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Comment by lalaland1125 | Hacker News Reader

> BLM matter had a massive run out the gate and then nothing really changed

This is quite incorrect. There have been some pretty large changes in our criminal justice system over the last 2 years.

The main changes have been:

- Reform District Attorneys like Gascon have been elected in many major cities

- Elimination of cash bail in many parts of the US, most importantly New York (we were also very close to eliminating cash bail in California, but bail bond companies invested heavily to stop that)

- Biden appointing a bunch of public defenders to federal courts

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I'm asking in good faith, to be clear:

Can you explain to me the benefit of the elimination of cash bail in new york or point me to resources why the elimination of cash bail is good? I hear a huge earful about how terrible the elimination of cash bail is and pointing at random crimes as caused by this elimination but I hear almost nothing as for the reasons why it was eliminated in the first place.

The idea is that it's immoral to charge people (who have not been convicted of a crime) money to be let out of jail. Cash bail hurts poor people who either can't get the money, or get charged usurious rates to borrow the money.

It's easy enough to find cases where crime could have been avoided if the offender were locked up. Stories of innocent people spending time in jail or losing large sums of money aren't as enticing.

I feel like saying "charge people money" and "losing large sums of money" misrepresents what bail is. It's a deposit that gets refunded to you in full as long as you don't skip town instead of showing up for your trial.

In practice most people are forced to use bail bonds. If your cash bail is set to $150k, you're going to go to a bail bondsman and pay them $15k instead (and lose that 15k forever).

Cash bail is a monstrous creation.

I feel like ignoring that a vast majority of American people live paycheck to paycheck and then pretending people have “refundable deposit” cash piles sitting around is either incredibly disingenuous or the first time you’ve ever thought about poverty

sure, except most people don't have enough money for bail lying around, most can't afford a $400 emergency. So that bail money comes from their family rent / food money. That or they just sit in prison, and lose their jobs. So they may have all charges dropped but still end up financially devastated due to bail.

It's only refunded (minus fees) if you have thousands of dollars lying around. Poor people don't have that. They have to use a bail bond company, which means paying large sums of money they will never get back. Many poor people can't even afford to use a bail bond company and have to stay in jail, or plead guilty to a crime they didn't commit.

> which means paying large sums of money

And in the wonderful cycle of capitalism, that money is then used to fund ballot propositions to keep cash bail in place

I would say it's statism or cronyism rather than capitalism. It doesn't have anything to do with ownership of the means of production.

It's quite literally ownership of assets being leveraged to make more money. It's as indelibly tied to capitalism as any other type of loan.

Unless you meant "cash bail" and not "bail bonds"

Is that due to simple usury or due to cost of risk? In other words, if enough of the bailed pop. skips bail (complete loss for bondsman), that money has to come from somewhere --and that somewhere may be both honest and dishonest criminals as well as innocent suspects.

It's a mix of both.

The bail bond industry (like most "vice" industries) has much higher profit margins than comparable insurance companies: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/05/bail-bo...

The "losing large sums of money" was in reference to taking out a loan to pay the money, they are expensive. I feel like that was pretty clear in my comment.

I live in a country where there is no cash bail (France). Whether you walk free from a tribunal or end up in pre-trial detention is still pretty much based on the whims and desires of racist (and poor-loathing) police, judges and prosecutors. Notably, homeless people are almost systematically locked up for a year or two before they can face trial for what is usually harmless illegal activity they have committed (such as stealing food from a supermarket, or cracking a squat).

Reformism cannot help the people against the judicial system because the judicial system is not broken: it was designed to oppress the poor and the immigrants, and from this perspective it's quite efficient and well-oiled. No amount of good-will reform (short of police/prison abolition) can change much about it. I can admit the situation may be different in the USA, since i hear (from TV shows, sorry) you can be convicted/acquitted by a jury of your peers? If that existed in France (except for the "Assises" court), i can assure you prison population would not have been multiplied in the past decades for what usually amounts to selling weed, stealing from a supermarket, demonstrating against our overlords, or just being an arab/black person walking down the streets when the cops want to beat you up and accuse you of all the wrongs you can imagine.

