Alex Tabarrok has a fascinating article in the Wilson Quarterly about the history of bail bondsmen and their role in this privatized segment of the criminal justice system. Let’s start by excerpting some history of the system.
Bail began in medieval England as a progressive measure to help defendants get out of jail while they waited, sometimes for many months, for a roving judge to show up to conduct a trial. If the local sheriff knew the accused, he might release him on the defendant’s promise to return for the hearing. More often, however, the sheriff would release the accused to the custody of a surety, usually a brother or friend, who guaranteed that the defendant would present himself when the time came. So, in the common law, custody of the accused was never relinquished but instead was transferred to the surety—the brother became the keeper—which explains the origin of the strong rights bail bondsmen have to pursue and capture escaped defendants. Initially, the surety’s guarantee to the sheriff was simple: If the accused failed to show, the surety would take his place and be judged as if he were the offender. The English system provided lots of incentives for sureties to make certain that the accused showed up for trial, but not a lot of incentive to be a surety. The risk to sureties was lessened when courts began to accept pledges of cash rather than of one’s person, but the system was not perfected until personal surety was slowly replaced by a commercial surety system in the United States. That system put incentives on both sides of the equation. Bondsmen had an incentive both to bail defendants out of jail and to chase them down should they flee. By the end of the 19th century, commercial sureties were the norm in the United States. (The Philippines is the only other country with a similar system.)
In recent decades, however, some states have begun to restrict or ban the use of private bail bondsmen. Not surprisingly, this hasn’t been good news. The cost to taxpayers rises and the effectiveness of the criminal justice system falls. Here’s another excerpt.
Every state now has some kind of pretrial services program, and four (Illinois, Kentucky, Oregon, and Wisconsin) have outlawed commercial bail altogether. …Today, when a defendant fails to appear, an arrest warrant is issued. But if the defendant was released on his own recognizance or on government bail, very little else happens. In many states and cities, the police are overwhelmed with outstanding arrest warrants. In California, about two million warrants have gone unserved. Many are for minor offenses, but hundreds of thousands are for felonies, including thousands of homicides. In Philadelphia, where commercial bail has been regulated out of existence, The Philadelphia Inquirer recently found that “fugitives jump bail . . . with virtual impunity.” At the end of 2009, the City of Brotherly Love had more than 47,000 unserved arrest warrants. About the only time the city’s bail jumpers are recaptured is when they are arrested for some other crime. …Unserved warrants tend not to pile up in jurisdictions with commercial bondsmen. In those places, the bail bond agent is on the hook for the bond and thus has a strong incentive to bring those who jump bail to justice. My interest in commercial bail and bounty hunting began when economist Eric Helland and I used data on 36,231 felony defendants released between 1988 and 1996 to investigate the differences between the public and private systems of bail and fugitive recovery. Our study, published in TheJournal of Law and Economics in 2004, is the largest and most comprehensive ever written on the bail system. Our research backs up what I found on the street: Bail bondsmen and bounty hunters get their charges to show up for trial, and they recapture them quickly when they do flee. Nationally, the failure-to-appear rate for defendants released on commercial bail is 28 percent lower than the rate for defendants released on their own recognizance, and 18 percent lower than the rate for those released on government bond. Even more important, when a defendant does skip town, the bounty hunters are the ones who pursue justice with the greatest determination and energy. Defendants sought by bounty hunters are a whopping 50 percent less likely to be on the loose after one year than other bail jumpers. In addition to being effective, bail bondsmen and bounty hunters work at no cost to the taxpayers. The public reaps a double benefit, because when a bounty hunter fails to find his man, the bond is forfeit to the government.
[…] even does a good job in some areas that most people assume are reserved for government, such as criminal justice, roads, and airport […]
[…] even does a good job in some areas that most people assume are reserved for government, such as criminal justice, roads, and airport […]
[…] NY Bail Bondmen painstakingly navigate through the archaic; an often capricious New York City bail system in order to bond a criminal defendant entitled to freedom from jail. By the NY Times omitting key facts previously presented, the article is construed by bail bondsmen and other industry experts as an attack against not only George Zouvelos, but the commercial bail industry in New York itself. Experts are construing these types of articles as further attempts to disenfranchise the general public against the valuable social functions and contributions the commercial bail industry provide Taxpayers, poor, working class and the public at large. It is a fact that hundreds of thousand outstanding criminal warrants not served exist in the aggregate from states that restrict or do not allow bail bondsmen to operate. https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2011/01/17/article-on-bail-bondsmen-suggests-new-nickname-for-t… […]
[…] NY Bail Bondmen painstakingly navigate through the archaic; an often capricious New York City bail system in order to bond a criminal defendant entitled to freedom from jail. By the NY Times omitting key facts previously presented, the article is construed by bail bondsmen and other industry experts as an attack against not only George Zouvelos, but the commercial bail industry in New York itself. Experts are construing these types of articles as further attempts to disenfranchise the general public against the valuable social functions and contributions the commercial bail industry provide Taxpayers, poor, working class and the public at large. It is a fact that hundreds of thousand outstanding criminal warrants not served exist in the aggregate from states that restrict or do not allow bail bondsmen to operate. https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2011/01/17/article-on-bail-bondsmen-suggests-new-nickname-for-t… […]
Great article! I’m very happy to see Pro-Bail articles being circulated. The public needs to see and hear more positive info from this industry.
as a
Professional bail agents are a necessity to society. As a U.S citizen, you have the right to bail out while awaiting trial. Not guilty until proven is part of how the Justice system works. Bail agents essentially “baby sit” people awaiting trial. To take that away and just release on OR’s could greatly endanger the public.
[…] second cartoon reminded me of this post about private bail bondsmen because it illustrates the government-must-be-involved mentality that pervades […]
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