Abolish the Cash Bail System

> it's worth noting that some amount of the bail money can be converted to a bounty for the apprehension of those of the accused who go on to skip trial.

Hahaha, bounty hunting certainly makes for good movie scripts, but in practice I imagine that it's quite a bad idea.

Leave law enforcement to the police, they are already bad enough at it -- I can't imagine you want poorly trained civilians without uniform to employ violence to apprehend suspects.

What happens when a bounty hunter mistakes the identify of someone who then decides to exercise self-defense against a kidnapping attempt?

The fact that this doesn't constantly cause massive problems in a country full of guns and "stand your ground laws" is amazing :D

The underlying problem is that people are being punished too much for minor transgressions and screwing people like that is making life worse for everyone by proxy.

First you can tell the police to just not give a fuck. This works well for the kind of people police tend to favor. If you're wealthy and look the part or you're an attractive woman this solution will likely work well for you, being white sure won't hurt either. The problem with this solution is unevenness of enforcement. Anyone of demographics the cops don't like (don't be a young black male) or anyone that crosses the cops is really gonna get screwed by this solution. It's also worth keeping in mind that less work necessitates cuts to the police force. Bored cops are an enemy of a free society.

Second you can solve it with the courts. Let the cops pick up whoever they want and sort it all out in the courts. Release people promptly and without bail, etc. etc. The problem with this solution is that vulnerable people still get screwed hard. "The ride" will still likely cost you your job in a high turnover industry. Eventually the cops are gonna get tired of seeing the same damn bike thief at it again the next day and stop picking people up though if the court doesn't actually punish the real criminals.

Thirdly you can solve this problem at the legislative level. You can not criminalize many things that boil down to minor instances of bad judgement and convert many nonviolent crimes into civil crimes, limit the circumstances under which police can arrest, limit the punishments the courts can inflict, require more prompt trials and releases, etc, etc. The downside is that like every public policy there are losers. There will be loopholes and certain kinds of crime are just gonna be below a threshold where anything gets done about them. If you get unlucky and happen to live beside the obvious crack house that the cops can't do much about then it's simply gonna suck for you. Furthermore people's lives will be ruined by a tolerance approach just as much as by an authoritarian approach. Criminals who have not yet crossed paths with the system to really get punished to the point of changing or thrown in jail will harm and kill people. That's just how it is when you relax laws at scale. Is it worth it? It's a matter of opinion.

Bailing on cash bail targets the court system for the point of reform. It's not a bad thing and certainly every little bit helps but if we truly don't want to over punish people for things society has to come to terms with the fact that it will need to cast a very coarse net and a lot of people engaging in behavior that you, yes you the reader, consider criminal will necessarily slip through (with the details depending on the part of the system in which you choose to make your changes as I've described above). There is no free lunch here. Make no mistake, I don't think this is a zero sum game and I'm all for a very coarse net. I just think a lot of people here are unprepared for exactly what it does look like and how long it takes to stabilize.

> This amounts to nearly half a million people sitting in jail each day, despite being presumed innocent under the law

Ok, but it's not the same half million on any given day. A huge number of those people got picked up the night before and will be out (on bail or otherwise) by the end of the business day. Incarcerating people is expensive. Even if getting them out doesn't involve the state getting an interest free loan the state still has an incentive to get them out.

In functional jurisdictions the turnover is high. I know that there's a litany of exceptions for the authoritarian (and therefore more inclined to lock people up for no good reason) and well moneyed (and have the money to do it) jurisdictions in the Boston-DC corridor (and please nobody construe this as me giving the Southeast or west coast a pass, they suck too but do it differently) but the underlying problem there is societal. If you reform bail the well moneyed authoritarian jurisdictions are still well moneyed and still authoritarians and will simply spend that money using the system to screw people some other way.

I feel like this is a much smaller issue than the US public defender situation. Or the way crimes carry vast sentences and prosecutors often later them on so that of anything sticks its still decades in prison. Then you either take a plea or face a 400 year jail sentence with a lawyer who has 100 other clients and can't actually remember your name or what you were charged with.

The whole criminal "justice" system in the states looks crazy to me. Bail reform won't really fix that.

> You don't pay, you just deposit money. If you show up to court, you get the money back. If you don't have that money on hand, its common to take out a loan.

If you're rich, yes. In practice, poor people can't round up enough money, so they must rely on a bondsman. So they'll pay something like 10% of the bail, and the bondsman will post the rest of the loan. The bondsman keeps the 10% at the end though.

Often people can't even round up the 10% and have to just stay in jail.