California governor signs overhaul of bail system
latimes.com
latimes.com
So, instead of an individual Judge getting flack for excessive bail, he can sleep at night having had his authority delegated to an anonymous 'committee' that can refuse to set bail altogether.
It seems the general public -- at least in California -- has little idea of the enormous role in the judicial system played by bail bondsmen. I know dozens. They are all a bit sketchy. But, they are the front-line dealing with the lowest rungs of society. They do a lot of good, ensure their charges stay out of trouble, and show up to court. They do it for a profit. But, that doesn't diminish their role.
I'm interested in seeing how it will turn out. I wish them well, but I've found abuses are more likely when the responsibility for a person is diffused amongst many.
Some judges have appointments for life, and those that aren't often aren't recalled. How is that accountable?
> anonymous 'committee' that can refuse to set bail altogether.
Where are you getting the information that the committee is anonymous or unaccountable? The articles on this change that I've read didn't specify that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_v._Turner#Repercussions...
[1]Rose Bird, Cruz Reynoso, Joseph Grodin
Who specifically funded those efforts I wonder...
And then stretch that to two other Justices.
And as we now know the 80's clamor for less and less legal review and more and more executions had pretty bad outcomes[1]
> Judges can be recalled, though it is rare.
I believe that's exactly what the parent was trying to point out...
A board seems less likely to face political blowback when the rare out on bail person commits a serious crime. That sounds like the sort of incident that incentivizes judges to be extra harsh.
Before a judge sets bail, he will (a) have the defendant in front of him, (b) listen to arguments from the State, and (c) arguments from the defense attorney. (In some situations, a booking magistrate can set bail before the defense attorneys appearance, but the defense sttorney has the right to have the judge revisit the issue as soon as he makes an appearance.)
This adversarial process is good. The State can make its arguments, and the Defendsnt can make his, and the issue is decided by an expert in the law who has st least seven years of college education.
It is unwise to toss out this system in favor of a gaggle of social workers.
Unfortunately, this is s trend that extends far beyond bail and California. I'm certain many readers have been involved in custody litigation where, instead of the judge listening to testimony, cross-examination, etc., the decision is effectively made by a 'Socisl Study' performed by an incompetent psychologist/social worker appointed by the Court. It's hideous.
It's also popping up in professional licensing boards. A doctor, to give an example, might be brought before the state medical board for some infraction. But, instead of the board hearing the case, they require him to be scrutinized and evslusted by some private contracted group of dingbats... almost almost always non-doctors. The group's 'advisory opinion' is almost always adopted by the board.
In short, there is a trend towards relieving our official 'decision-makers' from their duty to make decisions. It's disturbing.
If you also people if a specific punishment is severe enough, most will say yes.
People require less severe punishments the more informed they are. Voting on judges is only going to get a more generalized mob effect.
So, we have the will of the people. So far, so good.
And then we have the complete freedom of capital to nudge the will of the people.
Something is wrong with this picture.
Seems even if you remove the influence of capital, you're just kicking the can rather than actually solving the problem.
"Nudge" is far too weak of a verb, here. There are many structural issues between the population and exercising their will, and many structural advantages that allow capital to exert undue pressure on the political process. These advantages and dis-advantages are inherent to our system and have been described at length in academia.
Or, the solution is for the people elected by the people to write laws to take the decision out of the hands of judges and put it into a different mechanism; if this is a lesser political risk for them than it would be for the judges making decisions with the same result case by case, it shows that the will of the people is not against the result, as you claim it must be if the judges face a political risk for the outcome of frequent release, but against the mechanism of judicial discretion.
So for instance one interesting datum for that paper is release rates for people by prior offenses. Release, in the context there, can mean they were released either for an affordable bail or for no bail at all -- 'released to personal recognizance' being the phrasing. Of those with no prior convictions, 77% end up being released. For those with misdemeanor priors, 63% end up being released. And for those with felony priors, only 46% end up being released. Actually maybe 'only' is not an appropriate term there. People charged with a felony, and who have prior felony convictions, end up being released from prison 46% of the time.
Anyhow, the thing I think that arguably justifies judges' decisions is that we can have a sort of completely unplanned, but phenomenally well designed, experiment. Sometimes jails are forced to release people that they would not otherwise release because of emergency releases -- that can be triggered by things such as jail overcrowding. In these cases judges are going to release those who were seen to be less desirable candidates for release. Though of course they'll be releasing the 'least less desirable' candidates. Cutting to the chase there, these people released through emergency releases ended up engaging in some form of pretrial misconduct 52% of the time with 45% of them failing to appear for their court date. The pretrial misconduct rate for intentionally released individuals ranges from 27-36%, depending on the release type, with failure to appear rates of 14-30%.
