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!