Because everyone else is doing it. Or because everyone else is not doing it.

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A look at one of the lame-brained arguments used by opponents of accountable, secured pretrial release.

And, besides, what’s wrong with something that’s uniquely American?

Anyone in the bail bond business knows that there is an increasingly vocal and strident minority who would like to eliminate our profession completely. It doesn’t matter to them how effective we are at guaranteeing the appearance of defendants released pretrial. It doesn’t matter to them that we go out and routinely apprehend dangerous criminals who fail to appear at no cost to the taxpayers. It doesn’t matter to them that we are accountable to the criminal justice system and to the courts. It most certainly doesn’t matter to them that we pay taxes, support families and serve our communities.

None of the relevant facts matter. They are committed to ending what they call “money bail.” (We call it constitutionally protected secured bail.) The more money that these outfits siphon from the public trough, the louder become their cries to eliminate the evils of “money” in the criminal justice system. The irony is not lost on me that these “free” publicly-funded pretrial release advocates solicit “money” donations on their websites and grant applications.

Outfits like PJI burn through copious amounts of hard earned taxpayer “money” to produce bogus “studies” which invariably conclude that accused defendants should be released on unsecured bail bonds. One of their recurring fallacious arguments concerns the role of private commercial bail agents in the United States.

Popular does not always equal rightPopular does not always equal right

They argue that the United States is the only country in the world that has commercial bondsmen. Sometimes their claim is modified to state that only the United States and Singapore have commercial bail. I don’t know if this true or not, but honestly, who cares? The flawed argument is that since other countries don’t have such a system, therefore “money” (ie: secured and accountable) bail here in the United States ought to be eliminated.

 

First of all, when I went to school this was called an argumentum ad populum. My Mom had a much simpler description, “If all of your idiot friends jumped off of a bridge would you, too? To be clear, what they are saying to policy makers and anyone else who will listen to their poppycock is that if most countries don’t have commercial bail, then commercial bail must not have value. To show you just how hypocritical and disingenuous they are, they will often follow this illogical argument – sometimes in the very following paragraph – with the claim that Washington DC and Kentucky have eliminated commercial bail and therefore the other states in the U.S. should as well. So they are left with this absurd position: Eliminate commercial bail because the overwhelming majority of the other countries don’t have it. Eliminate commercial bail even though the overwhelming majority of jurisdictions in the United States use it.

They are wrong on both counts. Of course it’s preposterous to suggest that commercial bail should be eliminated because other countries don’t have it. We have commercial bail because it is effective and serves a critical role in our criminal justice system – not because of its popularity in other countries. Besides the fact that such an argument is illogical, what is wrong with something being uniquely American?

I am proud of my profession as a bail agent. I am also proud to be a citizen of the United States. I could be wrong, but I think that – just like commercial bail – the following are some things that are uniquely American:

  • College Football
  • BBQ
  • Muscle cars
  • Thanksgiving
  • Boy Scouts
  • Apple Pie
  • Blue Jeans

The next time you hear one of these misguided zealots say that only the United States has commercial bail, let them know that it has taken the rest of the world a while to catch up with us on NFL football and Harley Davison motorcycles as well.

 

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Missing Fugitives

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CHAPTER 1

MISSED CHANCES – THE GERALD BOYES CASE

Gerald Boyes Jr. missed two meetings with his parole officer.

It was his second time on parole for robbery in Florida. He’d been sent back to prison before because he kept getting arrested. A warrant was issued.

Little else happened — until detectives were called to his father’s home in rural Kentucky this past April.

His father had been bludgeoned with a hammer in the back yard. His father’s longtime partner lay dead on the floor inside, surrounded by blood.

Detectives tried to reach Boyes to inform him of the deaths. They grew suspicious when he didn’t return their calls, said McCracken County, Kentucky, Sheriff Jon Hayden.

A quick check revealed that Boyes was wanted for a parole violation in Florida. McCracken County Detective Captain Matt Carter and his partner were driving to Florida to try to find Boyes when one of them ran his name through a database that includes the names of people who sell items at pawn shops. Boyes, they said, had just sold his father’s distinctive Harley Davidson wallet — which was missing from the crime scene.

They made a U-turn and began driving north, toward the pawn shop outside Chicago.

“That was huge,” Carter said. “That was one big piece of evidence that tied him to the double homicide and also gave us his whereabouts.”

He said that same database also showed that Boyes had pawned jewelry near Chicago a week or two prior — within days of his violation warrant being issued.

