Florida's Pretrial Services Programs Wasting Tax Dollars

Florida has 28 pretrial services programs funded by taxpayers that provide free jail release to hundreds of defendants each year – regardless of their ability to pay for their own release. Some defendants are court-ordered into the program or court-ordered to be released on their own recognizance (ROR), while others are released “administratively” by jail staff into the program or “administratively” ROR.

The Florida Legislature’s Office of Program Policy Analysis & Government Accountability (OPPAGA) is charged with evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency of Florida’s pretrial services programs. OPPAGA is statutorily required to produce an annual report on Florida’s programs that covers how the programs are funded, the nature of criminal charges of defendants, failure to appear rates and new arrests, compliance with statutory requirements, budget and outcome information, participant fees and compliance with the Citizens’ Right-to-Know legislation.
 
OPPAGA was asked by the presiding officers of the Florida Senate and House of Representatives to conduct follow-up research based on their last annual report dated December 2010. This additional research compared 2008 and 2009 pretrial services budgets, percentage changes in index crime rates for 2008 and 2009, jail population and occupancy rates and fees charged to program participants.

The annual budget for Florida’s pretrial services programs for fiscal year 2009  range from a low of $100,526.00 to a high of $5,358,619.00. Twelve counties had an increase in their 2009 budget over fiscal year 2008 despite a decline in the percentage of the index crime rate within the county. The following counties who had increased budgets for 2009 are below:

• Broward: 3.05 percent budget increase; -4.0 percent decrease in crime
• Charlotte: 1.0 percent budget increase; -16.5 percent decrease in crime
• Collier: 26.24 percent budget increase; -6.1 percent decrease in crime
• Duval: 41.40 percent budget increase; -10.1 percent decrease in crime
• Leon: 120.73 percent budget increase; -7.5 percent decrease in crime
• Miami-Dade: 9.03 percent budget increase; -6.8 percent decrease in crime
• Okaloosa: 14.03 percent budget increase; -8.4 percent decrease in crime
• Orange: 134.43 percent budget increase; -12.2 percent decrease in crime
• Osceola: 4.26 percent budget increase; -3.3 percent decrease in crime
• Palm Beach: 0.44 percent budget increase; -4.5 percent decrease in crime
• Polk: 0.71 percent budget increase; -7.8 percent decrease in crime
• Santa Rosa: 21.25 percent budget increase; -8.6 percent decrease in crime

OPPAGA also found that jail populations and occupancy rates varied greatly among all Florida counties.  Furthermore, they determined that there was no correlation between a county's occupancy rate and whether or not they have a pretrial services program. 

This fact is important as advocates of taxpayer-funded pretrial services programs have said that without such programs it will accelerate the need to build more jail beds.  We know this is not the case.  In fact, Pasco County eliminated its pretrial services program in February 2009 and saved taxpayers $348,000 annually.  OPPAGA's most recent follow-up report stated that Pasco County's jail population did not increase after eliminating its pretrial services program.  Nor has the population of the 39 other Florida county jails that don't have a pretrial services program dramatically increased.

Florida taxpayers should let their legislators know that their critical tax dollars should be spent more wisely than providing free release from jail!

Moving Forward on Legislative Change

Last month we met with our friends at the Florida Sheriffs Association (FSA) to discuss pretrial release programs and their expansion in our state (12% last year alone despite a 6.7% reduction in crime). At the time we hoped we could convene a timely meeting to work together on a functional resolution for limiting this expansion without the need for legislation. We believe all sides parted in good faith with that goal in mind.

And while that good faith still exists, to date, a meeting has not taken place to discuss this issue.

Government-funded pretrial release programs continue to expand – even while the FDLE reports that crime in Florida is dropping – and they now cost Florida taxpayers nearly $30,000,000 per year according to the most recent Office of Program Policy Analysis & Government Accountability (OPPAGA) report.

We have reached out to our friends at FSA to let them know that our agents need relief, they want relief, and while some worry about the impact of legislative action, we simply cannot let another session come and go without some action.

