The United States for all its greatness, it certainly has a very divisive inter-racial relationship, and nowhere is it more pronounced than in the criminal and justice system. Every now and then, a trigger-happy cop will send a black man to his untimely death. More often than not, the cop in question is white and the confrontation between the cop and the alleged offender is always filled with extreme prejudice.
According to CNN, 60% of inmates in U.S. prisons are people of color. That works out to one in every African American, one in every 36 Hispanic, and one in every 106 Caucasian men. Ironically, black people represent only 13% of the U.S. population. Yet they make up 47% of the 1,900 exonerations in U.S. prison registry of inmates who have been wrongfully accused.
Slate stats show an even sorry state of affairs; the inmates who often cannot afford bail are black. The less affluent defendants end up spending more time at the pen, while the affluent one simply writes a check, and get back to the society. The less affluent continue wasting away behind bars.
One team of black techies have made it their business to make sure defendants who cannot afford bail, get assistance from the public. Kortney Ziegler and Tiffany Mikell have launched the Appolition app that allows the user to donate their spare change to the prisoner’s bond.
How Appolition app works
Once you have installed the app, you connect it to your bank account. You can then donate the cash you need to round up your balance to a whole figure. The cents you need to do away to get to a whole number gets deposited to your Appolition account and once it reaches 50 cents and above, it gets passed on to the Appolition.us account.
You will always have the option to opt-in and out of donating at any time; since making the donation is completely at your discretion. The idea behind the Appolition app is collecting the ‘cents’ from hundreds of people in the society and use it to make bail for black inmates who cannot afford the bond money.
Hey Twitter we are two black tech founders raising a seed round of half a million. A simple RT might introduce us to our next angel investor pic.twitter.com/18RZIo0Oyt
— King Kortney (@fakerapper) September 25, 2017
The founders of the Appolition app were inspired by the collective work of the grassroots activists. They seek to harness the power of crowdfunding to bail out inmates that cannot afford it for themselves.
Appolition has partnered with the U.S. National Bail Out, and the money crowdsourced via the app gets sent to the organization directly, which then puts it up to support inmates behind the bars.