The paper includes a couple of really handy tables that show logisitic regression analysis of release decisions and reoffense rates for people broken down into various categories, alongside their pretrial misconduct rates. So for instance you can see the weighting for, or against, release for various groups contrasted against how often they reoffend. In a perfect world, these would be inverses of one another. For instance if there is a large negative bias against releasing people for [x] then we'd expect to see a large positive bias in terms of pretrial misdconduct for [x]. And in most cases this does seem to be the case. But there are some exceptions. All in all, it seems like a system that does work pretty well. Should be interesting to see how well the bail committees perform by contrast!
For the same person, setting increased bail due to more serious allegations or greater flight risk does seem to make sense. That people have wildly different levels of wealth to start with is the major problem, but a system that would give me a $5000 bail on a shoplifting charge vs. a $5mm bail on murder seems to make some sense.
Here's a section from the actual bill:
A person released pursuant to the local rule of court shall be released on his or her own recognizance or on supervised own recognizance release ... A person shall not be required to pay for any nonmonetary condition or combination of conditions imposed pursuant to this section
I believe Supervised Own Recognizance means that the defendant can be required to wear a GPS tracking ankle bracelet (but under this bill, they can't be required to pay for it).
So that may do more to ensure that the defendant shows up for trial than leaving his girlfriend on the hook for $25K of bail money if he skips the trial. Plus, it seems that it'd be a good deterrent from committing other crimes while waiting for trial.
Yes, it will be harder for some people to pay than others. Things cost money, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to charge the person using the service for that service, even if they're ordered to do so by a court.
Innocence doesn't mean that you didn't use the service. Should the taxpayers foot the bill? Perhaps but good luck politically. Should the guilty people who used the same service pay an inflated price?
Law enforcement is a cost to society. Budget for it appropriately. If you find it's getting too expensive, look at ways to reduce costs. Maybe prosecute fewer drug crimes. But don't pass the cost along to those who are accused without any conviction.
Assuring appearance of the accused is a service government provides to taxpayers (EDIT: more correctly, the public at large); doing it with the minimum necessary and efficient interference with the liberty of the accused is a matter of basic human rights, not a service to the accused.
Therefore, there is no service to the accused being consumed, and no basis for a payment by the accused. The service being provided is to the public by the State at a cost to the liberty of the accused, and should be paid for out of public revenues, not out of the pocket of the person whose liberty is being curtailed.
EDIT:
> Should the taxpayers foot the bill?
Yes, clearly.
> Perhaps but good luck politically.
It's been the policy, and a fairly uncontroversial one, in the nation's capital (despite the fact that for much of that time, a Congress of the opposing major party from the D.C. local government has had veto power over D.C. policy) for years, and a national political movement has now coalesced around it, with polls showing strong national public support for it, and it was just approved by both political branches of the government of the largest state. So, yeah, it seems to be doing just fine, politically.
Of course the tax payer should pay. The criminal justice system is a service of society. The tax payer receives that benefit and as well pays its costs.
I'm really not sure what role and responsibilities people expect government to have in society.
What's next, start charging innocent people room and board for the period they were locked in jail, because they used that "service"?
The govt is not a business. Its purpose it not to make money, nor extract money from people charged with crimes. We don't want a society where you pay police each time they come to your house.
Capitalism isn't the end goal of society, it's a tool. I see way to many people on HN (not you specifically) where it seems the only tool they know of to solve a problem is "hmm.. I'll try to apply capitalism to that".
It is possible to frame every interaction in society as s product or service. The fact that we can doesn't mean we should.
I frequently see people caught up in the "technical problem solving" of how to transform something else into a buying and selling transaction with zero foresight into motivation or consequences of doing so.
The system is cheaper than keeping folks in jail as well. Some civil servant can call folks and leave reminders and such. No need to pay for food and housing. And a great bonus: The person's life isn't so negatively affected before they are even found guilt or for crimes that wouldn't usually have jail time.
2. Get dangerous people -- perhaps with little to lose if they are already facing serious charges -- off the street faster
Of course these benefits need to be balanced against the costs imposed on the defendent (who has not been convicted yet).
How does bail achieve that? If they are too dangerous to release, then it's no bail. If they are possibly dangerous, you're letting a financially motivated (exploitative) or ignorant entity decide who gets out of jail...be it a financial institution or the mob or family, but only if you come from a background which has finances to leverage. It's an effective tax on the poor innocent and guilty alike.
