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Comment by wireprotocol | Hacker News Reader

I don't follow your proposal. Honestly, it sounds really scary and disturbing, but I'll let you explain it better first.

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Rather than putting up cash, a friend, brother, sister, etc offers themselves as the bond for my freedom. If I abscond then they’ll be arrested and imprisoned until I’m apprehended. Assuming that “everybody has somebody”, it’s quite fair as rich or poor you’ll be able to find someone to be your bond.

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 has the capacity to put domestic abuse victims in jail for the actions of their abusers, force noble people to pay the price for family members who have no decency, and allow crime lords the ability to escape to freedom by sacrificing someone less influential.

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.

I think this is a bad idea. The whole concept of punishing one person for the crimes of another is disturbing.

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?

As other people have mentioned, this is a terrible idea. I wouldn't be surprised if my brother would let me rot in jail and skip bail, obviously I wouldn't offer myself up for bail, but not everybody would be in the same situation. It would be easy for people to coerce (by threats of violence etc.) people to offer themselves as bail.

It would easy for people to coerce others into giving up money for bail, as well. How is this worse in that aspect?

Would you rather give up some money or your freedom?

They are not comparable at all, and locking up an innocent person is unimaginably worse.

Because in the first example all the person lost was money, in the other - their liberty. Not sure how they're at all comparable.

The judge can oversee it, and if it appears anything illegal was involved, he can disallow it.

With money, this is much harder, because it's difficult to determine where money really came from.

Because the person who was coerced is in jail as opposed to just missing some money.

It's worse than having neither hostages nor money bail, which is what it was offered as an alternative to.

You make several assumptions that they have someone in the first place, and that they care about them as well - but justice should never be about assumptions. The entire justice system is designed to let guilty go free if it means a single innocent person is protected from wrongful incarceration.

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.

you should have written this in your opening post. In your op I thought that you were suggesting for some sort of whipping boy. Your clarification makes more sense. some things that should be pointed out is that your collateral can refuse, and that skipping bail is still a crime, so if you ditch, you will be hunted and be revoked bail rights for the rest of your life.

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