I saw him in the jail myself. Bail had been set at $100, an amount almost anyone's family could scrape together the same day. He didn't go home. He got moved around instead, his paperwork kept getting lost, and he sat in custody for a week or two on bail that was never actually the thing keeping him there.
The bail number isn't always the real barrier
Most people assume a low bail means a quick release: someone shows up with the cash, and you walk out. There's a second gate that almost nobody explains, and it can hold regardless of how low the number is. It's called a bail source hearing, and it's built into Criminal Procedure Law § 520.10.
At a source hearing, a judge determines whether the money being used to post bail was legally obtained. The law exists to keep drug proceeds, embezzled funds, or other criminal money out of the bail system. That's a legitimate purpose. What it isn't supposed to be is routine.
This isn't supposed to be automatic
Under CPL 520.10, a source hearing requires the district attorney to actually apply for one, and the court must have "reasonable cause to believe that the person posting cash bail is not in rightful possession of money posted as cash bail or that such money constitutes the fruits of criminal or unlawful conduct" before the inquiry can happen at all. The statute was built for organized crime and drug money. A family member's $100 isn't what "reasonable cause" was written to catch.
The window that isn't real
Here's how it plays out. Bail gets set at arraignment, low enough that it looks like a formality. The person is held at the courthouse, typically around four hours, to produce proof of where the bail money came from and to get the district attorney to actually convene the hearing in that window. In practice, that almost never happens: gathering tax records and getting a DA's office to show up for a source hearing on a low-level case in four hours is not realistic. So instead of going home, the person is shipped to jail, still technically bailable, just not able to clear the hearing in time.
When a judge grants a source hearing request, a person can be held for up to 72 hours just waiting for it. That's the official number. In practice, once someone is in the system waiting on a hearing that hasn't been scheduled yet, that window can stretch, and stretch is exactly what "moved around, paperwork lost" looks like from the inside. A 72-hour hold that blows past its own deadline turns into a week. Sometimes two.
What that week or two actually does
By the time a hearing finally happens, or the case just moves on without one, the person has already been sitting in jail for something a $100 bail was never supposed to cause. And jail time before a hearing changes how a case gets resolved, not because the case got weaker or stronger, but because the person sitting in it did. Research using randomly assigned judges, a method that isolates the effect of detention itself rather than just correlating with it, found that pretrial detention significantly increases the probability of conviction, primarily through an increase in guilty pleas (Dobbie, Goldin & Yang, American Economic Review, 2018).
This isn't a fringe outcome in New York City specifically. As of a March 2022 snapshot, 2,206 people in NYC jails had been waiting 6 months or more for trial, and 1,474 had been waiting a year or more, according to Vera Institute tracking of NYC jail data. Sixty percent of the people who had lost a year or more to pretrial detention were Black, against roughly 24% of New York City's overall population.
The point isn't the money, it's the exposure
A source hearing asks a family member to hand over tax returns and income sources to a court, and by extension the district attorney's office, just to help someone go home. Most people don't want that scrutiny, whether they've done anything wrong or not. When that requirement gets applied to a bail amount that was never large enough to plausibly be laundered money, the practical effect isn't catching illicit funds. It's making the family member walk away.
The exact question to ask
If bail has been set and the person still hasn't been released, ask directly: "Has the DA requested a source hearing on this bail, and what specifically is the reasonable cause they've cited?" The statute requires that cause to be stated. If nobody can point to it, that's worth pushing on, in writing, before assuming a low bail number will resolve itself.
Know the full facts of your case and every program available before you make any decision. Sit with your family and decide, not while someone is stuck behind a hearing that was never supposed to apply to them in the first place.