In the new system, dangerous people won't be released, regardless of how much money they have.
Bail means that poor dangerous and poor non-dangerous people are detained, and rich dangerous and rich non-dangerous people are released. It's not clear to me that the reason you stated is actually produced by the bail system.
> Get people to show up for trial
I'd be very interested in some numbers backing this up; surely there is some effect here, but I have no idea if bail would make 1% of people or 99% of people show up that would otherwise skip a court appearance.
My gut feel is that if you're impulsive enough to skip a court date and incur a police warrant, the threat of losing your bail bond isn't going to make much of a difference.
I did a quick Google search which brought up this paper from the 70s:
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/32349NCJRS.pdf
"A random sample of 756 defendants released on bail in Charlotte, North Caro1ina in 1973 was studied to determine the relative importance of various factors in determining the likelihood that a bailed defendant will fail to appear in court... The most important factors were found to be court disposition time (the amount of time between release on bail and court disposition), criminal record, and form of bail... Comparison of various forms of bail were made, adjusting simultaneously for criminal history and court disposition time. Forms of bail that rely solely on the threat of financial loss to ensure appearance in court proved to be the worst in terms of rates of nonappearance and rearrest. "
I'm sure there's a criminal justice system expert around here that can comment on some more recent research.
I’d like to see an experiment where rather than money, instead a free citizen is offered up for bail. And if you don’t show up for trial the citizen goes to jail till they apprehend you.
So I think at the top end of the spectrum this might make sense. The problem is that a very large percentage people in jail are there because their bail was literally $50 or $100 but they didn't have the money to pay it, so they end up in jail for months or years on end. And for these people, bail has zero impact on whether they show up for trial.
Of those released, about 33% are released for $0 bail, and the remainder met financial conditions. For those who faced a bail of < $5,000 70% were able to meet it. I'd like a non-media source indicating that "a very large percentage" of people in jail are in there due in an inability to meet bail of $50 to $100, because all the data I've seen indicates that you're either making things up as you go or being misled by a source who did the same (which is why I requested a non-media source).
> When the bail was under $10,000, most defendants secured release, including 7 in 10 defendants with bail under $5,000 (figure 3).
So we're talking about $50-100 bail fines, but even if you raise the definition of "small amount" to $5k, 70% of those are released. We're already down into single digit percentages of folks with a <$5k bail set who are financially unable to pay it. I wish the data went to $1k and below because I imagine the percentage unable to pay would be minuscule.
All the while that 50$-based jail time has disastrous impact on their personal lives (losing jobs, eviction by landlords, more complicated interaction with police, three-strike-rules ....).
Regarding your second: > Speaking of losing jobs, a whole industry just lost theirs Doesn't the legitimacy of the job come before the right to perform it? A whole industry just lost their jobs is probably what many said in 1833 after the passing of the Slavery Abolition Act.
Incorrect.
First, a bail system still will exist in California, just not a money bail system.
Second, most of the history of money bail didn't require up front payment and specifically prohibited those providing surety from getting paid.
So, yes, it's quite possible (and the historical norm) to both accept bail systems as legitimate—even specifically when money bail systems are seen as legitimate—and view anything like the current American profit-driven predatory lending and privatized fugitive apprehension industry surrounding it as quite illegitimate.
Or, we could instead try replacing money bail in a relatively small jurisdiction (say, Washington, D.C.) for a number of years, and if it works well do it in a larger jurisdiction.
Once the first step of that has been done and shown to work, the case for smaller incremental steps in the next jurisdiction, though, is pretty weak. You seem to think we are at the point of considering a first practical test, but that step was taken years ago.
Used to be if you skipped town the local authorities would have no way of tracking you down. And authorities where ever you fled to would often have no ability to tell if you had a warrant. That's mostly not true anymore.
So then you have people sitting in jail because they're broke, probably too broke to fee even. And for crimes where if they did flee might be in everyone's interest. The police will surely be heartbroken to find out a local trouble maker decided to leave town. /s
So, on a $500 bail, that's $50. If you're indigent, you might not have $50.
We don't have people pre-pay to not commit other crimes, why does specifically this one get it?
This is ignoring all the other, wealth disparity type issues, with bail.
Seems to me like it just privatized part of the justice system - instead of cops chasing down delinquent criminals, it's bail bondsmen.
Offloading risk to a firm specialized in managing it is precisely the point. The criminal justice system is just one instance - it’s a long lived and widespread form of insurance.