“I don’t really have faith in the system at all. There were some serious missteps there.”

The database, Carter said, is updated frequently. It might have been possible to find the Chicago-areas sale before the killings.

Florida parole officers don’t have access to that database, which is run by a private company. Hayden said he paid about $1,200 for his officers to access it during one year.

Boyes’ supervising officer, who was also responsible for monitoring more than 50 other people, “did not have knowledge the offender was in the Chicago area at the time,” said Alberto Moscoso, spokesman for the Florida Department of Corrections.

Records from the department show that Boyes’ parole officer did a records check to see if Boyes had been arrested again. They show she visited his home and left a voicemail on his cell phone. They show no other efforts to find him until April 16 — when he died in a confrontation with police in Antioch, Illinois.

“I don’t really have faith in the system at all,” said Don Potter, Boyes’ stepbrother. “There were some serious missteps there.”

Police found Boyes in a rental car near a bar in northern Illinois. Officials said police fired on Boyes as he raised a gun to his head and fired a single shot.

Had he survived, Sheriff Hayden said, he “absolutely” would have been charged in the double killing.

CHAPTER 2

IN PENNSYLVANIA, SIMILAR STORIES

There have been similar cases in Western Pennsylvania.

Frederick Harris III, who’s awaiting trial on charges that he dismembered his mother and her husband, eluded arrest on a parole violation warrant for about nine months prior to the 2014 killings.

That same year, Kerrese Lawrence, who was on probation for a drug charge, was arrested for new crimes and bailed out. Officials encountered him multiple times in court and during a police stop but didn’t detain him. Instead, they scheduled violation hearings — one of which he skipped.

That spring, police charged him with killing his pregnant girlfriend. They obtained a warrant after the woman’s death.

It took Allegheny County officials about 82 days on average to catch probation or parole violators under their supervision, according to a Post-Gazette analysis of court data. It was slower than all but five counties in the paper’s analysis.

Statistics show that people who commit crimes often reoffend. About three out of every four people arrested on a felony had prior arrests, according to one study of state court data published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Yet there is little research looking at probation and parole violators and the time it takes agencies to track them.

Studies dating back to at least the 1980s have shown that the swiftness and certainty of punishment are key to reducing new crimes.

University of Wyoming professor Eric Wodahl found in research published in recent years that, if handled correctly, punishments that involve community service or electronic monitoring can be just as effective as jail time.

“Immediacy does matter,” Wodahl said of consequences. “For them to be the most effective, they need to be certain that it’s going to happen.”

Allegheny County Sheriff’s Sgt. Doug Clark logs locations the deputies visit each day, noting where they found fugitives and where they struck out.

The Allegheny County Adult Probation Office does not have anyone dedicated to finding violators. Instead, it relies on the county sheriff’s office to track them down.

But the sheriff’s office also has to track down people wanted on other warrants issued by the courts — such as those issued for people who skipped their trials or dodged hearings for failing to pay child support.

Estimates put the number of outstanding warrants somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000, but Sheriff William P. Mullen said he’s never received a reliable number.

The sheriff’s office has 12 deputies and three supervisors dedicated to finding fugitives. It’s common for them to get pulled to help guard courtrooms when others are on vacation, especially during the summer, when some veteran officers can take three weeks off. The sheriff said shifting some deputies from the fugitive offices to courtrooms reduces overtime.

“We’re really scrambling to stay under budget,” he said.

Police officers can also arrest people on probation violation warrants. All officers have access to a national database that tracks warrants, but Mullen said officers in some local departments fail to run those checks on people they encounter. It’s not unheard of, he said, for deputies to arrest someone on a violation warrant and learn that they had interactions with other officers a few days prior.

The sheriff said he’s pushed for the creation of a county-wide database that would allow his detectives to see more information about stops made by other departments.

But such a system wouldn’t completely solve the problem. Fugitives can leave the county or state.

CHAPTER 3

WHEN FUGITIVES CROSS STATE LINES

Antonio Covington eluded arrest on a Georgia probation violation warrant for five months, despite being arrested in North Carolina where he was known to spend time.

Authorities never found him — until police suspect he killed a man in Charlotte, N.C.

He’s not the only example of someone who left the state and became a repeat offender elsewhere. A man wanted on an Illinois parole violation warrant was charged this spring with shooting a man in Iowa. A Pennsylvania man eluded authorities for three years despite multiple arrests in North Carolina.

Delays sometimes occur when people are sentenced in one county and supervised in another.