To that end, we wanted you to be among the first to know that we are moving forward in support of a bill filed by State Senator Ellyn Bogdanoff (SB 372) that primarily states:
It is the policy of this state that only defendants who are indigent and who qualify for the services of the public defender are eligible to participate in a pretrial release program.

We expect to announce a House sponsor in the coming days and we hope that each and every one of you will contact your local lawmakers and let them know that taxpayers should not be footing the bill for those who can afford bail.

The Bounty Hunter's Pursuit of Justice

When felony defendants jump bail, bounty hunters spring into action. It’s a uniquely American system, and it works.

Excerpts: As printed in the 2011 Winter issue of the Wilson Quarterly

By Alex Tabarrok

Alex Tabarrok is Bartley J. Madden Chair in Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and director of research for the Independent Institute. He writes regularly with coauthor Tyler Cowen at the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution.

Article concluded:

The prerogatives of bounty hunters flow from the historical evolution of bail. Bail began in medieval England as a progressive measure to help defendants get out of jail while they waited, sometimes for many months, for a roving judge to show up to conduct a trial. If the local sheriff knew the accused, he might release him on the defendant's promise to return for the hearing. More often, however, the sheriff would release the accused to the custody of a surety, usually a brother or friend, who guaranteed that the defendant would present himself when the time came. So, in the common law, custody of the accused was never relinquished but instead was transferred to the surety-the brother became the keeper-which explains the origin of the strong rights bail bondsmen have to pursue and capture escaped defendants. Initially, the surety's guarantee to the sheriff was simple: If the accused failed to show, the surety would take his place and be judged as if he were the offender.

The English system provided lots of incentives for sureties to make certain that the accused showed up for trial, but not a lot of incentive to be a surety. The risk to sureties was lessened when courts began to accept pledges of cash rather than of one's person, but the system was not perfected until personal surety was slowly replaced by a commercial surety system in the United States. That system put incentives on both sides of the equation. Bondsmen had an incentive both to bail defendants out of jail and to chase them down should they flee. By the end of the 19th century, commercial sureties were the norm in the United States. (The Philippines is the only other country with a similar system.)
 
Bail was widely admired as a progressive institution when the alternative was jail, but in the 1950s and '60s many judges and law professors began to think that the alternative to bail should be release on a defendant's own recognizance. Bail looked increasingly like a conservative institution that kept people, especially poor people, in jail. Many opinion makers came to support the creation of pretrial services agencies that would investigate defendants and recommend to judges whether they could be safely released on their own recognizance. In essence, the agencies would replace the judgment of bail bondsmen with the judgment of a professional bureaucracy.
 
In the early 1960s, the Vera Institute of Justice's Manhattan Bail Project in New York City began gathering information about local defendants' community ties and residential and employment stability and summarizing it in a numerical scoring system that it used to identify those who could be recommended for release on their own recognizance. The experiment was successful. The failure-to-appear rate among felony defendants the project recommended for release was no higher than the rate among those released on bail. Largely on the basis of these results, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Federal Bail Reform Act of 1966, which created a presumption in favor of releasing defendants on their own recognizance.
 
Although the new law applied only to the federal courts, the states have widely emulated the reforms. Every state now has some kind of pretrial services program, and four (Illinois, Kentucky, Oregon, and Wisconsin) have outlawed commercial bail altogether. In its place, Illinois introduced the government bail or "deposit bond" system. The defendant is required to deposit with the court a small percentage of the face value of the bond. If the defendant fails to appear, he may lose the deposit and be held liable for the full value of the bond. But while a defendant in a commercial bail system who shows up in court must still pay the bondsman a fee, those who do so in jurisdictions with systems like Illinois's get all their money back (less a small service fee in some cases). And the only people empowered to chase down a defendant who has fled are the police.

The results of the Manhattan Bail Project seemed to support the position of progressives who argued that commercial bail was unnecessary. But all that the findings really demonstrated was that a few carefully selected felony defendants could be safely released on their own recognizance. In reality, the project allowed relatively few defendants to be let go and so could easily cherry pick those who were most likely to appear at trial. As pretrial release programs expanded in the late 1960s and early '70s, failure-to-appear rates increased.