Keeping a person in jail because they can't afford bail is obviously horrible for that person, and that should be reason enough to oppose it, but it can also be harmful for other people.

A poor person who is finally acquitted after months of waiting in jail is likely to be released to homelessness, unemployment, and debt. They will also be suffering from the mental and physical trauma of their incarceration, which makes it more difficult for them to deal with their situation. Crime may be the only realistic means for them to survive, even if they have never committed a crime before.

Eliminating cash bail doesn't get more people out of jail. It keeps more people in it.

The purpose of pre-trial release is to let those out who are unlikely to cause harm or flee while they await trial.

1) If someone poses no risk, they are released.

2) If someone poses a risk, they are detained.

3) If someone poses a risk and is detained, bail is a tool to allow them out and ensure they return. Without it, you just keep them in jail.

Cash bail certainly provides advantages to those with assets or credit, but this is a separate issue.

> bail is a tool to allow them out and ensure they return. Without it, you just keep them in jail.

This is where it breaks down. I don't think you need bail to make sure they come back.

You can already let those who pose no risk go without bail. What alternative do you propose for people who pose a flight risk?

Denying bail, which is a thing they already do for people who pose a flight risk.

So then you just keep everyone with a flight risk, which is more people than now.

Today those who are a low flight risk can put up collateral to make sure they come back

Unless they are poor. And, again, I don't believe you when you say a monetary stake is required to make them come back.

If a person is proven innocent, they just should get two more questions.

First, they should be asked if they believe the innocent person should be compensated for time and defense costs. Second, if they believe compensation is in order, they should be asked if they believe the prosecutor or the state should pay that bill.

->Elimination of cash bail in many parts of the US, most importantly New York (we were also very close to eliminating cash bail in California, but bail bond companies invested heavily to stop that)

Let's have a look at the latest unintended consequences. One example from central New York one man was arrested and released without bail on 16 separate occasions between November and January. [1] This policy is not working for anybody, it isn't helping him, it isn't helping his victims. He would have been better off in jail where he could take some time to cool off.

[1] cnycentral.com/news/local/oswego-county-man-arrested-16-times-in-nearly-three-months-police-cite-bail-reform

Do US courts not have the ability to refuse bail to people like this? You'd have the same problem if he had enough cash to afford bail. It seems like a complete failure of the system for him to even have the option of not being held on remand until trial.

Yes, denying bail was always an option. Bail is non-sensical. Either their alleged crime is severe enough to allow them to be free before sentencing or it's not. Money doesn't need to be involved.

Might be more effective and cheaper to just help homeless people, rather than criminalize them like this.

Also NY repealed a state law, 50-A, which is one of the major laws preventing scrutiny and review of police departments and officers. Still more to go on that front though as the newly elected cop mayor rides a minor crime spike as if it were major and attempts to bring back the very prejudice/racist stop and frisk.

Is there anything preventing CA judges from setting bail at $1 in cases where a NY judge will now not set bail?

Judges can't do that because you can't just wholesale eliminate cash bail without other changes as you can't just release everyone. The new laws are necessary to introduce alternatives as part of that elimination.

For example, the law in California would give judges risk scores to switch to a risk based bail system.

Risk scoring has been problematic after AI/expert risk scoring systems produced politically unpalatable results.

It is difficult to see a productive way out of this dilemma since "correcting" the input data is a priori impossible to do in an objective way, and skewing the algorithms will almost certainly produce unintended effects (e.g. a violent criminal being underscored, released, then they victimize innocents again).

Whether the risk score is discriminatory on protected classes can be easily measured. (After implementing a risk score system, is the fraction of bail jumpers equivalent across groups?) I assume that kind of measurement is what prompted the overhaul of cash bail.

But unless the system is either completely perfect (i.e., its predictions are never wrong), or completely worthless because it ignores all input data and always gives the same risk score, then there will always be some measurement that says it's discriminatory on protected classes: https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.01195

The paper you linked to describes three different definitions of fairness that don't agree. I gave a single definition of fairness that is self-consistent.

Yes, if everyone agreed that your definition of fairness were the right one (which I personally do) then there'd be no problem. But in practice there will be people who want to use other ones (in some cases because they want to be able to say it's discriminatory).

