Did you know that according to statistics, over 60% of the current prison population are people of color? One in every 15 African American men and 1 in every 36 Hispanic men are incarcerated in comparison to 1 in every 106 white men. If that’s not startling enough, while black people represent 13% of the U.S. population, they represent a whopping 47% of the 1,900 exonerations in the prison registry that have been wrongfully accused, according to CNN.
It gets worse. It’s common in many of these cases that because of sky-high bail amounts, less affluent defendants are stuck in jail for low-level crimes or crimes they didn’t even commit while wealthy ones can buy their freedom by writing a check, according to Slate.
Kortney Ziegler and co-founder Tiffany Mikell created Appolition, an app that allows you to donate your spare change to a prisoner’s bond. The functionality is quite simple. You connect your bank account and just as you would do with your extra cash, rounding it up and depositing it into your savings account, you would opt to add it to your Appolition.us account. That spare change would then be donated each time you reach at least 50 cents. The user is in complete control of the donation and can pause it or resume it whenever they see fit.
The company was developed after a tweet from @fakerapper went viral.
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
Inspired by the collective work of grassroots activists, the founders found a way to harness the power of crowdfunding to empower those who can’t afford bail. Appolition is working in partnership with National Bail Out, allowing the money to be sent directly to the organization which will be put directly toward the prisoner’s bail.