Besides saying how much they care about the truth (and yet, not telling it -- see my last blog), the bail industry keeps trying to convince people that it cares about victims. Here are six things showing that it doesn't.
1. The bail industry doesn't believe in (and lobbies hard against) risk assessment tools, which are actuarial tools designed to help judges determine how risky a defendant might be to potential victims. Instead, the industry says bail agents can determine risk by looking at a defendant, and apparently fully assess risk through some sort of process known as the "circle of love," which essentially holds that if you don't have the circle, you must be risky. In the end, the bail industry thinks that people who have money are low risk, and people who don't have money are high risk. Otherwise, it says, those defendants would be out of jail, right? Man, you can't argue with that logic.
2. The industry will bail out anyone no matter how risky. As long as you gots the cash, you're out. Again, this is tied to the industry's perverse way of assessing risk, explained above.
3. The industry refuses to supervise for any defendant behavior other than coming to court. That means that if a person is likely to create a new victim, or violate some condition of release designed to keep people from becoming victims, the bail industry wants nothing to do with it. Getting people back to court is all it cares about because that's the only way it makes money. All its talk about public safety is based on a severely strained logical argument that when people miss court, they automatically go out and start committing tons of new crimes, which is just moronic. The essential business model of the bail industry is only designed to deal with court appearance. Public safety simply doesn't fit into that, and whenever states attempt to make bail agents supervise for public safety (often by forcing them to forfeit money for new crimes), the bail industry fights back. Don't believe me? Ask anyone in Pennsylvania.
4. The industry has made it so that in virtually every state in America bail agents can only forfeit money on a commercial bail bond for missing court. Nobody ever loses money if a defendant commits a new crime. This leads to the perverse situation where a dangerous person keeps getting out on bail, committing more crimes, and keeps bailing out, all without any bail agent or insurance company losing any money. Now I fault judges for this revolving door stuff, too, but the laws keeping the industry from losing money for new crimes come courtesy of the national bail insurance companies. I already wrote about Maurice Clemmons, the poster child for this sort of constant bailing out and creating ever more victims here. He was continually bailed out by a for-profit bail bondsman until he finally killed four police officers. If judges keep setting money bonds for dangerous people, bail agents will keep on helping them get out of jail, no matter how many victims it creates. Oh, and by the way, the industry has made it incredibly unlikely that it will ever actually forfeit any money even for court appearance. Check out most state laws that provide loopholes and numerous extensions and exonerations for the bail industry. And when the industry actually does have to forfeit something, it often sues to keep from coughing up the dough. Most state court bail cases deal with bail agents trying to keep from paying a forfeiture.
5. This whole way of doing business causes, as the New Jersey Supreme Court wrote, "problems at both ends of the spectrum." What that Court meant was that the money bail system keeps certain lower and medium risk people in jail and allows certain higher risk people out of jail. When you keep low to medium risk people in jail due to money, it actually makes them higher risk to commit more crimes. And when you allow certain higher risk people out of jail, you naturally run the risk that they will commit more crimes because, well, they're higher risk. More crimes means more victims. That's what the money bail system does.
6. Finally, the industry lies about what it does for victims. If the industry actually cared about victims, there'd be a few fundamental changes the industry would make in order to deal with criminal activity. The fact is that when the rest of the country decided that public safety was a valid constitutional consideration for limiting pretrial freedom in the 1970's and 1980's, the bail industry simply failed to keep up. Telling the truth to victims means telling them that the industry is only in business to make sure the defendant comes to court. Telling victims the truth means telling them that the industry thinks it can determine risk by how much money someone has. Telling victims the truth means telling them that the industry is quite willing to bail out anyone -- no matter how risky -- so long as he or she has money. Telling victims the truth means telling them that the industry doesn't even care if that person continues to commit new crimes. Telling victims the truth means telling them that the industry has for decades championed laws designed to allow high risk defendants to continue to commit crimes without incurring any liability on bail agents.
In short, telling victims the truth means telling them that the money bail system actually creates victims.
