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Unable to Post Bail? You Will Pay for That for Many Years

nytimes.com

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Re: Unable to Post Bail? You Will Pay for That for Many Years

#111

Post by philwelch »

int_19h wrote: post #89
philwelch wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people don't have enough cash on hand to pay any amount of bail that would serve as an incentive for them to get back--especially not most people who get arrested on criminal complaints. The bail bondsman actually provides another service to the court: he has the legal power and financial incentive to apprehend a suspect and return them to the custody of the court if you skip bail. In other words, instead of the…

> It's a fairly underrated and underappreciated market mechanism where the entire problem of "making sure people show up to court if they are on trial" can be handled by a competitive market, usually more efficiently or humanely than most local governments would do themselves. Given that many other countries don't have bail bonds at all, would you care to demonstrate how they're less humane in practice by citing some…

In many of those countries, you either have to post bail yourself (which isn't any easier on the impoverished suspect), accept some form of probation, or in some cases are just held in custody.

Re: Unable to Post Bail? You Will Pay for That for Many Years

#112

Post by philwelch »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #80
philwelch wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's imperfect, but no perfect solution exists. If you're considered a low flight risk, you could be released under your own recognizance or released at a low enough level of bail that you can afford to pay the bondsman's rate. If you're considered a very high flight risk, you stay in jail. Cash bail is for the cases in the middle, and if you either abolish it or replace it with something less effective or efficient,…

Is it actually correlated to flight risk? Do they ever determine accused murderers are low risk?

Accused murderers are, everything else held equal, a greater flight risk because they have a greater incentive to flee. They're also less likely to be granted bail in the first place, because murder is a serious charge.

Re: Unable to Post Bail? You Will Pay for That for Many Years

#113

Post by kazinator »

> In itself, an inability to pay bail after being arrested makes it more likely that you will be convicted of that offense,

That could be, at least in part, due to inability to post bail being correlated with actually, like, being guilty.

That and being unsophisticated and without a lawyer.

> The implications of the two studies are powerful and troubling. Being behind bars while awaiting trial had profound negative repercussions, and they were borne disproportionately by low-income people and by black people.

For pete's sake, and the umpteenth time, correlation doesn't imply cause and effect.

Re: Unable to Post Bail? You Will Pay for That for Many Years

#114

Post by philwelch »

mikeash wrote: post #95
philwelch wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm a bail bondsman, I'm probably already sending text messages to my clients to make sure they show up in court, because if they don't, I'm the one out the money unless I go pick them up and take them to the county jail myself. I'm not sure about ankle bracelets, but there's no reason they couldn't be part of the current bail system, either--if I'm a bail bondsman, I'd give a discount to any client that wears an…

How much competition is there going to be the bail bondsman for the homeless guy who gets picked up for vagrancy, or a poor person working paycheck to paycheck who already owes his soul to the local payday lenders? Your proposal sounds like a great way to get excellent bail services for people who have money, but that’s not how the courts are supposed to work.

I'm not opposed to judges from releasing people of their own recognizance or under a different form of community supervision if that would be appropriate in that particular situation.

Re: Unable to Post Bail? You Will Pay for That for Many Years

#115

Post by philwelch »

int_19h wrote: post #86
philwelch wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An algorithm can be racially biased, or have biases that significantly correlate with race, without actually having a "race" variable.

I think what he's suggesting is feeding the input data that differs only on that variable, and if the algorithm produces differing output, then it is by definition racist (and then you send the authors back to the drawing board to figure out why).

That's fair.

Re: Unable to Post Bail? You Will Pay for That for Many Years

#116

Post by heelix »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #84
FireBeyond wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Fire fighting" gets you hailed as a hero. "Fire prevention" tends to be dismissed as "You didn't really do anything. You just got lucky." Humans are super bad at counting the disasters that didn't happen, but should/would have. So "fire fighting" is more attractive, "sexy" and heroic. I was at a Fire Service training course this last few weekends. And something one of the Fire / Medics said really resonated with m…

Thank you. Dehydration can kill you in about two days. We don't treat restaurants as life giving either. We mostly decry them as sources of health problems -- obesity, diabetes, etc. Feeding people is only life saving if you are feeding famine victims in Africa. It's absolutely not anything important if you are an American stay at home mom cooking from scratch to meet both budgetary and dietary restrictions. Nope. Su…

It is scary how fast people can go down hill without water. We regularly go camping up on the MN/Canadian boarder in the BWCA - going lake to lake in canoes. Usually we pack in a filter (or chemical purifiers, way back) to make sure folks don't get beaver fever. One guy opted to not drink the purified water... and went downhill fast the next day. Had to paddle him out and take him to the ER. Not sure what he was thinking - that the .5L of water he took in was enough to get him through 3 days.

