Friday, August 4, 2017

Bail Agents, You Lost Me

If you look at my blog over time, you’ll see that I started by trying to send messages to people in the bail reform movement concerning what I called the “basics” of bail, like the definitions of terms and phrases, etc.

Later, it sort of morphed into a platform to illuminate all of the manure that the bail insurance companies were spreading. Along the way, I figured I owed it to bail agents everywhere to let them know about the bail insurance antics and to tell those agents that there could be a place for them in bail reform, if they would only distance themselves from those companies. After all, I liked bail agents, and I sort of figured they were all like me – interested in the right to bail, liberty, and freedom. You know, all that stuff in our constitutions.  

Well, nobody’s listening. And so, bail agents, you’ve officially lost any support I might have given you in the past. After seeing a number of posts by PBUS, “The National Voice of the Bail Agent,” I now just assume you all agree with their strategy to fight everything, align themselves with idiots and publicity hounds, and turn the bail reform movement – something your industry could have helped with – into a mean circus. Today I see the insurance companies attacking New Mexico Supreme Court Chief Justice Charles Daniels personally. How, exactly, does that help your cause and not turn judges against you everywhere?

Yesterday, I witnessed a video in which the illustrious leader of PBUS chased down a person with a microphone with someone shouting, “George Soros!” over and over. Based on what these guys are saying (and remember, PBUS is your “voice”), I’m now questioning whether you even care about the right to bail. Listening to PBUS, all you apparently care about is accountability (a punishment term) and making sure you don’t have to hug thugs. Frankly, if that’s true, you shouldn’t be in bail at all. You should all become prison guards. Do you realize how damaging it is for the people leading your opposition – PBUS and ABC – to basically abandon any notion that you care about the right to bail, what the Supreme Court called “the right to freedom before conviction?”   

I was the only person on this side of the movement who thought you had a place in the future of pretrial release and detention, and now I don’t. It’s my fault. I honestly thought bail bondsmen understood their own history and their potential to help America through this generation of reform. I’ve been writing this for years now, but nobody is listening, and so now I don’t think I owe your industry anything.


From now on, you guys get lumped in with the insurance weasels. And I’m personally going to spend all my spare time convincing judges to simply stop setting surety bonds. And if they simply stop setting surety bonds, don’t ever say you weren’t repeatedly warned.