These stories highlight the ways in which probationers and parolees avoid detection by leaving the states in which they were convicted — sometimes with little effort to hide their identity.

Covington’s Georgia case dates to July 30, 2013, when someone called 911 to report that a man was driving erratically. A police officer stopped the car and found multiple drugs and guns, which Covington was prohibited from owning.

Covington later pleaded guilty to gun and drug violations, and a Gwinnett County judge ordered him to spend time at a drug treatment facility and then participate in an aftercare treatment program as a condition of probation.

Covington got kicked out of the aftercare program July 7, 2015 “due to non-attendance.” A probation officer obtained a warrant a month and a half later.

Delays sometimes occur when people are sentenced in one county and supervised in another. Covington’s latest address was in Fulton County, about a half hour away. Violation paperwork for someone supervised in Gwinnett County would have to be completed by a Gwinnett County officer, according to Georgia officials.

In the interim, Covington was arrested in North Carolina for illegally possessing a prescription drug and posted bail in the case. The Georgia probation violation warrant makes no mention of North Carolina or his new arrest.

Bert Flewellen, a spokesman for the Georgia Department of Community Supervision, said he was not permitted to discuss individual cases under state law.

He said probation officers do have the resources to conduct records checks on the people under their supervision and do so “at random, for-cause, and at designated milestones during supervision.”

Probation officers can file additional paperwork in court if they learn of new arrests after a violation warrant has been issued. That paperwork was not filed in Covington’s case.

Covington appeared again March 31 of this year, when police say surveillance cameras spotted him and another man dumping 19-year-old Ernest Cash Jr. at a Charlotte, North Carolina, hospital. Cash, who had been shot, died the next day.

Police later charged Covington and another man with killing Cash.

CHAPTER 4

HOW TO CATCH A FUGITIVE

The probation department in Hennepin County, Minn., one of the top-performing jurisdictions, is run by a former law enforcement officer.

“What keeps me up at night is whether or not [violators] are out committing a crime, so this is a very high priority for our department,” said Chester Cooper, who worked for years in the local sheriff’s office before he joined the Department of Community Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Cooper and his predecessor created a position that exists in few others departments: They have one officer whose sole job is to work with other local agencies to track violators.

Probation Officer Beth Heidmann, who works in Hennepin County, Minn., spends her days collecting background information on probation and parole violators and coordinating their arrests with local agencies. (Courtney Perry for the Post-Gazette)

Officer Beth Heidmann works out of the local sheriff’s office. Each day, she gathers a list of fugitives and digs through their case files, social media accounts and other sources to find leads on their whereabouts. She passes the information along to other officers who will do the actual arrests.

She has access to dozens of members of the sheriff’s office, members of a federal fugitive task force and anyone she can contact at other departments.

Here, it takes officials an average of 43 days to arrest someone on a county probation violation warrant.

“I’m concerned about the 43, so we need to work on that,” said Cooper, the director, after he learned the results of the Post-Gazette analysis.

Before Heidmann’s position existed, the office relied on two officers with few resources to catch the fugitives. Cooper and his predecessor abandoned that system out of concerns for the officers’ safety.

That system rejected in Minnesota is similar to one that is currently being used in Pima County, Ariz., where officials take more than twice as long to capture fugitives on average.

Ken McCulloch, director of field services for Pima County Adult Probation, said he didn’t think it was fair to compare his department to many others in the country. Pima County officers can arrest people without a warrant and often issue warrants when they don’t know the whereabouts of someone they’re supervising, he said. Hennepin County officials said they like to reserve warrants only for people whose whereabouts are unknown or who are especially dangerous.

“What keeps me up at night is whether or not [violators] are out committing a crime.”

Among the people tasked with finding fugitives in Pima County is Officer Mark Echavarry. He’s part of a two-person team that works to arrest people who are being supervised for domestic violence cases. Their positions are grant-funded and their resources are limited.

Echavarry and his partner work alone in an old, rusted sedan that was seized as part of a prior investigation. They don’t have lights and sirens. They don’t have bars in the back of the car, so if anyone fights arrest they have to call local police to take them to jail.

He spends some of his time tracking down violators, but also has to juggle meetings and compliance checks. They also have to do background work before heading out on cases.

On one day in May, he only had time to make one stop, where he caught a probation violator. But he had at least four new warrants waiting for him when he returned to the office.

Echavarry says he’s asked for more resources in the past but hasn’t received them.

“It’s a sticking point with us,” he said.

