California governor signs overhaul of bail system • Hacker News Board

Re: California governor signs overhaul of bail system

#131

Post by spacehome » Wed, Aug 29, 2018, 5:42 AM UTC

jmspring wrote: post #103

firic wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does this have to do with one party? How is a primary system in one party different than a general election amongst two parties?

California did better with balanced government. Republican Gov and democratic legislature. There was some semblance of balance. Without that balance, we see prop 47 and 57. Local communities using those as an excuse to not really do much in the way of law enforcement — the city government of Santa Cruz was actively hostile toward the police well into the 90s. An individual casing bikes with bike tools in the east bay…

Seriously, though, what would you have the cop do in that case?

Re: California governor signs overhaul of bail system

#132

Post by tommoor » Wed, Aug 29, 2018, 5:43 AM UTC

donarb wrote: post #121

tommoor wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like they could go with a system similar to some of the nordic countries do for driving tickets where the bail amount is a percentage of your earnings.

Don’t you mean the fine amount? I doubt any jurisdictions arrest for traffic infractions.

Yea, I mean the fine.

Re: California governor signs overhaul of bail system

#133

Post by philwelch » Wed, Aug 29, 2018, 5:44 AM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #60

philwelch wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The involvement of bail bondsmen has a cost; the fact that the major direct cost is paid for by what amounts to a tax on the (potentially wrongly) arrested doesn't mean it isn't a cost. Unless your county is run by a mafia of bail bondsmen or something, this doesn't turn out to be true. By default, people who get arrested just stay in jail. If someone is able and willing to pay a bail bondsman, that means they woul…

> By default, people who get arrested just stay in jail. In a money bail system, sure. But artificially creating a worse default doesn't make the relatively better condition good . Jail as pretrial default is imprisoning the accused, who are presumed innocent, which is a cost (both an economic cost and a liberty cost.) In a pretrial services model, pretrial detention is exceptional, not default.

People are often released of their own recognizance if the judge is confident that they will show up to court. And sure, maybe they should do that more often. Likewise, some people are straight up denied bail. But there’s a wide gray category of people you don’t necessarily trust to voluntarily show up to court, but who can be incentivized to do so through some mechanism short of just going to jail, and getting rid of that mechanism will just keep those people in jail. So what’s that mechanism? House arrest? Ankle bracelet? Hold one of their close family members hostage? I mean, all of those kind of suck, but if you think any of them might be better, you can offer them as an alternative to bail, and if anyone takes them, more power to them.

Re: California governor signs overhaul of bail system

#134

Post by samstave » Wed, Aug 29, 2018, 5:45 AM UTC

TomMckenny wrote: post #46

swebs wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Judges can be recalled, though it is rare. It recently happened to the California judge who presided over the Brock Turner case over accusations that his sentence was not harsh enough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_v._Turner#Repercussions...

Another instance was the removal of 3 California supreme court justices[1], including the first woman, for over turning too many death penalties and ruling against insurance companies too often (although the TV campaign to remove focused only insufficient zeal about the death penalty.) [1]Rose Bird, Cruz Reynoso, Joseph Grodin

>"over turning too many death penalties and ruling against insurance companies too often"

Who specifically funded those efforts I wonder...

Re: California governor signs overhaul of bail system

#135

Post by TangoTrotFox » Wed, Aug 29, 2018, 5:45 AM UTC

YokoZar wrote: post #29

lurquer wrote: post #26

Instead of the duly appointed Judge making the decision, the power is delegated to a "Risk Assessment" board. (i.e., a bunch of unaccountable social workers). So, instead of an individual Judge getting flack for excessive bail, he can sleep at night having had his authority delegated to an anonymous 'committee' that can refuse to set bail altogether. It seems the general public -- at least in California -- has little…

Isn't part of the problem that judges face a lot of pressures to be extra harsh when deciding bail? A board seems less likely to face political blowback when the rare out on bail person commits a serious crime. That sounds like the sort of incident that incentivizes judges to be extra harsh.

The data doesn't seem to indicate that judges are heavily influenced by outside forces when determining bail. This [1] is a paper from the Bureau of Justice Statistics on bail stats. Those data are only for felonies at the state level, which is somewhat biased but also arguably the most important group as well -- misdemeanor offenses tend to receive $0 to negligible bail.

So for instance one interesting datum for that paper is release rates for people by prior offenses. Release, in the context there, can mean they were released either for an affordable bail or for no bail at all -- 'released to personal recognizance' being the phrasing. Of those with no prior convictions, 77% end up being released. For those with misdemeanor priors, 63% end up being released. And for those with felony priors, only 46% end up being released. Actually maybe 'only' is not an appropriate term there. People charged with a felony, and who have prior felony convictions, end up being released from prison 46% of the time.

Anyhow, the thing I think that arguably justifies judges' decisions is that we can have a sort of completely unplanned, but phenomenally well designed, experiment. Sometimes jails are forced to release people that they would not otherwise release because of emergency releases -- that can be triggered by things such as jail overcrowding. In these cases judges are going to release those who were seen to be less desirable candidates for release. Though of course they'll be releasing the 'least less desirable' candidates. Cutting to the chase there, these people released through emergency releases ended up engaging in some form of pretrial misconduct 52% of the time with 45% of them failing to appear for their court date. The pretrial misconduct rate for intentionally released individuals ranges from 27-36%, depending on the release type, with failure to appear rates of 14-30%.