I have a suspicion though that if you eliminated bail, what you'd end up doing would functionally be making all the bail bondsmen (who currently are limited in what they can do) disappear but suddenly create a need for a bunch more police (who have broader powers).
I don't know if that is really a positive tradeoff. I think the bail bondsmen are likely to have more repercussions if they just murder you, your family, and your dog in your house; the police can more or less do that with impunity in some places, de facto if not de jure.
OTOH, even most of the history of money bail didn't involve up front payment, it involved recognizances and sureties (pledges from either the accused or third parties, with the latter prohibited from profiting from the arrangement).
> I have a suspicion though that if you eliminated bail, what you'd end up doing would functionally be making all the bail bondsmen (who currently are limited in what they can do) disappear but suddenly create a need for a bunch more police (who have broader powers).
Since Washington, D.C., already did this for quite a while, why are speculating as if this hasn't been done?
In some cases it may remove a significant portion of the money the accused might flee with. In others, it can provide social constraints that are more binding than legal ones. For example, if your parents but their house (or a large portion of what the sale of it would net) up as collateral for your bail, you may be less inclined to flee if it would financially ruin them.
If you are guilty, I expect you actually don't want to end up in jail no matter the cost. Let us say you face 10 years in jail, you have actually committed the crime: what are the chances you think you will just take it one step further and ruin your family?
Sure. I'm not making a case that bail is perfect, or even good overall, I'm just laying out some of the reasoning behind why it exists.
> Let us say you face 10 years in jail, you have actually committed the crime: what are the chances you think you will just take it one step further and ruin your family?
What are the chances that your friends and family don't understand this, and as such are unwilling to put up collateral as bail? It's not like the the accused get to put up other people's money and property without their say-so. The accused might con them into paying the bail, but really, there's only so much you can do in a case like that. If you could solve that scenario, you could probably eliminate confidence crimes altogether.
As I understand it, bail on bond is an old concept. Imagine rich landlord from movie universe Wild West. Their power comes from wealth (which comes from land) and being free. If they are detained for the period of trial, then someone will take over the land and they lose the power. If they are bailed on bond and fail to show up for trial, the land is seized by government and they again lose the power. Being free (getting bailed) and keeping the wealth (showing up for trial) is the winning move for the landlord, therefore they are strongly incentivised to appear for trial.
Of course the person in question must have a lot to lose (social status, wealth, etc.) for bail on bond to work. For the outcast beggar jail is arguably a better place than open streets. The rich™ have their wealth diversified so much, that it would be difficult to seize significant portion of their wealth.
> We don't have people pre-pay to not commit other crimes, why does specifically this one get it?
As I understand it, bail on bond is not about committing other crimes (while this is a nice side effect) but about appearing for trial.
> Seems to me like it just privatized part of the justice system - instead of cops chasing down delinquent criminals, it's bail bondsmen.
As others have noted, bail bondsmen essentially operate "risk management" business and offloading the risk assessment from court to bail bondsmen is one of the points.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/when-it-c...
(n.b. the next paragraph of the article doesn't invalidate this argument. If a defendant is deemed to be a serious threat by a judge, they don't have to let the defendant go—bail or not.)
Again the idea is to have a strong incentive to report for trial. Assuming your actually emotionally close to the person being offered as bond (ex: I wouldn’t let my brother go to prison) then you’d make sure to show up.
In the case of the person who has done no wrong and knows they will show up to trial, it reduces the cost of the bond to effectively zero. For the rich you’re able to put a price higher than just money, the actual freedom of someone they care about.
Note that this entire system is predicated on a judge deciding if the person being offered for bond being worthy of the position. Otherwise you could have rich people “buy” their freedom by paying off a sap to sign their name.
This system only works under assumption that the accused is honorable, but it's silly to think that people accused of crimes are generally honorable.
You'd end up with a lot of cases of a woman trying to help a deadbeat boyfriend who doesn't care about her or anyone else. Are you really going to put her in jail? Maybe he just leaves the country, and then what?
Why do you think involving innocents is a good idea? Especially when it means they go to jail and get their freedoms taken away? People who skip bail already put their family at risk plenty of times, often signing away property and leaving family members destitute.
It would be much better to refund bail costs for anyone acquitted than to force this on people who do not deserve it.
With money, this is much harder, because it's difficult to determine where money really came from.
They are not comparable at all, and locking up an innocent person is unimaginably worse.
Washington D.C had demonstrated that the pretrial services model does that without the economic Injustice of money bail, so, no, that's not a relative advantage of money bail.