CHAPTER 5

FAILURE TO ISSUE WARRANTS QUICKLY

While research shows rapid consequences can help prevent probationers or parolees from committing new crimes, officers will at times hold off on filing warrants. They hope the people they are supervising will start following the rules again and avoid jail.

But that doesn’t always work.

Francisco Fernandez, 23, missed a drug test in November, officials said, and met in person with his probation officer the following month. Fernandez, who was on probation for a drug case, then missed four more drug tests and moved without the permission of his probation officer, according to court records.

“Jumping on that warrant immediately, for a relatively low-level offender, may not get the benefit.”

He later told a police officer “he hasn’t reported because he wanted to get his [medical] marijuana card first,” according to a police report.

The Pima County Adult Probation Department’s policy gives officers 90 days to try to locate many probationers after their last face-to-face contact with them. For people who have been deemed especially likely to reoffend, the window is tighter — three days.

“Jumping on that warrant immediately, for a relatively low-level offender, may not get the benefit,” McCulloch said, noting that some people might need time to get sober or do other things for their well-being.

One hundred seventeen days passed before an officer filed a request to revoke Fernandez’s probation.

During that time, the officer visited addresses for Ferndandez, left a voicemail for him and sent him a certified letter.

A week after the request, on April 12, the court issued the warrant. Warrants like the one issued to Fernandez normally go to the department’s absconder team. Fernandez’s officer decided to hold onto the warrant because he “was hearing things that the probationer was in the vicinity and might turn up,” McCulloch said. “Looking at the case notes, I don’t see any [indications] that he was checking other residences or physically following up.”

Police found Fernandez April 27, when they responded to a call that a 7-year-old boy had been shot at an apartment building. The boy, the nephew of Fernandez’s girlfriend, survived.

Fernandez gave differing accounts of the shooting during an interview with police. During the last one, he said, “I think the gun was loaded and I accidentally pulled it,” according to a police report.

McCulloch said he was comfortable with the way his officer handled the Fernandez case.

“He was kind of doing a wait and see thing.”

Bail Reform: The True Cost of FREE

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The Pretrial Justice Institute Finally Admits that Public Sector FREE Pretrial Release and Supervision are Too Costly…Their Solution, FREE Release with No Supervision.

In my many years of defending the commercial bail industry from public sector advocates, I have seen it all. I have seen these advocates lie about their programs’ effectiveness, draw sketchy conclusions from statistically irrelevant research (that of course they conducted themselves) and perpetuate false narratives to misinform the public about the so called “evils” of the commercial bail industry, or as they refer to it, “money bail.” Even with all that, I would be lying if I said I wasn’t shocked and confused when I read the most recent article published by the Pretrial Justice Institute’s guest blogger, Charlotte McPherson. In this July 19th blog entitled “Pretrial Supervision, Like Detention, Should Be Carefully Limited.” Ms. McPherson made the following comment:

“Jailing people accused of crimes can be a costly endeavor, but so can releasing them and placing them on supervision. For example, drug testing and electronic monitoring are not cheap, nor is the pretrial officer’s time that is required to monitor compliance for these and other pieces of supervision. With tightening budgets for pretrial programs, defendants are increasingly required to cover the cost of their own drug testing, electronic monitoring, and other forms of supervision that may accompany release. In some cases, the cost of money bail would have been cheaper for the defendant than the cost of their supervision in the long term.”

Now think about this for a moment. Ms. McPherson is saying that the cost of releasing defendants through a public sector pretrial program is too high and supervising them is proving to be too difficult. If I am not mistaken, isn’t that what the commercial bail industry has been saying about public sector pretrial release for decades…that it doesn’t save money. Not only have we been saying it, we have shared third party research study after research study that shows that public sector programs do not save counties money, but rather cost them potentially millions.

“bail reformJust look at New Jersey. The argument made by those that support public sector pretrial was that their programs are capable of supervising defendants just as effectively as commercial bail and saving the county money because the person is no longer taking up jail space. Unfortunately, every study done has shown both of these statements to be wrong. Pretrial programs are not effective in supervising defendants. Studies show that defendants fail to appear for court much more often when supervised by a public sector pretrial program. Also, pretrial programs do not save money, but instead create a costly new layer of bureaucracy in an already cash strapped criminal justice system. In the New Jersey pretrial discussions, a Towson State Professor of Economics, testified that a pretrial program in New Jersey could cost the state upwards of $500 million a year. Regardless of this insightful research and expert opinion, New Jersey moved forward anyway and passed legislation to create pretrial programs across the state.

