Jay Z calls out bail bond industry in Father's Day column
Rapper and performance artist Shawn Carter, known as Jay Z, took a stand against the bail bond industry in a Time column ahead of Father's Day.
In Friday's "Ideas" column, Carter talked about his work on Time: The Kalief Browder Story and how producing the docuseries on Spike led him to "became obsessed with the injustice of the profitable bail bond industry."
So in time for Father's Day this weekend, he's highlighting the flawed system where "on any given day over 400,000 people, convicted of no crime, are held in jail because they cannot afford to buy their freedom."
"We can't fix our broken criminal justice system until we take on the exploitative bail industry"
Like nationwide Mother's Day efforts to bail out mothers held in custody, Jay Z said he was supporting similar organizations to help fathers who can't afford bail. Some of those organizations include Southerners on New Ground and Color of Change.
He said as a father, "it's the least I can do," but noted that giving money is "not a long fix."
Instead, he called for a systematic overhaul. "We can't fix our broken criminal justice system until we take on the exploitative bail industry," he wrote.
He stayed on the topic of racial justice and the jail system and didn't give any clues if his wife Beyoncé has given birth to their expected twins yet, but he did mention his "growing family."
Topics Social Good Celebrities Racial Justice
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