> I’d like to see an experiment where rather than money, instead a free citizen is offered up for bail. And if you don’t show up for trial the citizen goes to jail till they apprehend you.
This kind of primitive hostage system is very much like some of the ancient precursors of bail; I'm not sure what reason we'd have to reexplore that, though.
This is fundamentally wrong... the "other person" is not the suspect in this situation, so you would be putting an innocent up for punishment in lieu of a suspect. Honestly, I'm not even sure if you are trolling or just misdirected here, but if it isn't obvious to you why this isn't an acceptable idea, I'm happy to discuss.
It obviously doesn't work well for people without a connection to the community in which they were arrested.
This is a good vice episode. Gives an overview of DC's no-bail pretrail release system vs the bail bond system used in neighboring Maryland.
If so, then it seems like a good trade-off - those facing trial have more freedom, and threats to there freedom can't be used in a coercive manner, but those who aren't facing trial have less privacy.
* Clear biases in distribution of bail vs. non-bail gated release
* The substantially unbalanced cost of bail for poor vs. middle-class and up. Basically: if your bail costs $1000 and you make $50k/year you can probably arrange cash to cover it. If you make 20k/year you probably cannot, so your option is to lose $100 - bail bond is not returned to you - or you literally go to jail without a trial.
There will also likely be an increase in "no bond" holds until the court date.
This is a step in the right direction, but the entire incarceration machine needs an overhaul/downsize.
Let's say we go for something like "no direct victims" e.g. possession, drunk and disorderly, etc have no jail penalty, theft or violent crime does? But then how to you class smashing a window during a protest: Is that deserving of jail time? If not, then why is there the threat of incarceration pending bail? Again: I don't know, none of this really has easy yes/no answers.
Mugging is a violent crime, but shoplifting isn't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violent_crime
But I get pretty pissed off when someone steals my bike, smashes my car, wakes me up in the middle of the night or similar. These are not necessarily violent, but they still are things I feel like we should prevent more than the other types.
Oh, and in the US, every person is innocent until proven guilty in the court of law. So by definition, every bond is issued to an innocent person.
You go to jail until your trial. Not quite the same thing.
2 months later the charges are dropped.
I spent two months in jail, I didn't even have a trial, so I wasn't even in jail "until my trial", I was jailed for no reason. That is enough to get me fired - I didn't come to work, and US law doesn't protect me from being fired when a court prevents me from going to work.
The /only/ reasons for jail before trial is if there is a risk to the public or a documented risk of not appearing. The existing bail laws punish you according to what prosecution and police can get away with, and functionally turn "bail law" into jail for the non-rich, fines for the middle class. Maybe that could be reduced if the government were considered liable for any and all losses suffered by someone who is innocent, including loss of employment. That would given prosecutors and police some balance to the incentives to prevent bail or demand large bail amounts.
Uh. No one goes to 'trial' anymore.
There may be some sense in which it is enabled by that, but it's definitely a reaction to a national grassroots political movement (stronger in the Dem party, but not exclusive to it) against the money bail system as economically unjust, plus the relative successful model of Washington, D.C., in eliminating money bail even ahead of the national movement gaining traction.
Years later, the father explained that the man was the father’s brother, who had committed some crime before the turn of the century, and would occasionally show up saying he was down on his luck.
Whether the story was true, what stuck with me was the fact that there was once a time that somebody could leave town and largely create a brand-new identity. I guess it’s possible today, but it’s not easy. For starters, you need a social security number, and businesses are able to check whether those are valid better than they could a few years ago.
That's far more a concern for people trying to re-enter the United States. For those leaving, this is hardly an impediment.
Also, the bail system isn't designed to only incentivize defendants themselves to show up to court. The bail bondsman has the financial incentive and the legal right to apprehend and deliver a defendant who has skipped bail. Removing the bail bondsman from the equation only increases the public cost of reapprehending these defendants.
Edit: I should add...people who get caught committing crimes are generally not the best at responding to the incentive of not going to jail, or else they wouldn’t get caught committing crimes in the first place. So any mechanism that relies on this incentive is unlikely to be effective. Introducing a third party with vested interests at no additional cost is a non-trivial benefit of the bail system. Although maybe the police unions are happy to transfer the workload (and added hours!) to their members.
There are innumerable cases where innocent people have been arrested (think protests that are protected by the first amendment, or simple mistakes, or malice) where the charges are dropped or dismissed. You could already have lost your job due to being wrongfully imprisoned, or if you could afford the bond you're out the bond (it does. not. get. refunded. It's pure profit for bail bond companies).
