From the United States District Court in Montana on Wednesday: "Allegheny and Fidelity created the environment that bred these acts by providing First Call [the bail agents] with a form contract which authorized this conduct and by requiring First Call to bear the financial risk of forfeiture."
Bail agents, you may not know this, but virtually all insurance companies bear financial risk. Some of them pay out on 98-99% of claims. They make their money on what they call the "float," which is the time between when a premium is paid and a payout is made. They take that money, invest it, and make their profits. As the court noted, however, bail insurance companies don't do it this way. In fact, one bail insurance guy bragged a while back that his company had never paid out on a single claim in 107 years of being in business. Who pays? Well, you know the answer to that. You do, defendants do, their families do. Everyone pays but the bail insurance companies. They've set this whole thing up to make money for nothing over the course of decades. They tried to keep it all secret through their work with ALEC, but we exposed that and now the whole world is taking a hard look at bail insurance that doesn't really insure anything.
In fact, I used to liken the bail insurance companies to the Mafia, with bail agents just dropping bags of money off onto their porches every week. I suppose that's why Rico seems so appropriate to me.
I've long since stopped looking at bail insurance company websites because I realized they only tell you about the stuff that makes them look good. Overall, though, money bail - and bail insurance companies -- are not doing well, and I've yet to see any decent plan from them for the future. All I do now is help states draft provisions to (1) eliminate money, (2) create viable preventive detention and then help people sue the states when they don't do those two things correctly. That's what's happening all over America, and ABC's insistence that somehow everyone is deciding to go back to the old days of high, arbitrary amounts of money is just dumb.
