The current American Bar Association Journal has a story about bail reform -- you can find it here.
In it, the bail insurance company
lobbyist tries to defend the money bail system by pointing to a 2004 Journal of
Law and Economics study saying release on surety bonds was better than release
on “own” or “personal” recognizance. That’s a problem, and it’s misleading, but
it’s something those companies do despite knowing it’s misleading, so I’ll try
to make this really clear.
That study was produced using
the State Court Processing Statistics (SCPS). And, essentially, the authors of
the study used those statistics to essentially say that release on a surety
bond was superior to release in other ways. The bail insurance companies
glommed onto this study as one of their “go-to” documents that, according to
the bail insurance companies, proves surety bonds are great. You can tell the
insurance companies still really like it because they’ve been touting it around
the country for years, most recently in the ABA Journal article, above.
The problem (and this is a
big problem) is that the Bureau of Justice Statistics – the group that keeps
the very data that the study used – said in a formal data advisory that you can’t
use their data to make “evaluative statements” about the effectiveness of one
or other form of release – i.e., the
exact thing that the study did. In fact, the data advisory says, “any
evaluative statement about the effectiveness of a particular program in
preventing pretrial misconduct based on SCPS is misleading.” If you read the data advisory – which, by the way,
was only put out because of numerous misleading bail insurance company claims
using mostly this particular study, you’ll see that there’s no way you can
really compare the data to make any statement about which release type is best.
I don’t blame the authors of
the study. They wrote it before the data advisory came out and they were economists,
not criminal justice people. But I do blame the bail insurance companies for continuing
to mislead people by citing to the study because they know exactly what they’re
doing. In fact, once the data advisory came out, the bail insurance actually
went to BJS to complain: “How unfair,” they cried, “to keep us from using this
study!” But then everything went quiet, and about six months later they just
started citing to the study again. Apparently, the bail insurance companies
have decided that the people they give it to are a bunch of idiots, and that there’s
really nothing to lose by citing to discredited research.
This should concern all
Americans, but it should especially concern bail agents. That’s because every
time the bail insurance companies cite to this study, I (or any of about 100
others who know the story) go in and explain everything to the people they
cited it to. Once I do, the people who were misled get really peeved – not only
with the bail insurance companies, but also with bail agents. They get peeved
because the insurance companies are misleading jurisdictions on purpose to make
money. And the anger over that leads to anger about everyone associated with
the commercial bail system.
I’ve written about this a
bunch, so it’s clear the insurance companies don’t care what I say. Or maybe
they do. We’ll see.
By the way, this knowing misrepresentation
in the American Bar Association Journal was brought to you by the American Bail
Coalition, whose members include:
Accredited Surety and
Casualty Company
AIA Surety
American Surety Company
Bankers Surety
Black Diamond Insurance
Company
Lexington National Insurance
Corporation
Sun Surety Insurance Company
Universal Fire and Casualty
Insurance Company
Whitecap Surety