The unfortunate result is that New Jersey now needs to come up with more money (as predicted) to fund these so called “money saving programs.” And just for the record, and because I like to point out the obvious, commercial bail just continues to play its important role in the criminal justice system costing the people of New Jersey $0 and effectively supervising defendants and getting them to court.

The other aspect of this quote from Ms. McPherson that is shocking to me is the idea that she seems to think that supervision of defendants who are released via pretrial needs to be minimized. Are you serious? Letting defendants out for free and supervising them with taxpayer funded pretrial programs is one thing, but letting defendants out for free and not supervising them at all is both myopic and dangerous. If public sector pretrial programs are less effective than commercial bail when they actually try and supervise defendants, than how in the world are they going to be more effective when you don’t supervise them at all?

Public sector pretrial advocates are so driven to eliminate commercial bail that they are willing to let as many people out of jail as quickly and as irresponsibly as possible so that they can ensure their existence. Unfortunately in the process they undermine the validity of the criminal justice system in the process and put the public in danger for the purposes of achieving their own agenda.

It seems to me that those that support public sector pretrial programs don’t understand the purpose of pretrial release in the first place. It is not about release. It has never been about release. Yes a person is released from jail as part of the process, but the only reason you release them is based on a promise and a guarantee that they will appear at ALL court appearances. They best way to ensure that appearance is by financially tying that defendant and their loved ones to that release, and supervising them while they are out. You remove either of those elements and you will have a less effective mechanism for ensuring appearance. We have been saying this for decades and the research has proven this for decades.

The private sector/public sector pretrial debate has been going on for over 50 years and I don’t expect it to end any time soon. I do give the Pretrial Justice Institute credit though for coming out and admitting that “FREE” supervision is costly and ineffective. But even with that admission, which I don’t think they even fully understand the ramifications of, I do not expect them to change their goals or mission anytime soon.

What I do expect with certainty is that the public sector pretrial community will continue to shift and change their approach and narrative to attack the commercial bail industry. It is like throwing spaghetti on a wall and seeing what sticks. Unfortunately for the public sector pretrial community, their ideas are undercooked and not ready to serve to the public for free, despite their claims otherwise. They throw FREE release and supervision against the wall and now they find out it is too expensive. They throw risk assessments against the wall and now they find out that they are racially biased. They throw electronic monitoring against the wall and now they find out that it might be violating a defendant’s civil rights. And of course, the latest string of spaghetti they are throwing against the wall is the constitutionality of bail. In fact, they haven’t just thrown one strand of spaghetti but have thrown a whole handful of strands across the country. The question of whether they stick or not is still out there, but if history tells us something, the primary goal of these public sector pretrial advocates isn’t public safety or improving the effectiveness of the system. It is to completely eliminate the private sector commercial bail industry at any cost. They attack us like they have some personal vendetta against our industry, and care less about how effective we are at doing it. It really goes beyond common sense.

Meanwhile, in the face of all this craziness, the commercial bail industry will continue to do what it does. And that is ensuring that the criminal justice system has a chance to work; ensuring that defendants show up for court; and ensuring that victims get a chance at justice. After all, isn’t that what the pretrial release concept is all about in the first place?

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Seven Questions about Bail, the Bail Business, and being a Bondsman

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What do you think is the biggest misunderstanding people have about bail?

I think people would be surprised by how grateful the family members and the accused are for the services which we provide. Most bail agents have a desk drawer full of thank you cards and letters. Getting arrested is often a wake-up call that forces the defendant and his family to admit that there is a problem which they can no longer deny. As bail agents we often have a front row seat and even get to play a small part in watching people transform their lives for the better.

We get "Thank You" cards.

We work very closely with family members of the accused and other members of their community circle in order to assure that we can guarantee their appearance in court. This includes working with the parties to establish affordable payments for the bond.

People are also surprised to learn that the bail agent — who owns and operates a small business in the community he or she serves — is almost always personally financially accountable for the defendant’s appearance. There is a common misconception that there is some big insurance company that will pay for failures to appear or that the bail agent can cut some sort of a deal. The reality is that the bail agent personally guarantees the defendant’s appearance in court. If the defendant fails to appear the bail agent locates and apprehends the fugitive. Failing that, the bail agent pays a substantial penalty to the State. That’s why private, secured bail works so well.

What are some of the biggest challenges facing the bail bond business?

