National Black Mama’s Bail Out Day is a national campaign spearheaded by the Atlanta-based activist group Southerners on New Ground (SONG). The campaign plans to pay the bail money of jailed Black mothers not convicted of a crime to be home in time for Mother’s Day, May 14.
According to a report from the Prison Policy Initiative, 70 percent of the 646,000 people incarcerated in more than 3,000 local jails have not yet been convicted of a crime.
“One reason that the unconvicted population in the U.S. is so large is because our country largely has a system of money bail, in which the constitutional principle of innocent until proven guilty only really applies to the well off,” authors of the report state.