There are also cases where bail has been used to get people who are innocent to take plea agreements, which inflates police/prosecutor success rates while simultaneously allowing the actual criminal to go free. The basic statement is "take this community service plea or we'll set your bail too high for you to afford". Again, numerous documented cases of this exist.
Finally, a person who skips bail when they aren't having to pay money, are reasonably likely to skip bail anyway, and for the rich the money doesn't matter. Robbert Durst skipped bail on a $300k amount because 300k literally didn't matter to him, even ignoring the low amount that was asked - again, bias in bail system frequently results in significantly higher bail amounts for people of colour.
Yes; putting people in jail is a mechanism for making sure people show up to court. It is a very effective mechanism. And it remains a mechanism even after California's reforms.
There's no civil right to receive an offer of bail. Perhaps there should be some sort of legal protection so people don't lose their jobs on account of merely being arrested, but the court always has the option not to offer bail and just hold you until trial. And I think this reform actually makes that outcome more likely, which I'll explain more below.
> or if you could afford the bond you're out the bond (it does. not. get. refunded. It's pure profit for bail bond companies).
Bail bondsmen are essentially loaning you money to pay bail, it's just that you pay the interest up front as a lump sum payment. (Also, you're securing the loan by granting the bail bondsman the legal right to apprehend you and bring you to jail if you skip your court date, which is why bail bonds are still affordable despite the obviously high risk inherent in them.)
> There are also cases where bail has been used to get people who are innocent to take plea agreements, which inflates police/prosecutor success rates while simultaneously allowing the actual criminal to go free. The basic statement is "take this community service plea or we'll set your bail too high for you to afford". Again, numerous documented cases of this exist.
Sources?
In any case, the essential problem is that someone has to estimate a combination of three factors:
* The probability that the suspect will miss their court date
* The cost of trying to apprehend the suspect and return them to jail, if they miss their court date
* The probability of success of trying to apprehend the suspect and return them to jail, if they miss their court date
The bail system solves this problem. If a bail bondsman is willing to bet their money on you in exchange for a certain bond amount, and you can afford the bond amount, you don't have to stay in jail. The bail bondsman has the incentive to accurately estimate all of these factors, and also has greater knowledge of them, because the bail bondsman himself is often the one to apprehend you if you skip court. If the bail bondsman miscalculates and offers bail to risky suspects, he loses money and goes out of business; if he miscalculates and doesn't offer bail to safe suspects, he loses money to his competitors. So not only is the bail bondsman making better bets, he's also only risking his own money.
Having bureaucrats making the decision and sheriff's deputies trying to round up people who missed their court date is going to be far less efficient, and will probably result in more people staying in jail, because there will be a much stronger incentive to err in the direction of keeping people in jail. A bail bondsman who never issues any bail bonds goes out of business; a county that never releases suspects of their own recognizance has 100% of suspects show up to their court dates.
Once we recognize the fact that it really sucks to get arrested and sent to jail, and that many innocent people are arrested and sent to jail and suffer serious life consequences as a result, then the question becomes: how do we effectively reduce this suffering while still being reasonably certain that criminal defendants don't miss court? I think the bail system likely solves this problem far more effectively, measured purely in terms of reducing the suffering of the people getting arrested than the California Bureau Of Arbitrarily Deciding Whether Or Not To Release You Of Your Own Recognizance.
You see, the problem isn't the estimation of non-appearance risk, it's that poor people are inherently more financially risky, so they get charged more for the same loan. But financial risk isn't the same as non-appearance risk. Financializing the court-appearance guarantee is imposing the cost of financial risk on some people for no reason, by demanding that they get a loan.
In essence, a bail loan is actually a perfectly secured loan - it is secured by the court holding the principal in escrow. There is no "repayment risk", only risk that the bail will be forfeited due to non-appearance, which is exactly equal to the flight risk.
If you intend to show up to court, and can get a personal loan large enough to cover bail, of course you’re better off doing that. And if you skip bail and don’t get the money back and have no means to repay that personal loan, you carry that debt with you and you cease to have the ability to take out large personal loans, so skipping bail isn’t really a sustainable life strategy in that case, either. And yeah, I’d actually be in favor of sliding-scale bail so rich people couldn’t just pay their own bail either, though you’d need to figure out what to do if you ever arrested Jeff Bezos because I don’t think Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are gonna put their money together to be his bondsmen :)
> Bail bondsmen are essentially loaning you money to pay bail With a 10% interest rate, except that's not per annum, that's until your trial or charges are dropped, so it's closer to 200% interest rate assuming a two week turn around.
> Sources?