Today, when a defendant fails to appear, an arrest warrant is issued. But if the defendant was released on his own recognizance or on government bail, very little else happens. In many states and cities, the police are overwhelmed with outstanding arrest warrants. In California, about two million warrants have gone unserved. Many are for minor offenses, but hundreds of thousands are for felonies, including thousands of homicides.

In Philadelphia, where commercial bail has been regulated out of existence, The Philadelphia Inquirer recently found that "fugitives jump bail . . . with virtual impunity." At the end of 2009, the City of Brotherly Love had more than 47,000 unserved arrest warrants. About the only time the city's bail jumpers are recaptured is when they are arrested for some other crime. One would expect that a criminal on the lam would be careful not to get caught speeding, but foresight is rarely a prominent characteristic of bail jumpers. Routine stops ensnare more than a few of them. When the jails are crowded, however, even serial bail jumpers are often released.

The backlog of unserved warrants has become so bad that Philadelphia and many other cities with similar systems, including Washington, D.C., Indianapolis, and Phoenix, have held "safe surrender" days when fugitives are promised leniency if they turn themselves in at a local church or other neutral location. (Some safe surrender programs even advertise on-site child care.) That's good for the fugitives, but for victims of crime, both past and future, justice delayed is justice denied.

Unserved warrants tend not to pile up in jurisdictions with commercial bondsmen. In those places, the bail bond agent is on the hook for the bond and thus has a strong incentive to bring those who jump bail to justice. My interest in commercial bail and bounty hunting began when economist Eric Helland and I used data on 36,231 felony defendants released between 1988 and 1996 to investigate the differences between the public and private systems of bail and fugitive recovery. Our study, published in TheJournal of Law and Economics in 2004, is the largest and most comprehensive ever written on the bail system.

Our research backs up what I found on the street: Bail bondsmen and bounty hunters get their charges to show up for trial, and they recapture them quickly when they do flee. Nationally, the failure-to-appear rate for defendants released on commercial bail is 28 percent lower than the rate for defendants released on their own recognizance, and 18 percent lower than the rate for those released on government bond.

Even more important, when a defendant does skip town, the bounty hunters are the ones who pursue justice with the greatest determination and energy. Defendants sought by bounty hunters are a whopping 50 percent less likely to be on the loose after one year than other bail jumpers.

In addition to being effective, bail bondsmen and bounty hunters work at no cost to the taxpayers. The public reaps a double benefit, because when a bounty hunter fails to find his man, the bond is forfeit to the government. Because billions of dollars of bail are written every year and not every fugitive is caught, bond forfeits are a small but welcome source of revenue. At the federal level, forfeits help fund the Crime Victim Fund, which does what its name suggests, and in states such as Virginia and North Carolina they yield millions of dollars for public schools. Indeed, budget shortfalls around the nation are leading to a reconsideration of commercial bail. Oregon, which banned commercial bail in 1974, is considering a controversial bill to reinstate it, and even Illinois, nearly 50 years after establishing its alternative system, may once again allow bail bondsmen.

Bail bondsmen monitor defendants, guide them through the court process, and help them show up for trial. When defendants skip town, it's the bounty hunters who track them down. But despite the benefits of commercial bail, bondsmen and bounty hunters don't get a lot of thanks. The American Bar Association has said that the commercial bail business is "tawdry," and Supreme Court justice Harry Blackmun once called it "odorous." After Dog Chapman arrested the serial rapist Andrew Luster and delivered him to the Mexican police, Dog was the one who ended up in jail. Bounty hunting is illegal in Mexico, and Chapman was charged with kidnapping despite the fact that (according to him) he had a local police officer with him at the time of the arrest. It surely didn't help Chapman's case that he was not trying to recover a bond that he had posted, since Luster had put up his own money. Luster was quickly extradited by the FBI, which offered Chapman no gratitude or assistance with the Mexican authorities. As if to rub salt in the wound, the judge in the Luster case refused even to reimburse Chapman for his expenses out of the $1 million Luster had forfeited.

