Rickert reports on an organization in California that provides bail only after a careful review of the defendant’s history, the charges against them and other factors. Then they provide the person out on bail with services to keep them out of trouble and they insist that the person show up for their court dates. If you’re going to do this, here’s a responsible model, but it’s certainly not what the radical local group here is interested in doing. They seem to believe that everybody is a political prisoner.

So, here’s the upshot. It’s a free country. If an organization wants to take these sorts of extreme views and put the community at risk by putting dangerous felons, like Tiambra Walker, on the street and behind the wheel, that’s their right. But it’s not our obligation as taxpayers to fund them.

Here are the organizations that are listed as supporting Freedom for the 350:

-Freedom Inc.

-Young Gifted and Black

-Madison General Defense Committee of the IWW

-Madison-Area Urban Ministry

-Sankofa Behavioral Community Health

-Operation Welcome Home

-LGBT Books To Prisoners

-National Lawyers Guild

-Racial Justice Tipping Point

In a sane world what would happen is that the City of Madison and Dane County would cut off money to any of these groups that it funds. A quick survey finds that Freedom, Inc., alone receives over $100,000 from the City of Madison. To be clear, it doesn’t appear that any of the city money goes directly to the bail program, but of course, any taxpayer money going to these organizations frees up other resources that could be used for that purpose. Even more important, defunding these organizations would send a signal of disapproval and perhaps get them to abandon the program.

I’m nothing if not realistic. What I propose isn’t going to happen. Nobody on the City Council or the County Board is inclined to do this, and even if they were, they wouldn’t want to take on the political slings and arrows for what would surely be a lost cause.

Nonetheless, I think it’s useful for somebody to at least suggest a move toward sanity. Let me be the one.