The most basic google searches will give you examples. Even John Oliver has done a section on the abuse of bail to coerce guilty pleas. Just as an example (first hit on google) https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/innocen...
> The probability that the suspect will miss their court date Missing your court date is always (and remains) something that results in immediate incarceration. So the impetus to not miss their court date is compulsory (no-bail) incarceration. Presumably we consider incarceration a motivation?
> The cost of trying to apprehend the suspect and return them to jail, if they miss their court date Vastly vastly cheaper than keeping them in jail -- especially given for minor crimes skipping bail doesn't result in a manhunt, it literally just means a warrant is issued and the next time a defendant encounters police they will be arrested, and again, not have the opportunity of bail.
The bail system does not solve any of these problems - the fact that even when money is involved people still skip bail should tell you something. The only thing that the current bail system ensures is that poor defendants will go to jail, even if they're innocent.
Remember that people who are put in jail because they can't afford bail are not compensated for the costs they are subjected to, even if the charges are dropped.
No, you don't. You have a civil right not to be imprisoned indefinitely, but you can be held in jail from the moment you're arrested to the moment a "not guilty" verdict is reached by a jury.
People who are arrested and charged for crimes (charges which in many cases are dropped before trial) are not necessarily people who have been caught committing crimes.
> people who get caught committing crimes are generally not the best at responding to the incentive of not going to jail
The pre-trial services model does not rely exclusively on that incentive, any more than the money bail system does.
> Introducing a third party with vested interests at no additional cost
The involvement of bail bondsmen has a cost; the fact that the major direct cost is paid for by what amounts to a tax on the (potentially wrongly) arrested doesn't mean it isn't a cost.
Unless your county is run by a mafia of bail bondsmen or something, this doesn't turn out to be true.
By default, people who get arrested just stay in jail. If someone is able and willing to pay a bail bondsman, that means they would prefer to lose the bond amount than to remain in jail, which means that they're strictly better off. "Why not just release them of their own recognizance?", you might ask. Courts do that sometimes! We're only talking about the cases where the courts don't do that.
In a money bail system, sure. But artificially creating a worse default doesn't make the relatively better condition good.
Jail as pretrial default is imprisoning the accused, who are presumed innocent, which is a cost (both an economic cost and a liberty cost.)
In a pretrial services model, pretrial detention is exceptional, not default.
The mechanism in the new California law is a pretrial services system similar to the one that has for years been successfully used in Washington, D.C., in place of money bail. It's not just getting rid of a mechanism with no replacement.
A system where the decision on whether you go to jail or not is made by bail bondsmen is not just. If they decide not to grant you a bond, to where do you appeal?
By the time you're dealing with a bail bondsman, you're already in jail, and a judge has likely decided not to release you of your own recognizance. The question is whether or not you have to stay there until trial.
To a higher court, as with any other judicial order? This is how things work in normal common law countries like the UK, Canada and Australia.
What these are revolving, non-profit bail funds. They screen those who require bail as to maximize the recovery of the money, choosing those that are thought to have good prospects in showing up to court. They seem to be quite effective at this, so I think there is a reasonable chance the law's "commissions" can also enjoy some accuracy. It also lends some ideas as to how such commissions can be held accountable, benchmarked, or enjoy some internal competition.
This won't result in more poor people being released. It will simply result in a higher percentage of middle and upper class people being extorted into guilty pleas that they would not otherwise take, under the threat of losing their careers and families as a result of many months, and in a large number of cases, years, of pretrial detention.
Instead of just poor people?
Uhh, sounds like they will be treated the same as a poor person is currently treated then.
I don't see what's wrong with everyone being treated equally regardless of ability to pay.
I agree that judges should have the discretion to release poor people that cannot make bail. That part of the system needed to be changed. I don't agree that they should have limitless discretion to arbitrarily hold anyone without bail. That is a gaping and dangerous hole to open up.
What you really want is a system that allows further changes based on assessment of it's faults.
Anyway they are going to try to get changes to tweak the law, probably try to do their own assessments of racial bias, and I expect they'll sue locally for specific county level changes that are allowed within the law.
I think we'll get there. We know that existing risk assessment tools tend to overestimate black and latino people reoffending and underestimate white people, and if they can show a systemic bias they'll have ammunition to change things.
Getting rid of the bail industry is huge though, especially getting rid of lobbying from them against this in the next round. I'm hopeful that this will be a step forward, and allow for another step forward.
Examples - woman assaulted in front of her child at a city park with a ranger near by, perp didn't even get a ticket. Known bike thieves carrying a bike while riding another - nothing done.