Dog Chapman's television show has brought him and the bail bond industry plenty of fame and notoriety, but Chapman is a controversial figure among bondsmen. The famed bounty hunter's checkered history includes prison time, drug abuse, and charges of racism, and many bondsmen think that "Dog" doesn't do much for their image. Bondsmen don't want to be the dogs of criminal justice; they want to be recognized as professionals working alongside police, lawyers, and judges. They are tired of being called "odorous." Bounty hunters want some respect. The record shows that they've earned it.
______________________________________


The full article can be found at: http://www.wilsonquarterly.com/article.cfm?AID=1775

The Bounty Hunter's Pursuit of Justice

When felony defendants jump bail, bounty hunters spring into action. It’s a uniquely American system, and it works.

Excerpts: As printed in the 2011 Winter issue of the Wilson Quarterly

By Alex Tabarrok
Alex Tabarrok is Bartley J. Madden Chair in Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and director of research for the Independent Institute. He writes regularly with coauthor Tyler Cowen at the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution.

Article continued:

Nevertheless, I was apprehensive as I drove to Baltimore early one morning to try my hand at bounty hunting.

When Dennis and I meet, he hands me a photo showing our first fugitive of the day.  I'll be honest.  I was expecting to see a young African-American male.  What can I say?  It's Baltimore and I've seen every episode of The Wire.  But I'm surprised.  Taken a few years ago in better times, the picture shows an attractive young woman, perhaps at her prom.  She has long blond hair and bright eyes.  She is smiling.
We drive to the house where a tip has placed her.  It's a middle-class home in a nice suburb. Children's toys are strewn about the garden.  I'm accompanied by Dennis and two of his coworkers-a former police officer and a former sheriff's deputy.  One of them takes the back while Dennis knocks.  A woman still in her nightclothes answers.  She does not seem surprised to have four men knocking at her door this early in the morning.  She volunteers that we can search the house, and eventually we get the whole story from her.

"Chrissy," our fugitive, is the woman's niece.  Chrissy was at the house two days before and may return.  The once attractive young woman has had her life ruined by drugs.  Or she has ruined her life with drugs-sometimes it's hard to tell.  She is now a heroin addict whose boyfriend regularly beats her.  The aunt is momentarily shocked when we show her the photo. No, she doesn't look like that anymore-her hair is brown, her face is covered with scabs and usually bruised, and she weighs maybe 85 pounds.  "Be gentle with her," the aunt says, even though, she predicts, "she will probably fight."

The aunt gives us another location to scout: a parking lot where Chrissy and her mother are supposedly living out of a car.  We are about to leave when the aunt thanks us for being quiet, because there's a child in the house who was scared the last time the police came by.  The child is Chrissy's son.  We drive to the location and look for the car.  Dennis and his deputies see what looks like the vehicle and knock on one of the dirty windows, peering intently into the interior.  The car is empty.  Dennis and his deputies will return later.

What it takes to be a successful bounty hunter is mostly persistence and politeness.  On most days your leads don't pay off, so you need to visit and revisit the fugitive's home, work, and favorite hangouts.  Waiting is a big part of the game.  Why politeness?  Well, where do the leads come from?  From people like Chrissy's aunt-relatives and friends who might not talk to the police but who will respond to a kind word.  Bounty hunters are polite even to the fugitives who, after all, are also their customers, and sadly, bounty hunters rely a lot on repeat business.  One customer of a firm owned by the same family that runs the one Dennis works for told him proudly, "My family and I have been coming to Frank's Bail Bonds for three generations."

Most fugitives don't fight, and Dennis is eager to avoid confrontation.  Cowboys don't last long in this business.  Most bounty hunters have a working relationship with police officers and will sometimes call on them to make the arrest once a fugitive has been located.

A bounty hunter also benefits from being prepared.  A typical application for a bond, for example, requires information about the defendant's residence, employer, former employer, spouse, children (along with their names and schools), spouse's employer, mother, father, automobile (including description, tags, and financing), union membership, previous arrests, and so forth.  In addition, bond dealers need access to all kinds of public and private databases. Noted bounty hunter Bob Burton says that a list of friends who work at the telephone, gas, or electric utility, the post office, welfare agencies, and in law enforcement is a major asset.  Today, familiarity with the Internet and computer databases is a must.