The paper includes a couple of really handy tables that show logisitic regression analysis of release decisions and reoffense rates for people broken down into various categories, alongside their pretrial misconduct rates. So for instance you can see the weighting for, or against, release for various groups contrasted against how often they reoffend. In a perfect world, these would be inverses of one another. For instance if there is a large negative bias against releasing people for [x] then we'd expect to see a large positive bias in terms of pretrial misdconduct for [x]. And in most cases this does seem to be the case. But there are some exceptions. All in all, it seems like a system that does work pretty well. Should be interesting to see how well the bail committees perform by contrast!

[1] - https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/prfdsc.pdf

Re: California governor signs overhaul of bail system

#136

Post by TangoTrotFox » Wed, Aug 29, 2018, 5:46 AM UTC

hamandcheese wrote: post #119

firic wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If judges risk themselves politically if they release people on bail then that means that the will of the people is to rarely release people on bail. I know it may sound weird to you and me but apparently there are a lot of people in California who feel that someone accused of a crime should suffer in prison until they are proven innocent. That is the disadvantage of democracy, people with different opinions get to v…

Or maybe the solution is to remove the political (dis)incentive structure such that the will of an irrational population doesn't continue to cause harm.

Completely agreed, but how would you propose to navigate these waters within a democratic system?

Re: California governor signs overhaul of bail system

#137

Post by 0xB31B1B » Wed, Aug 29, 2018, 5:53 AM UTC

downandout wrote: post #94

stanleydrew wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This won't result in more poor people being released. It will simply result in a higher percentage of middle and upper class people being extorted into guilty pleas that they would not otherwise take, under the threat of losing their careers and families as a result of many months, and in a large number of cases, years, of pretrial detention. Uhh, sounds like they will be treated the same as a poor person is curren…

Uhh, sounds like they will be treated the same as a poor person is currently treated then. I agree that judges should have the discretion to release poor people that cannot make bail. That part of the system needed to be changed. I don't agree that they should have limitless discretion to arbitrarily hold anyone without bail. That is a gaping and dangerous hole to open up.

That is already the case right now, anyone can be held without bail

Re: California governor signs overhaul of bail system

#138

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, Aug 29, 2018, 5:57 AM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #133

dragonwriter wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By default, people who get arrested just stay in jail. In a money bail system, sure. But artificially creating a worse default doesn't make the relatively better condition good . Jail as pretrial default is imprisoning the accused, who are presumed innocent, which is a cost (both an economic cost and a liberty cost.) In a pretrial services model, pretrial detention is exceptional, not default.

People are often released of their own recognizance if the judge is confident that they will show up to court. And sure, maybe they should do that more often. Likewise, some people are straight up denied bail. But there’s a wide gray category of people you don’t necessarily trust to voluntarily show up to court, but who can be incentivized to do so through some mechanism short of just going to jail, and getting rid o…

> People are often released of their own recognizance if the judge is confident that they will show up to court. And sure, maybe they should do that more often. Likewise, some people are straight up denied bail. But there’s a wide gray category of people you don’t necessarily trust to voluntarily show up to court, but who can be incentivized to do so through some mechanism short of just going to jail, and getting rid of that mechanism will just keep those people in jail. So what’s that mechanism?

The mechanism in the new California law is a pretrial services system similar to the one that has for years been successfully used in Washington, D.C., in place of money bail. It's not just getting rid of a mechanism with no replacement.

Re: California governor signs overhaul of bail system

#139

Post by DSMan195276 » Wed, Aug 29, 2018, 5:59 AM UTC

_2d30 wrote: post #120

Alex3917 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Getting people to show up to trial is the main one. So I think at the top end of the spectrum this might make sense. The problem is that a very large percentage people in jail are there because their bail was literally $50 or $100 but they didn't have the money to pay it, so they end up in jail for months or years on end. And for these people, bail has zero impact on whether they show up for trial.

Is that true? Why not get a bail bond??

I'm assuming that is the bail bond. Bail bonds aren't free, you pay a small percentage that you don't get back. So if you have no money at all, you obviously can't afford to pay the bail, but you also can't afford to get a bondsman to pay it instead.

Re: California governor signs overhaul of bail system

#140

Post by TangoTrotFox » Wed, Aug 29, 2018, 6:03 AM UTC

Alex3917 wrote: post #58

koolba wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting people to show up to trial is the main one. I’d like to see an experiment where rather than money, instead a free citizen is offered up for bail. And if you don’t show up for trial the citizen goes to jail till they apprehend you.

> Getting people to show up to trial is the main one. So I think at the top end of the spectrum this might make sense. The problem is that a very large percentage people in jail are there because their bail was literally $50 or $100 but they didn't have the money to pay it, so they end up in jail for months or years on end. And for these people, bail has zero impact on whether they show up for trial.

I have the data available for felonies right here [1]. And according to those data 77% of people without prior convictions end up being released (63% for those with only misdemeanor convictions, 46% with prior felony convictions).

Of those released, about 33% are released for $0 bail, and the remainder met financial conditions. For those who faced a bail of [1] - https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/prfdsc.pdf