This happens in a number of CA cities (Berkeley, SF, Santa Cruz). It's always interesting to see how ideals of one party left unchecked drive a city/state in to the ground.
Without that balance, we see prop 47 and 57. Local communities using those as an excuse to not really do much in the way of law enforcement — the city government of Santa Cruz was actively hostile toward the police well into the 90s. An individual casing bikes with bike tools in the east bay would have an “encounter” with PD, in Santa Cruz PD actually told me in a meeting - they won’t engage unless they actively see an incident in progress or the owner reports it.
No, it didn't. It was nonstop crisis.
your choice not to use the word convicted but instead known strikes me as really interesting.
So your argument is that the police should focus on enforcing your perception of order despite the fact that the social contract (and the law is a social contract) has been changed because the populace viewed the existing version to be structurally racist and unfair?
Not to mention this has nothing to do with a police officer's failure to act. The 'one party' that has fought for the police to not be legally required to enforce the law is not the 'one party' you are referring too.
His/her opinion was that this wasn't going to really change much. People arrested for minor crimes are often released on their own recognizance and major crime they aren't offer bail terms they can meet. Under this new system, the same people will likely be released without bail and the same people will be kept behind bars.
Interestingly, if you skip out on a court date, an arrest warrant is issued, but they expire after 3 years. Apparently getting people to show up for their court date is a huge problem as the consequences are pretty minor unless you encounter law enforcement.
It's an improvement, sure, but no surprise consulting a branch or two of government to draft it would end up with more power to a branch. What are the objective criteria for the "risk analysis" that divides the accused into the three risk levels? And how often do extenuating circumstances really occur that require judicial override sans approval from an additional independent council?
This doesn't solve all issues, this just solves one issue, which is that someone's economic status shouldn't be why they're in jail, only their likelihood of committing more crime, witness tampering, or skipping court.
I'm sure this new system will have problems that will need to be addressed, but it is a moral thing to TRY.
Or deny it because no arrangement can adequately guarantee appearance, yes. The fact that money is the key element used to guarantee appearance doesn't mean that money is always sufficient even in the money bail system.
I could argue that a judge's biases are harder to detect and correct because in doing so you literally have to accuse another human person of being biased, which is something nobody wants to do.
To argue that an algorithm is biased requires that one analyze all the data fed into the algorithm and gain some insight into the algorithm. Most of the time the original data is unavailable, incomplete, or proprietary and the models used to predict risk are also considered proprietary, which limits an outsider's ability to detect and correct biases.
The big takeaways for me: - the process for setting bail prices is very opaque, with little accountability. Many districts have extraordinary or unmanageably high bail for common crimes. - if you are poor, and can't afford bail, you either have to stay in jail, meaning you are apart from your family, unable to work, or more often than not, pay a bail bondsman a non-refundable amount of money to get you out of jail, meaning, before you are charged, before you are guilty (or innocent), you end up paying a fine.
TLDR is that pimps find women who are up for bail, offer to bail them out, and then threaten to rescind the bail if they don't start working for them.
It seems like the easier fix would be to forbid a bail payment from being rescinded once it's made, but removing bail entirely also solves the problem.
So why did she do that? And did they deserve it?
I'm guessing maybe a bicycle accident. Just a wild guess. I mean, been there, almost did that. But with a chain, not a bat. Those jerks almost killed me.
Is this sarcasm? I'm struggling to think of a good reason for three elderly people to deserve getting beaten with a bat.
So anyway, does that equate to "deserve it"? Maybe not, upon calm reflection. But sometimes shit just gets out of hand. I am, of course, sympathetic for everyone involved.
I wonder if, like excessively long prison sentences, that increasing bail has limited returns (in terms of getting people to show up for their trials). IE, most people will come to trial anyways. Those that are likely to skip will skip regardless of bail amount.
If he ran again in 2020... well, it would be pretty fitting considering he's done his whole career path twice, but it's pretty crazy that it's not absolutely out of the question for someone who was on the national stage at the same time as Carter and Reagan to still be there.
His 1976 campaign by contrast was oddly similar to his current persona, a kind of center-left, pragmatic technocrat. The conventional wisdom seems to be that he only lost because Carter figured out quicker how to campaign in the new primary system (1976 was the first year that primaries rather than state conventions dominated) and racked up a bunch of early delegates.
>My aura smiles and never frowns
>Soon I will be president...
I can't imagine what that first day back in 2011 must have been like. "Oh yeah, just like I left it... except now there's all these computers, those weren't here before..."