I can't think of good sides to the bail system. What positives do you see.
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.