Let’s Set the Record Straight
The Pretrial Justice Institute is distributing a webinar again basically calling for local governments to abolish money bail and instead institute government-run bail programs that are more lenient and apt to let criminals out of jail for free.
Here are some of their arguments:
Uncertainty about release since no in/out decision is made
- 47% of felony defendants who have money bail set are released, 53% stay in jail
- Percent of felony defendants who have money bail set and who are released ranges from 16% to 85%
- Defendants with access to the money can purchase their release, those without cannot
An “out” decision is made – no uncertainty about release.
- Release is not dependent upon the defendant’s access to money.
A letter we posted from Jerry Watson a couple of weeks ago refuted this well. In it he said, “The key plank in the platform of today’s Pretrial Release Agency’s campaign to justify their existence is their attempt to assign the cause of jail overcrowding to how the bail system operates. They claim that adjustments making it easier for persons to be released from pretrial custody would automatically solve overpopulation in the jail. Such an approach is fatally flawed and should not even be considered for very good reasons.
When a person is arrested and the court is making its bail decision, how many people are already in the jail should not even be a consideration. The Pretrial Release champions concoct theories dedicated to the purpose of “striking the proper balance between bail amounts, jail population, and community safety.” One of those three, jail population, doesn’t belong. While a defendant’s bail amount and the court’s concern for community safety are inextricably connected and should certainly drive the court’s decision, jail population should not be a part of that equation.
Considering existing jail population as an incident to the setting of bail in a new case is fraught with legal improprieties. The Eighth Amendment to our United States Constitution simply says that there shall be no excessive bail. When asked exactly what that means, the courts have consistently told us that bail is “excessive” if it is set at an amount higher than that reasonably calculated to ensure the defendant’s return to court as directed.”
Furthermore, jail populations in America have actually been declining. In fact, according to the Department of Justice, the number of individuals in jail has fallen from 785,536 in 2008 to 748,728 in 2010. Nationally, jail populations are at their lowest levels since 2005. The jail capacity rate is ten percentage points lower today than it was in 2006, falling from 96.3 percent to only 86.4 percent.
This is attributable to a number of factors including a falling crime rate and an increased use of private-sector bail. From the Department of Justice we know the use of commercial bail bonds has increased from 25 percent of releases in 1990 to over 40 percent in 2004. More people are contracting with private-sector bail agents to secure their release from jail, and the system does a good job of swiftly and safely releasing defendants from jail prior to their trial. If PJI’s criticism about the unfairness of commercial bail was correct, then jail populations would have increased and not decreased.
For years government bureaucrats have promoted the idea of eliminating bail bondsmen and encouraging the government to make the decision to release criminals on their own recognizance or on a government-issued deposit bonds. The result of this government-run system has been predictable: a large number of criminals failed to appear in court and government officials failed to track them down.
