FRANKFORT, Ky. — State lawmakers continue to work on a bill limiting charitable bail organizations after an effort to do so failed during session earlier this year.

Members of The Bail Project, which collects donations and uses them to pay bail for people who can’t afford it, testified in front of a joint interim committee Wednesday.

Shameka Parrish-Wright, Community Advocacy and Partnership Manager for The Bail Project, said she wishes the group was around when she was a teen and pleaded guilty to a crime she didn’t believe she was guilty of.

“But because I was poor, I did not get my due process,” she said. “The presumption of innocence only existed on paper.”

Parrish-Wright and The Bail Project are actively working to end cash bail entirely because it only affects poorer people. The group’s operations manager in Louisville, Carrie Cole, said it’s an uphill battle in Kentucky.

“It’s the South. We’re going to have to chip away from the systemic racism, the systemic oppression that is built within the system, and I think that starts with collecting data,” she said.

Cole said the state can do a better job collecting data on pre-trial incarceration to get a better picture of who is affected by the cash bail system.

“It doesn’t seem like a hard argument to me that if you’re poor, you’re held in jail,” she said. “That’s something we should address.”

Republicans have majorities in both the House and the Senate, and Rep. John Blanton (R-Salyersville) says this bill will likely be one they focus on next session.

“We are forgetting about the victims,” he said. “We are focusing totally on the criminals, and we’re forgetting about those people that are hurting.”

He filed a bill last session to end charitable bail organizations that gained traction after the shooting of Louisville mayoral candidate Craig Greenberg. A different group, the Louisville Community Bail Fund, bailed the suspect out of jail in that case.

“I know the group that done that, that wasn’t you all,” Blanton told Cole and Parrish-Wright, who ran for mayor this year. “But nevertheless, when they do that, it forces us as policymakers to set things in place to prevent those things from happening.”

Eventually, the House passed an amended bill prohibiting charitable bail groups from posting bail beyond $5,000, but the Senate didn’t take it up before session ended.

Blanton said he’s still working on the bill because he used to work in law enforcement.

“I know that there’s been times that I’ve taken people out of communities, and people in that community thank me for getting that individual out of that community because they’re such a menace,” he said. “They’re so fearful; they live in a state of fear, and then all of a sudden, some group that they don’t even know comes and pays their bail, and they go right back into that group.”

Parrish-Wright said she’s working with Blanton on the bill, but helping people post bail isn’t the problem.  

“As someone who lives in the West End (of Louisville), who birthed kids in the West End, I’ve seen a lot of things,” she said. “And I will tell you that our work is not what’s making the crime rise; we have a problem all over our country with poverty, with gaps in services. We all are surviving failed policies.”