Good bond dealers master the tricks of their trade.  The first three digits of a Social Security number, for example, indicate the state where the number was issued.  This information can suggest that an applicant might be lying if he claims to have been born elsewhere, and it may provide a clue about where a skipped defendant has family or friends.

If at all possible, bail bondsmen get a friend or family member to cosign the bond.  The reason is simple.  A defendant whose bond is cosigned is less likely to flee.  As Dennis told me, "In my line of work, I deal with some mean people, people who aren't afraid of me or the police.  But even the mean ones are afraid of their mom, so if I can get Mom to list her house as collateral, I know the defendant is much more likely to show up when he is supposed to."  A defendant whose bond is cosigned is also more likely to be caught if he does flee, because the bondsman will remind the cosigner that if the fugitive can't be found, it's not just the bondsman who will be left holding the bag.

Bounty hunters have robust rights to arrest fugitives.  They can, for example, lawfully break into a suspect's home without a warrant, pursue and recover fugitives across state lines without necessity of extradition proceedings, and search and seize without the constraint of the Fourth Amendment's "reasonableness" requirement.  Just like everyone else, however, bounty hunters must obey the criminal statutes.  A bounty hunter who uses unreasonable force or mistakenly enters the home of someone who is not a bail jumper is subject to criminal prosecution.

The Bounty Hunter's Pursuit of Justice

When felony defendants jump bail, bounty hunters spring into action.  It’s a uniquely American system, and it works.

Excerpts: As printed in the 2011 Winter issue of the Wilson Quarterly

By Alex Tabarrok
Alex Tabarrok is Bartley J. Madden Chair in Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and director of research for the Independent Institute.  He writes regularly with coauthor Tyler Cowen at the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution.
________

Andrew Luster had it all: a multimillion-dollar trust fund, good looks, and a bachelor pad just off the beach in Mussel Shoals, California.  Luster, the great-grandson of cosmetics legend Max Factor, spent his days surfing and his nights cruising the clubs.  His life would have been sad but unremarkable if he had not had a fetish for sex with unconscious women.  When one woman alleged rape, Luster claimed mutual consent, but the videotapes the police discovered when they searched his home told a different story.  Eventually, more than 10 women came forward, and he was convicted of 20 counts of rape and sentenced to 124 years in prison.  There was only one problem.  Luster could not be found.

Shortly before he was expected to take the stand, Luster withdrew funds from his brokerage accounts, found a caretaker for his dog, and skipped town on a $1 million bail bond.  The FBI put Luster on its most-wanted list, but months passed with no results.  In the end, the authorities did not find him.  But Luster was brought to justice—by a dog (or at least a man who goes by that name).  Duane Chapman, star of the A&E reality TV show Dog: The Bounty Hunter, tracked Luster for months.  He picked up clues to Luster’s whereabouts from old phone bills and from Luster’s mother, who inadvertently revealed that her son spoke fluent Spanish.  He also gleaned useful information from a mysterious Mr. X who taunted him by e-mail and who may have been Luster himself.  Finally, a tip from someone who had seen Dog on television brought Chapman to a small town in Mexico known for its great surfing.  Days later, he and his team spotted Luster at a taco stand, apprehended him, and turned him over to the local police.

Most people don’t realize how many fugitives from the law there are.  About one-quarter of all felony defendants fail to show up on the day of their trial. Some of these absences are due to forgetfulness, hospitalization, or even imprisonment on another charge.  But like Luster, many felony defendants skip court with willful intent.  The police are charged with recapturing these fugitives, but some of them are chased by an even more tireless pursuer, the bounty hunter.

Bounty hunters and bail bondsmen play an important but unsung role in a legal system whose court dockets are too crowded to provide swift justice.  When a suspect is arrested, a judge must make a decision: set the suspect free on his own recognizance until the court is ready to proceed, hold the suspect in jail, or release the accused on the condition that he post a bail bond.  A bond is a promise backed by incentive.  If the suspect shows up on the trial date, he gets his money back; but if he fails to show, the money is forfeited.  We don’t want to deprive the innocent of their liberty, but we also don’t want to give the guilty too much of a head start on their escape.  Bail bonds don’t solve this problem completely, but they do give judges an additional tool to help them navigate the dilemma.