A judge in CA could just do that, or even not charge any bail. They have a lot of discretion. However, some judges may decline to offer low (or no) bail. That's where the "no cash bail" elected officials come in. Some DAs, for example, make it policy not to ask for cash bail (and obviously the defense attorneys or defendants will also ask for no cash bail).

> This is quite incorrect. There have been some pretty large changes in our criminal justice system over the last 2 years.

Do you have any examples? The biggest changes I've seen lately have been a result of COVID-19 and a judicial reform bill signed by Trump (in contrast to the law & order track record of Biden).

> Reform District Attorneys like Gascon have been elected in many major cities

Yes, and those crazed Red State loonies in San Francisco are trying to recall the king of all progressive DAs, Chesa Boudin. Gascon's next.

When San Francisco has a recall vote coming up for the DA of San Francisco, just decisively ousted progressive school board members, and the entire state had a recall election for the governor, one might imagine the progressive agenda isn't what normal people want. Claim all you want about the right orchestrating these events, but at the end of the day it was registered Democrats who got rid of the board members and it's registered Democrats that will oust Boudin.

Yup, we can credit politicians bending to appease BLM for these disastrous policies. The guy who stabbed the woman 40x in NY this past week had been arrested and released without bail numerous times. Woo-hoo... equity!

It's a massive run they've had, to all our detriment. Fortunately, I think it's all backfiring.

I presume you're hoping he was poor enough that he would have remained imprisoned until his trial, if cash bail were imposed?

No presume he's hoping the woman wouldn't have been stabbed 40x times.

Cash bail wouldn't have prevented him from doing anything if he was rich. How do you propose to address this inequality? Me, I'd prefer we evaluate them immediately to decide if they should remain locked up based on the merits of the case and not how much money they have, and get them into court faster.

This same man was previously arrested over 40 times, 16 of which occured in one day. After a certain point, bail should not have been offered. Even if it had, it should have been ruinously expensive for anyone, no matter how rich.

Whether or not he should have been let out at all is completely independent of the cash bail system, unless you think that the decision of whether or not to release him should be contingent on his financial situation.

Exactly. Too many people confuse "no cash bail" with "no pre-trial jail at all". I'm guessing there is some political messaging involved, sponsored by the bail industry.

Maybe I'm the odd one, but when someone is arrested 16 times in one day, for offenses so minor he can be instantly released, I assume that they're probably suffering from some kind of mental illness and needs help and treatment, which could be provided in a secure environment if they are a danger to themselves or others, but just raising the price of bail seems like a conplete non-solution.

Looked it up, it's another homeless man.

The solution seems to be that if an offender is violent enough then they should not be offered bail, not that bail should be more expensive. The first option addresses violent crime, the second simply punishes poor people. I very much doubt someone that habitually performs violent crimes is going to think to themselves, no violence today, don't want to risk sacrificing my bail money that I may get back in a few months.

> The solution seems to be that if an offender is violent enough then they should not be offered bail

Won't this ruin your life if someone who looks like you commits a violent enough offense, and the police accidentally arrest you for it?

Of course, but by focusing bail on violent criminals or clear flight risks for financial crimes and those with the means to leverage them, you have effectively filtered out a good portion of optimally non violent people who are not a continuing threat to society. Optimally criminal history is part of the decision as well. There will always be issues with innocent people being arrested and held due to the nature of the accusation but no system is perfect. In my opinion holding a person accused of a violent enough crime (think a random assault on a stranger, intent to cause serious injury, etc. vs a fist fight at the bbq) is warranted. The people assaulting Asians on the street, the knockout game, etc. should absolutely be held, no need for bail. Requiring bail for someone accused of stealing diapers should not be required as they are not a threat. Of course everyone's definition of 'good enough' is going to be different and if I ever find myself as that falsely accused person I am sure my opinion would change again.

The per capital crime rates aren’t consistent across races. For example, 6% of the population (black males) are responsible for 50% of all murders.

What will be the reaction to the statistics that white peoples get set free more often than black people because white people tend to commit “victimless crimes” more frequently?

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