Re: Unable to Post Bail? You Will Pay for That for Many Years

#117

Post by int_19h »

philwelch wrote: post #111
int_19h wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a fairly underrated and underappreciated market mechanism where the entire problem of "making sure people show up to court if they are on trial" can be handled by a competitive market, usually more efficiently or humanely than most local governments would do themselves. Given that many other countries don't have bail bonds at all, would you care to demonstrate how they're less humane in practice by citing some…

In many of those countries, you either have to post bail yourself (which isn't any easier on the impoverished suspect), accept some form of probation, or in some cases are just held in custody.

So, what is the aggregated outcome of those differences? How many people end up in jail there vs here? What's the average term? And so on.

Furthermore, many of those are democratic countries. If their arrangements are worse off, you'd expect some people - even if it's a small minority - to make note of that, and advocate to reform the system to be more like US. Are there any examples of that?

Re: Unable to Post Bail? You Will Pay for That for Many Years

#118

Post by mnm1 »

philwelch wrote: post #42
jdietrich wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Posting a cash bail has no bearing on your risk to the public. If a judge thinks that you pose a high risk, you shouldn't be offered bail at any price; if you don't pose a significant risk, you should be offered bail conditional on your behaviour during the bail period rather than your ability to pay. The vast majority of people on bail aren't mass murderers or armed robbers, they're petty criminals and drug addicts.…

Bail conditions are all well and good, and it's not an either/or--even if you pay cash bail for a domestic violence charge, you're still required to stay away from the alleged victim. The purpose of cash bail is to make sure the suspect shows up to court. Which--sure, can be replaced with monitoring, and then instead of having a bail bondsman pick up bail-jumpers at zero cost to the taxpayer, the taxpayer can pay the…

Sounds like a win win situation. We get rid of the scummy bail bonds men and we make the sheriff so his job all the while not putting innocent people in jail. Oh, what's that? You'd rather have innocent people in jail rather than paying the sheriff to do his job every once in awhile? That's quite an immoral position.

Re: Unable to Post Bail? You Will Pay for That for Many Years

#119

Post by philwelch »

int_19h wrote: post #117
philwelch wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In many of those countries, you either have to post bail yourself (which isn't any easier on the impoverished suspect), accept some form of probation, or in some cases are just held in custody.

So, what is the aggregated outcome of those differences? How many people end up in jail there vs here? What's the average term? And so on. Furthermore, many of those are democratic countries. If their arrangements are worse off, you'd expect some people - even if it's a small minority - to make note of that, and advocate to reform the system to be more like US. Are there any examples of that?

There are actually US states that don’t allow commercial bail, so the data for that should be available. You have to control for other factors, but there are fewer of those between states than between countries.

I don’t think many people even in the US understand the commercial bail bond system, and many people only learn about it from biased sources advocating to repeal it. It is a bit of a legal idiosyncrasy particular to the US.

Re: Unable to Post Bail? You Will Pay for That for Many Years

#120

Post by mindslight »

philwelch wrote: post #69
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So an innocent person who's unable to afford bail either has to wait in jail for their court date or pay a fee for their freedom? That doesn't seem inhumane at all?

It's imperfect, but no perfect solution exists. If you're considered a low flight risk, you could be released under your own recognizance or released at a low enough level of bail that you can afford to pay the bondsman's rate. If you're considered a very high flight risk, you stay in jail. Cash bail is for the cases in the middle, and if you either abolish it or replace it with something less effective or efficient,…

> It's imperfect, but no perfect solution exists.

Make the police and courts fully fund their externalities, period. Private companies can still compete for the responsibility of keeping tabs on and apprehending fugitives, but the state should be paying the fee.

Right now the damages caused by police are effectively paid by an absurd reverse-lottery where the unlucky victims have to bear the costs of their own false imprisonment. There is little incentive for the police to not overzealously arrest and hold people, because it gets accounted for as effectiveness rather than the waste that it is. This has been so institutionalized that police even use it as an illegitimate punishment - eg "you can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride". This is not the rule of law, nor justice.

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