Our biggest challenge lies in continuing to educate politicians and policy makers about what we actually do and the vital role we play in the criminal justice system. Private bail enables communities to protect themselves and secure a defendant’s appearance for trial while allowing the accused to avoid pretrial detention. The secured bail which is posted by the independent licensed agents in jurisdictions across the United States is the single most effective and efficient way to achieve those goals. We do this at no cost to the taxpayers.

Many politicians and policy makers are unaware that defendants bailed by a commercial surety are far more likely to appear in court and far less likely, if they fail to appear, to remain at large for extended periods of time. Too often we find ourselves competing against publicly-funded government pretrial release programs that advocate the wholesale release of accused criminals with no real accountability.  Accused criminals have a constitutional right to bail. The question is who should pay for that bail? The friends and family of the accused, or the taxpayers?

What do you think about the efforts of Equal Justice Under the Law and their lawsuits seeking to end “money bail”?

Not much. It’s possible they have good intentions but they are naïve, very entitled and very miss-informed young men who have no real understanding of our criminal justice system or the purpose of bail. They are using these lawsuits and the threat of lawsuits to bully and extort small municipalities. They hold press conferences touting their goal of “ending the American money bail system.” But what they are really seeking is the immediate release of any defendant who simply says that he cannot afford the required bail. They believe that “caging” people is inherently wrong. Well, there is a reason we have jails.

This outfit claims that defendants are jailed because they are poor. The truth is that defendants are jailed because there is probable cause to believe that they committed a crime. The community has a strong vested interest in securing their appearance at trial. These lawsuits seek to force communities to immediately release accused criminals based solely on their unsubstantiated claim that they can’t secure their bond. This is absurd, and dangerous.

What do you think of current efforts to change the role of money in bail? What do you say to critics who contend using money in bail is unfair to poor people?

Money incentivizes people. People work for it and value it. A key reason why secured bail works so well is because people don’t want to lose their own money. The family of the defendant doesn’t want to lose money. The defendant doesn’t want to lose money and the bail agent certainly doesn’t want to lose money. Why do we require “money deposits” when we rent an apartment? By using a private licensed bail agent, friends and family of the accused pay only a small fraction of the bail amount (in most jurisdictions 10%, and strictly regulated by the State). The bail agent then pledges the entire penal amount of the bail bond to the court.

Affluent people don’t always need to use a bail agent to secure their bonds. They post their own assets and the fear of losing those assets (usually money) secures their appearance for trial. They are hardly “buying their way out” of jail. Rather, they secure their appearance by providing the court with tangible collateral security for their bail bond.

Bail agents permit bail for only a fraction of what the court requires and typically offer affordable installment plans to facilitate payment. Bail agents don’t discriminate against the poor. Rather, we routinely enable those of lesser means to secure their pretrial release by working with their family members, friends and social network. Ironically, the same voices that cry for an end to “money bail” frequently advocate GPS monitoring, drug testing and other cumbersome and very expensive measures that have little or nothing to do with securing the appearance of the accused at trial.

Most bail agents agree that there ought to be a mechanism to secure the pretrial release of truly indigent non-violent first time offenders with strong community ties. This was the original incentive for bail reform.  Today, most of the larger taxpayer-funded government pretrial release programs no longer even screen for indigence. The EJUL lawsuits seek the immediate release of accused criminals based upon their own unsubstantiated claim that they cannot secure their bond.

Detractors of private secured and accountable bail claim that the poor languish in jail solely due to their inability to secure bail. Almost always this proves to be untrue. The majority of pretrial jail inmates with low bonds almost invariably have other holds such as immigration and previous warrants for failure to appear or probation violations, etc. It’s an unfortunate myth that bail discriminates against the poor.

What’s the only thing worse than the telephone ringing at all hours of the night and day?

The telephone not ringing at all hours of the night and day.

How would the criminal justice system function without financially secured bail?

Not very well. Look no further than Washington D.C. and Kentucky for answers to that question. Those jurisdictions spend enormous sums of taxpayer money with very little to show for it. The only thing that matters in a pretrial release decision is whether the accused defendant will appear and whether there is an acceptable risk to public safety in releasing the defendant. The larger publicly-funded release programs like those in Kentucky and Washington D.C. fail on both counts. They do a lousy job of ensuring appearance and almost nothing to assure public safety. They claim they “supervise” through the use of drug testing, GPS bracelets and the like but how well can you claim to monitor behavior when you can’t even guarantee appearance?

