“We had a lot of bail bonds companies ... dragging down the neighborhood.”

Bail bonds business on N First Street, near the Hall of Justice. Summer 2021.

Excerpt from an interview with Sarah, a resident of the neighborhood surrounding the Hall of Justice in San Jose, CA. Summer 2021.

Interviewer: So now, um, moving to the courthouse and the jail. We can talk about -- we can talk about them separately, since you seem to have thoughts on them separately. Does the courthouse affect your life or the way that you live your life every day?

Sarah: No, not every day. It occasionally has issues -- not issues -- occasionally has some impact, but not...certainly not every day. It's -- it's --

Interviewer: What are some of those impacts?

Sarah: It's rela -- it's only -- it's a distance away. The impact is just that sometimes we have, um, protests, depending on what is being tried. So, you have the helicopters and, you know, that kind of stuff. It happens within our -- within the community. It's kind of a little bit -- you know, you can tell, oh, okay, it's you know, Thermos? [referring to Theranos]. The lady who went to Stanford, but, uh, but she quit, and she did that -- she had that company. She's being tried over here. So, every time she comes, they got the helicopters, they got this, they got that. So, you could tell -- stuff like that. And then, occasionally, you get the protests that are down here for whatever's happening at the courthouse. But not, nothing major, I mean, you just get a few of that stuff going on.

Interviewer: Got it.

Sarah: Yeah, a few times a year, I guess I should say.

Interviewer: So, would you most characterize those impacts as negative?

Sarah: Umm, I don't see them as negative because there's so few, so I can't say, uh -- well, the helicopters are negative, okay? You can tell that the helicopters are quite annoying when they're hovering around here. So, that is a negative.

Interviewer: Uh huh (haha).

Sarah: But when they have the protests, they’re not that...they're contained because they're in front of the courthouse. They're contained, and they're not -- that's -- I don't feel that as a negative...because it's free speech and stuff.

Interviewer: Right. Got it. And what about the jail? How does the jail affect --?

Sarah: Well, that's a different story (ha).

Interviewer: Sure.

Sarah: And the reason for that is, um, they release people from jail, but they process them here. And then, they don't give them...I don't know -- they don't provide transportation -- some of them don't have a place to go after they come out. So, they come in our neighborhood. So, there's a little bit of a -- there's a little bit of a problem with that. They get released. And maybe I'm being a little prejudiced with these people, because, you know, maybe they're not cause -- maybe they're not the ones causing the problem in the neighborhood -- maybe there's someone else causing the problem. But we see that occasionally. And there has been an escape every so often -- get the helicopters, you know? And because I'm close to the jail and, I mean, I'm on [street redacted] and the jail is on First and Hedding...it's been occasion where our, uh, we've been locked down because somebody escaped, you know, and they have to go find them. And they -- they come this way, towards us, and they hop fences, and they go in our backyard. That's what happened.

Interviewer: Oh, wow -- 

Sarah: So, that's -- yeah, yeah. So, we've been locked down in different ways. One to which -- one where there was an actual crime committed -- he wasn't an escapee. But that was another. So, another one was an escapee, and they -- they were looking all over the place. I just had to stay in my house. It's okay when it's -- I'm not bothered when it's during the day because I can see what's going on and the police and SWAT can see what's going on. But if it happened at night, you know, it has not happened at night because they don't release them at night. And they didn't escape at night. They escaped during the day. So, that was the only issues we've had with that, with the people that escaped. But other than that, it's the releasing, I'm not quite sure. And then the other impact we've had in the past, that we as a community had to trust the city and get a policy actually made, which took a long time because it's government, is that we had a lot of bail bonds companies in our neighborhood, and that was really...that was really dragging down the neighborhood. We had so many of them. And they don't contribute to the family of the neighbor -- in our neighborhood -- it doesn't contribute to that neighborhood. It's only support -- and we found out -- it's only support for the people who are incarcerated. But, you know, when you -- when you investigate them, where we go, "how does it work?" You realize they do that stuff online. They don't have to be -- their presence doesn’t have to be so concentrated here in our area, so that was the problem. And we gradually got that...it's gradually going away. Even, you know, we had that thing on the ballot, anyway. Of course, there's lawsuits against that. But we'll see what happens.

Interviewer: How would you, um -- can you tell me a little bit more about what you mean by there is sort of a "drag on the community?"

Sarah: Say that again. I didn't quite understand your question.

Interviewer: Sorry. You had mentioned, um, that you thought the bail bond officers are kind of like a "drag on the community."

Sarah: Right. The impact was there's so many of them, so there is no variety of stores and commercial, one. The more thing is, is that we have a school nearby, and kids walk by so many of these bail bonds and they say, "well, what's that for?" They question it, so that was a little bit -- and the other thing was, is that even these bail bonds people, one in particular -- I have to say one because it's evidence of one in particular -- was actually giving swag to kids for the bail bonds. And they're using that -- and that's just, you know, it's like the tobacco company giving swag to kid -- not that they'll give them something to smoke, but maybe they give them a trinket, like a keychain, to go smoke, you know, stuff like that...they're getting it. Then the other thing was, is that they support a group of stressed-out people. So, we -- I was getting people, and I know that their relatives or friends, but they were stressed out to try and get them out of jail. And they're pacing in front of my house because that's how close it was. It's on my back and forth. They're parking everywhere. So, you get a lot of -- and when there's a concentration, you get a lot of stressed-out people that are accumulating in our neighborhood, so they can take care of their loved ones. So those are the -- those are the things that was impacting our neighborhood.

**

Related research:

O’Neill, Kate K., Ian Kennedy, and Alexes Harris. "Debtors’ Blocks: How Monetary Sanctions Make Between-neighborhood Racial and Economic Inequalities Worse." Sociology of Race and Ethnicity (2021): 23326492211057817.

Page, Joshua, Victoria Piehowski, and Joe Soss. "A debt of care: Commercial bail and the gendered logic of criminal justice predation." RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 5, no. 1 (2019): 150-172.