I’ve had a couple of busy
months working with people in Illinois, Kentucky, Virginia, Indiana, Texas,
Maryland, New Jersey, Idaho, California, New Jersey, Montana, Florida,
Wisconsin, Connecticut, and the federal system.
And hey, bail insurance
dudes, since you seem to like following me around, in the next couple of months
I’ll be in Arizona, Colorado (yeah, I live here, but occasionally I travel
across the state to spread the bail/no bail gospel), Ohio, Tennessee, Alabama,
Wisconsin, Kansas, Missouri, and Texas. That doesn’t count the phone calls and
emails from everywhere else.
Bail agents, this is just my
puny schedule, and there are plenty more people like me going around the
country and basically saying the same things that I say. And you should realize
that wherever I go, I see that the bail insurance lobbyists are doing you
absolutely no favors. They’re using the same flawed research, the same tired
arguments, and the same threats of chaos to try to keep people who want to
change from actually changing, and it’s just not sitting well.
On their websites, the bail
insurance folks will issue “statements” about this and that, and they’ll
trumpet what they think are victories. By the way, there’s nothing historic
about what they did in New Mexico to the proposed constitutional amendment –
the historic part would have been the part they muddled up – and forcing
criminal justice people to accept bad language with the threat of killing the
bill only causes animosity. Pushing an agenda on the people by nosing around
the legislature isn’t historic; it’s the only way the insurance lobbyists can
get anything done. In fact, they did practically the same thing in Colorado.
The insurance company guy was there when we passed the 2013 changes to our bail
statute. He didn’t like any of it, and made a pretty confusing statement in
front of one of our committees, but ultimately he testified as being neutral
and tried to spin it to bail agents as some sort of great victory and
compromise.
Bail agents, you should realize
that the insurance lobbyists claim to be acting in your interest, but they’re
failing miserably and leaving ill will in their wake. And if you keep letting
them speak for you, your industry will fail as well.
