Roughly 4,300 women across California will spend this Mother’s Day in pretrial custody. An estimated 80% are mothers, and most are their children’s primary caretakers. Pretrial incarceration — leading to coerced guilty pleas, unemployment and housing loss — devastates these women and their children, who are left behind.

This mass family-separation is the work of judges who break the law and elected bodies that fund incarceration over community-centered care. Last year, the California Supreme Court held that it is unconstitutional to jail presumptively innocent people solely because they cannot afford to pay cash bail. In January, the California Legislature extended the same protections to people accused of violating their probation. Yet, a recent report from Silicon Valley De-Bug, a community advocacy organization, found that judges continue to set unaffordable cash bail in most cases.

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