As an example, Washington D.C.’s pretrial release program recently placed a GPS tracker on an accused murderer’s fake leg to assure his house arrest. The defendant promptly swapped prosthetic limbs and left his house to go murder someone. Right up until the police obtained a search warrant and found the fake leg with the GPS tracker still attached, the pretrial release employees maintained that the defendant whom they were “monitoring” was still confined to his apartment. In Kentucky, accused defendants are regularly released even with a history of many prior failures to appear.

In short, most of these publicly-funded pretrial release programs fail in assuring appearance and do nothing to protect public safety. They are great successes, however, at spending tax dollars.

Their latest panacea is “risk assessment.” They claim that by utilizing often-times secret algorithms that they can accurately predict who will commit future crimes and who will appear in court. These so-called “risk-based decision tools” are a cynical attempt to evade any accountability. People like judges are no longer responsible or accountable for release decisions; it becomes simply a matter of risk data analytics. What you end up with is a system that releases dangerous felons with prior failures to appear because they score out correctly. Non violent defendants with strong community ties remain locked up because of “brave new world” risk assessment scores that predict the likelihood of future crimes.

Any advice for new bail bondsman?

 Bail bonding is real risk assessment. We are in the business of risk and the stakes are high. Listen. Listen carefully. Practice listening. Listen to what they are saying and listen carefully to what they are not saying.

Get political. Be active in your community. If you don’t have a terrific work ethic, consider finding another line of work. Learn everything that you can about everything that you can. Join and participate in your local, state and national bail associations. It’s not the bonds you write that will ensure your success; it’s the bonds you don’t write.  Don’t lie to yourself. Keep your word.

Watch out for identical twins.

This week’s hare-brained alternative to Real Accountability

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Just ask the fugitives to pretty please come to court.

The preface: What we do is simple. We secure the pretrial release of accused defendants by entering into a written agreement with the State. This agreement (called a bail bond) guarantees the State that we will have the accused defendant in court each and every time as required in order for their criminal case to be adjudicated. If the defendant fails to appear and becomes a fugitive, we go out and locate, apprehend and surrender him or her back to the jurisdiction of the court. If we fail in this obligation, we pay a substantial cash penalty to the State, usually an amount equal to 1,000% of what we grossed for writing the bond. We are excellent at what we do, since bondsman who fail in their obligations quickly go out of business. In summary:

  • We secure their release from jail and pledge real money to the State to secure their appearance.
  • When a defendant fails to appear we locate, apprehend, and surrender them to jail.
  • In the rare cases where we are unable to arrest and return the fugitive, we pay a substantial cash penalty to the State.

We do this quietly and efficiently and at no cost to the taxpayers. We don’t bill the State for all the days that our defendants are not taking up jail space, nor do we bill taxpayers for routinely arresting and returning our bail skips. We play a vital role in the criminal justice system.

When you remove real accountability from pretrial release decisions, the results are predictable.

For example, in Philadelphia, where the courts routinely utilize government-run bail schemes instead of financially secured pretrial releases, defendants fail to appear in great numbers and no one is held accountable.

In December of 2009 The Inquirer reported that Philadelphia’s court system was in complete disarray. In an outstanding special report titled Justice: Delayed, Dismissed, Denied, they reported that some 47,000 wanted fugitives were on the street:

“The court’s bail system is broken. Defendants skip court with impunity, further traumatizing victims who show up for hearings that never take place.

There are almost 47,000 Philadelphia fugitives on the streets. Philadelphia is tied with Essex County, N.J. – home of Newark – for the nation’s highest fugitive rate. To catch them, the city court system employs just 51 officers – a caseload of more than 900 fugitives per officer.

In a sign of the system’s disarray, court officials had trouble answering when The Inquirer asked how much fugitives owed taxpayers in forfeited bail. At first, they said the debt was $2 million. Then they pegged it at $382 million. Finally, they declared it was a staggering $1 billion.”

The solution to having so many fugitives would seem obvious. Hire additional officers to go locate and arrest these criminals. And stop releasing defendants on unsecured fantasy bail bonds where no one is held accountable for their appearance in court. Instead, Philadelphia officials had a better idea. They simply erased 19,400 warrants from the system. Seriously. From the Inquirer:

“But in a sweeping move to lower Philadelphia’s staggering tally of 47,000 fugitives, top court officials have quietly dropped criminal charges against Sanchez and more than 19,000 other defendants who skipped court.

At the urging of Pennsylvania Chief Justice Ronald D. Castille and District Attorney Seth Williams, Philadelphia judges closed criminal cases and canceled fugitive bench warrants for thousands of accused drug dealers, drunken drivers, thieves, prostitutes, sex offenders, burglars, and other suspects.