Bail might be a rich man’s privilege were it not for the bail bondsman.  (Many bondsmen are women, but “bondsperson” doesn’t have quite the same ring, so I’ll use the standard terminology.)  In return for a non-refundable fee, usually around 10 percent of the bond, a bondsman will put up his own money with the court.  A typical bond might run $6,000. If the defendant shows up, the bondsman earns $600.  But if the defendant flees, the bondsman potentially can forfeit $6,000.  Potentially, because when a fugitive fails to appear, the court gives the bondsman a notice that essentially says, “Bring your charge to justice soon or your money is mine.”  A bondsman typically has 90 to 180 days to bring a fugitive back to justice, so when a defendant jumps bail, the bondsman lets the dogs loose.

Actually, that last image suggesting a massive manhunt is misleading.  Bail bond firms are often small, family-run businesses—the wife writes the bonds and the husband, the “bounty hunter,” searches for clients who fail to show up in court.  Although a bondsman never knows when a desperate client might turn violent, his job is usually routine, as I found out when Dennis Sew volunteered to show me the ropes.  Dennis has been in the business for more than 20 years and in 2009 was named agent of the year by the Professional Bail Agents of the United States.

More on this story to follow . . .

ALEC Supports Private Surety Bail

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the nation's largest nonpartisan, individual membership organization of state legislators, issued a press release on January 10, 2011 supporting the industry in reducing jail populations.

Jail Population Decreases as the Use of
Commercial Bail Increases

For Immediate Release

January 10, 2011
 Washington, D.C.; A new study by the U.S Department of Justice (DOJ) found the number of individuals who were held in jail decreased. The overall jail population has decreased from 773,341 in 2007 to 760,400 in 2009. This coincides with an earlier DOJ study that found the percentage of individuals who were released on commercial bail from jail increased from approximately 20 percent in 1992 to over 40 percent today.

Michael Hough, Public Safety Resident Fellow at the American Legislative Exchange Council, (ALEC) said, “This latest study disproves the myth being pushed by some that the use of bail bonds increases the number of people in jail – we now know in fact the opposite is true -- that the increased use of commercial bail helps to alleviate overcrowding in jails.”

The National Association of Pretrial Services Agencies, which lobbies for the abolition of commercial bail, released a report in 2009 claiming the pretrial jail population was rapidly increasing due to commercial bail (http://www.napsa.org/publications/napsafandp1.pdf). National Public Radio also made a similar argument in a three-piece report entitled, “Bail Burden Keeps U.S. Jails Stuffed with Inmates.”

While the number of individuals in jail decreased from 2007 to 2009 the number of individuals in prison continued to grow.  Hough said, “Commercial bail is more widely used by local governments and judges because bondsmen are able to quickly free individuals from jail while holding them accountable to return to court to face justice. It is important to note that other factors like a declining crime rate also factored in to the lower jail population, put clearly the antiprivate sector bail lobby will have to find something other than jail overcrowding to howl about."

ALEC's website is http://www.alec.org/

Pretrial Release – Using “proven” methods vs. “evidence-based or simple” methods

The Eighth Amendment (Amendment VIII) to the United States Constitution is the part of the United States Bill of Rights, which prohibits the federal government from imposing excessive bail, excessive fines or cruel and unusual punishments.

Bail laws in the United States grew out of a long history of English statutes and policies. During the colonial period, Americans relied on the bail structure that had developed in England hundreds of years earlier.  When the colonists declared independence in 1776, they no longer relied on English law, but formulated their own policies which closely paralleled the English tradition.  The ties between the institutions of bail in the United States are also based on the old English system.  In medieval England, methods to ensure the accused would appear for trial began as early as criminal trials themselves.  By the end of the 19^th century, commercial sureties were the normal manner of release. 

In the 60’s there was pressure to develop alternatives to money bail; in 1966 President Lydon Johnson signed into law the first reform of the federal bail system since 1789, which created presumption in favor of releasing a defendant on their own recognizance (ROR), or a promise to appear for court. As evidenced by numerous national studies, such unsecured release has led to increased failures to appear for court costing the criminal justice system and taxpayers millions of dollars.

