Bail Industry: "Money Bail Only For Felonies?"

Here's a great article summarizing the current bail reform movement, titled, "The Fight to Fix America's Broken Bail System." I have to say there's a bit of vindication in hearing people call it "broken." It wasn't that long ago that I had to listen to goofballs in my own county saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Wogga muk gubba pum wup!

In the article, ABC says it just wants to preserve money bail in felony cases, saying, "The key core of our business is high risk felony cases. That's where judges should use us."

The author of the article says that the statement is "belied" by the bail industry's actions, and I agree. After all, the bail insurance companies are fighting like crazy to keep money bail in all cases, not just felonies. The federal lawsuit in Harris County only deals with misdemeanors, and the insurance companies have spent more of the bail agents' money on that case than in any to date.

So why make such a blatantly false statement? I have no answer except that the industry has been making any and all statements and arguments lately just to see what sticks. They say bail should be left to the legislatures, and then they bring their own legal claims to court (by the way, the industry has been using the courts to get its way for decades; it just doesn't like it when things go the opposite direction). They say the constitutional amendment in New Mexico is some great compromise between the industry and the state, and then they sue the state. They say there are no people in jail due to lack of money, then they say that it's time they admit that there are. In a federal trial court they say people are in jail because they want to be in jail, and then later in the same case they say those people are too dangerous to release. Now they say they only want money bail for felonies, but they fight like crazy to keep it in all cases. Makes your head spin.

This is a sign of an industry that either doesn't understand what it wants, or that's simply desperate to find the one argument that miraculously lets everything just stay the same -- preferably with them making gobs of money without doing anything. Then again, I've said before that ABC doesn't even know what the term "bail" means, so the whole thing might just be incompetence.

Really, the bail insurance "strategy" is just a confused mess, with ABC and PBUS flailing with schizophrenic arguments, groundless lawsuits, worthless PR campaigns, and bogus Facebook posts. Meanwhile, justice officials are quickly recognizing that the bail industry is simply in the way.

No wonder California has decided to look into whether there's some basic flaws in the bail insurance model with an eye toward regulation. Oh wait, that's a different blog!

Join PBUS?

So some insurance dude is trying to get people to join PBUS. Makes sense. He wouldn't make any money at all if bail agents didn't do all the work for him. That obviously extends to groups like PBUS.

My advice is simple, and completely different. Bail agents, you need to break free from ABC and the insurance-infested PBUS before it's too late. Their strategy -- to fight bail reform -- is not the strategy that keeps you in business.

Ever since I first started looking into it 10 years ago, I realized that bail reform was inevitable. INEVITABLE. Get it? It was always going to happen. And now it's happening, and all the insurance people can do is fight. That won't work. If you've read even a fraction of my posts, if you've ever read any of my papers, you'd know why.

I know virtually everything ABC and PBUS are doing. I'm not kidding -- people tell me everything for some reason. And everything they're doing -- from sniveling around DOJ and filing weird class action lawsuits to hiring a PR firm and fabricating news stories for bogus websites -- simply isn't going to work. People want to change, and they need help with the changes. They don't want a fight.

There's only one thing that I identified as a "genius move" that would forestall bail reform for about 20 years, and the insurance dudes actually did sort of the opposite of that move recently (remember, I said I'd tell people what the "genius move" was if I ever saw it happen). So there's a smart strategy, but the insurance companies do the opposite.

Likewise, in the Harris County opinion, the judge had to tell ABC that it didn't even know what the word "bail" meant. So  there you have it; an incompetent group with the opposite of a smart strategy.

A couple of weeks ago I posted a video of a committee in Philadelphia ripping on an insurance guy, a bail agent, and some dude from New Jersey. At the end, one of the committee members said to the agent something like: "We're changing. Have you done anything at all to try to adapt to that change?" Another good question would have been, "Is there anything you all can do to help us change?"

Those are good questions. The answers, of course, are, "No, because the insurance dudes said I should fight everything."

Join PBUS? No way.