“They were clogging up the system,” said Castille, a former Philadelphia district attorney. “You’re never going to find these people. And if you do, are you going to prosecute them? The answer is no.”

Of course the Inquirer was able to find some of these fugitives.

“I’m ecstatic,” said Reginald Newkirk, who had been facing two drunken-driving charges. Reached at his current home in Watha, N.C., Newkirk was told that the charges had been withdrawn. “I’m glad to hear that.”

In Newkirk’s 1991 arrests, police determined that his blood-alcohol levels were 0.273 and 0.277 – almost three times the legal threshold for intoxication at the time. Asked whether he had been drunk at the time, Newkirk, now 61, replied, “More or less.”

Another fugitive, Alfred Carter, who fled in 1989 before he was sentenced for a strong-arm robbery, is now living in Washington.

His conviction was set aside in an attack in which he admitted he left his victim dazed, weeping, and bleeding on a sidewalk in West Philadelphia.

“That’s good,” said Carter, 60. “I’m glad it’s dropped.”

And what about the nearly $1 billion owed by bail jumpers and their families who signed? Like the warrants, Philadelphia officials just pushed a button and made the problem disappear.

“In a single act, nearly $1 billion in debt owed to Philadelphia by onetime fugitives has disappeared.

Philadelphia’s court system, at the request of the city, wiped off the books longtime debt owed by tens of thousands of criminal defendants who failed to appear for their court dates.”

The order follows extensive reforms that came after The Inquirer published a series of articles in 2010 that shed light on widespread systemic problems in the city courts, including an ineffective bail system that for decades imposed no consequences for skipping court.

Criminal defendants are required to post 10 percent of bail in cash to earn release. Before recent court reforms, many routinely fled – on paper forfeiting the remaining 90 percent owed – but in practice little was done to catch them or collect the debt.”

In summary, Philadelphia has tens of thousands of fugitives because they are released from jail on unsecured bonds with no financial incentive to appear in court and no real accountability. Their solution to this horrendous problem was to purge the warrants and pretend that it never happened. Score one for the criminals; the accused defendants who actually went to court were saps. The same environment created $1 billion in uncollected (and unsecured) bail forfeitures. Philadelphia officials had a similar solution. They pushed a button and made the $1 billion in fantasy bail forfeitures disappear. Score another win for the criminals.

In Florida, where I live and write bail for a living, I have 60-days in which to timely satisfy a bail forfeiture, either by producing the fugitive defendant or by paying the forfeited bail amount. If I fail to do, I am prohibited from writing additional bail. I am literally put out-of-business for failing my obligation to the State. In addition, a civil judgment is entered against me and against the insurance company that backs my bail. If the insurance company fails to pay the judgment timely, they are prohibited from writing any bail. This is called accountability.

You would think that Philadelphia — in the light of the consequences of their experience with unsecured bail with no real accountability — would be open to instituting a pretrial release system with secured, financially accountable bail. You would be wrong.

Which brings us to our whack-job of the week. Cherise Fanno Burdeen. Cherise Fanno Burdeen is the Executive Director of an outfit called “Pretrial Justice Institute”. Ms. Burdeen is a staunch detractor of “money” bail. (Her position on “money” grocery stores and “money” police officers is unknown at this time.)

Cherise Fanno Burdeen, Just say "pretty please!"Cherise Fanno Burdeen,
Just say “pretty please!”

Cherise Fanno Burdeen has a better idea than secured pretrial releases and real accountability. She thinks we are missing the point if we have the nerve to actually jail criminals who fail to appear for court. Here is what she told the Inquirer:

 

“The vast majority of people who fail to appear in court are not . . . trying to evade justice. For the most part, these are people who the courts don’t provide robust reminder systems, much like you or I get for haircuts or doctor’s appointments. The courts didn’t provide practices that doctors’ offices and salons learned a long time ago can nearly eradicate failure to appear.”

So if you are a bondsman who can’t celebrate Memorial Day Weekend with your family because you are busy chasing down a wanted fugitive, keep in mind that it’s your own fault. According to this dingbat Cherise Fanno Burdeen, you should have sent your client a friendly reminder and simply asked him respectfully and politely to “pretty please” go to his court date.

Amazingly , according to the Inquirer, Philadelphia now intends to actually use this mild-mannered lame-brained and naïve approach.

When the number of open felony warrants sky rockets once again, city officials will know exactly what to do.

 

Via - http://bailbondsman.com/this-weeks-hare-brained-alternative-to-real-accountability/