The private surety bail industry has continued to ensure defendants appear for all court proceedings. Bail agents are financially and physically responsible for all defendants released on bail and use no taxpayer funds. But the industry is under increased attacks.

By law, Judges must release defendants on the least restrictive conditions they believe are compatible for appearance at trial. When jails become overcrowded Judges are pressured to release individuals ROR rather than run the risk of setting a bail the defendant can’t secure. And then there are large government-funded pretrial services programs and credit card vendors who release defendants with little to no supervision.

While release on a bail bond through a private surety bail agent has been proven to be the most efficient and effective means of pretrial release, these other release methods are couched as “advancing justice through innovation and technology.”

A Proven Method.
A proven method is defined as “having been demonstrated or verified without doubt.” The private surety bail industry has a “proven method” of release that guarantees the appearance of the defendant in court. If not, the bail agent is 100 percent financially responsible and not the taxpayer. This proven method has been verified through numerous national studies.

Government-funded pretrial services programs began as a means to help indigent defendants charged with minor offenses secure release from jail. Today, they eschew any method of release using financial means – no matter the charge or the criminal history of the defendant – and don’t even consider indigency to be a factor for eligibility. Such programs have faced increasing scrutiny from elected officials and taxpayers as they have grown to become large bureaucratic programs fighting for their survival. Their latest tactic? They claim to use “evidence-based” practices that focus on innovation, technology, research, motivational interviewing and cognitive behavior!

These programs claim such methods will ensure the most effective release decision is recommended for defendants – all on unsecured release. So how does it work you ask?

Well defendants released under government-funded pretrial services programs are “interviewed and assessed” by asking a lengthy series of questions, many of which require specific personal information to be provided, and then pretrial services staff take such data and compile a “research-based” risk assessment to determine if the defendant will show up for court and not re-offend while on release. Your tax dollars at work here!

What type of questions is asked of defendants? Let us tell you.

• Have you ever felt you should cut down on your drinking or drug use?
• Have people annoyed you by criticizing your drug use or drinking?
• Have you ever felt guilty about your drug use or drinking?
• Have you had an eye opener the first thing in the morning to steady nerves or get rid of a hangover?
• Do you ever use drugs to change the effect of another drug you have taken?
• Do you feel . . . nervous, hopeless, restless or fidgety, so depressed that nothing can cheer you up?
• Do you feel that everything is an effort, worthless?
• Has a medical doctor ever prescribed medicine for an emotional problem such as depression or nervousness?
• Have you been hospitalized for an emotional or behavioral problem?
• Did you receive special education services in school for an emotional or behavioral problem?
• Have you ever spoken to a psychologist or counselor about an emotional problem?
• Have you ever received treatment for an alcohol or drug problem?
• Do you have chronic medial problems that continue to interfere with your life?
• Are taking prescription medicine for a physical problem?
• Does someone contribute to your support?
• Does it constitute the majority of your support?
• How many people depend on you for their support?
• Are you satisfied with your living arrangements?
• Do you live with anyone who has a drug or alcohol problem?
• Have you even been a victim of emotional, physical or sexual abuse?
• What is your frequency of drug or alcohol use?
• Do you administer drugs orally, through an IV, smoke, nasal snort?
• Which substance is a major problem?

And just how long do you think this process takes?  Is it long enough to justify the millions of taxpayer dollars going in to such programs? These are defendants who have been arrested for a crime and have not yet had their day in court. Why are they being coddled by the pretrial services programs and asked such intrusive questions? These defendants have not been found guilty, ordered to probation, drug or mental health programs or any other “program” as a condition of their sentence. Such heavy-handed “intervention” at the front-end is what your tax dollars are being spent on when most defendants can afford to simply pay a nominal fee to bond out of jail.  And if they can't afford a monetary bond because they are truly inidgent, let the Judge take the onus for releasing the defendant on their own recognizance. 

Pay Bail Simply.
Then we have just the opposite system of release: the swipe-and-go credit card release system! This type of release is when an out-of-state software company is allowed to set-up shop in a county jail and for a hefty non-refundable fee, allows a defendant or their family to “swipe” their way out of jail. And oh by the way – whoever runs the jail gets a piece of the pie as well. For every defendant who swipes their way out, the jail gets a percentage of the transaction. How will this software company ensure that defendants actually show up for their court appearance? What will they do if defendants fail to show? They will do nothing to ensure that those who swipe their way out of jail are present in court. The jail will use more of your tax dollars by having their officers or other law enforcement officers try and find the absconded defendant when they aren’t fighting crime.

How is this method of release, where a company takes a non-refundable premium from a defendant, any different from the private surety bail industry?  Both obtain a non-refundable premium but with a bail agent, they are 100 percent financially responsible if the defendant fails to appear for court.  Under the other methods of release, the taxpayer is responsible. 

And a pretrial services program is about as responsible as the credit card vendor for a failure to appear. If a defendant doesn’t show up for court it’s only a negative statistic for the program. They simply tell the court the defendant “violated” his/her pretrial release and more of your tax dollars are allocated for the sheriff to go out and again try to find the defendant.  With a bail agent, it is their livelihood and business on the line.

Feeling generous yet with you tax money this holiday season?

The Truth About Bail.
The private surety bail industry has been characterized by government-funded pretrial services programs as “greedy bail agents” and who “exact” money for bail from defendants while leaving those who can’t afford bail to languish in jail. They have even stretched their theories to state that jails are overcrowded because of bail agents! Statistics 101: a correlation does not translate in to causality. The truth is that small and repeat bonds are the bread-and-butter of many bail agents. We all know there are many repeat offenders in every community. Bail agents build up a client base of such defendants who know that the agent will find and re-arrest them if they don’t abide by the bail contract – appear at court and stay out of trouble!

Research has proven that most defendants are able to bail out of jail within 24-72 hours. Bail agents are a critical component of helping to keep jail populations in-check. And the cost of bail to the defendant? A nominal fee of 10 to 15 percent of the bond in most states; this translates to approximately $100 - $500 maximum for most defendants. Contrast that with a pretrial services officer making from $16 to $25 an hour interviewing hundreds of defendants with their lengthy “risk assessment” tool and it adds up to substantially more than a bail bond would. Not to mention the time defendants remain in jail having to submit to such assessments when they could have been released on a bail bond using no taxpayer funds. Talk about affecting jail overcrowding!

To Sum Up.
Pretrial services programs and swipe-and-go systems completely remove any transfer of responsibility to a licensed and bonded agent who lives and works in the local community. It removes the economic interest that an agent has in making sure the defendant shows up for court. By doing so, we see a reduction in the “show up” rate for court, a rise in repeat crimes, and extra costs to taxpayers for requiring law enforcement to retrieve the missing defendant.

Research has proven that failure to appear rates are higher for defendants released on their own recognizance, deposit bonds and other non-secured release methods, while the private surety bail industry has the lowest failure to appear rate.

Our country continues to face an unprecedented economic crisis that still may take years to recover from. State and local governments have drastically cut budgets while raising fees for services and passing those costs on to already financially-strapped citizens. Private surety bail affords the opportunity to reduce jail overcrowding, increase public safety and improve compliance of those defendants released into the community pending case disposition. Any release method should always take into account the best use of taxpayer dollars and public safety.

As one great Florida Legislator said:

“The fact is that government can always compete with private industry and with the use of tax dollars can put almost any business out of business. If the government wanted to, they could lend money as banks; they could pay more interest than banks. If government wanted to be in the insurance business like private citizens, it could certainly do that. We just put it on the taxpayers’ backs."

And as far as government competing with private enterprise . . . this same Legislator said:

"Hell hath no furry like a bureaucrat who’s been asked not to compete with private industry!"

As we leave 2010 behind and enter in to a new year, citizens all over the country should become vocal advocates and demand that their valuable tax dollars not be wasted by governments wanting to become bigger and bigger to justify their existence to the detriment of public safety.

Hold those who choose to commit crimes accountable for their behavior and their release. Public policy affects public safety.