21 ms·

Bail reform could give justice to poor, minorities

115 points by cubano 8y ago

mathieuh 8y ago
Yeah, I'm sorry, but as a citizen of the UK, the US system of bail and bail bounty hunters is just nuts. A child could see that it is incredibly regressive (in the economic sense of the word).
- gambiting 8y ago
  Same as the plea bargain system - it's completely obvious that US has loads of completely innocent people pleading guilty just to get out of jail, if the alternative is waiting a year or longer for the trial. It's insane.
  - crankylinuxuser 8y ago
    Which is insane. We acknowledge that someone making a statement when they are kidnapped is under extreme duress. Yet when the state does it, somehow the "confessions" aren't under duress and are legally binding? Hardly. Edit: Currently at -1. For those who -1'ed me, I'd like to hear your arguments why state imprisonment prior to a guilty verdict isn't extreme duress, or a violation of "nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"
    - amarkov 8y ago
      When you've been kidnapped, you have good reasons to think that the kidnapper might just kill you if you don't go along with what they want. I've heard a lot of abusive police interrogation practices in the US, and none of them go so far to make you worry you'll be taken out back and shot. You're drawing an equivalence that just isn't there, and I think you know that.
      - gambiting 8y ago
        I do remember reading articles saying that prosecutors frequently say to detainees who have already spent 3-6 months in jail "look, you can plead guilty to this minor crime, and with the time served you can go home to your family tomorrow. Or you can wait for trial, which can happen maybe in next 12 months, if the judge isn't sick on that day and doesn't reschedule for another 3 months later. So what will it be? Do you want to go home tomorrow, or stay locked up for a year before even going to trial?" Like, I don't think I'd care how innocent I was - I'd want to get out asap. If your options are presented as "get out now" or "stay locked up for an indefinite amount of time, with no hope for compensation for the time lost even if you win" then it's an easy choice.
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - shawabawa3 8y ago
        It's absolutely not a false equivalence. For starters, many people do die in police custody without being convicted But "kidnapping" does not require a threat of death to have a real impact on your life. If your choice is to "confess" to a minor crime with time served, or lose your job/home/etc due to being locked up without trial, it's a no brainer for many people to falsely "confess", and it's absolutely under duress
  - noer 8y ago
    The Plea Bargain system is really a result of the problems with the money bail system. There's less incentive plead guilty if you're not in jail.
- nkw 8y ago
  > Yeah, I'm sorry, but as a citizen of the UK, the US system of bail and bail bounty hunters is just nuts. Which is somewhat ironic since the foundation of our bail system originates from UK common law and the limitations on it (e.g. the 8th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution) originate from limitations put into place after abuses of bail in the UK legal system. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excessive_Bail_Clause#Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excessive_Bail_Clause#Origins
revscat 8y ago
It's not broken if your overarching goals are to decrease the political power of the poor and middle classes through increased financial instability and/or incarceration.
crankylinuxuser 8y ago
This is only one part of a system that the rich have their rules, and the rest have "their rules". It also goes along with the idea: pay for a bigshot attorney, get out of murder charge. Be poor accused, get public defender and a guilty charge. In Indiana, you can even expunge felonies up to a certain criminal threshold. Do you know what the primary criteria is? You have to PAY for them to expunge. The USA has always been pay-for-play. Now, its being called out for what it is. This country, the legal system, elections; you name it. The more money you have, the more influence you have, and the "better" the system is for you. How do we fix this? The simple answer is to elect people who have more liberal mindsets that try to get rid of these poor=disenfranchised laws. That's a long term, and not even guaranteed to work. What do we have short term? I have no clue.
- rectang 8y ago
  The ideology underpinning such unequal treatment ferments in places like HN. How often do we see the argument around here that unlimited inequality is fine so long as everyone improves in absolute terms? That argument is bogus because political power closely tracks wealth -- and thus unlimited inequality facilitates a society where we are not equal under the law.
  - IanDrake 8y ago
    For the sake of argument, can you name a current law that treats people unequally by some immutable quality of the individual?
    - rectang 8y ago
      "Immutable", eh? That would exclude wealth. But disparities of wealth are a fountainhead of unequal treatment under US bail laws.
      - IanDrake 8y ago
        I wouldn’t consider wealth to be immutable, but I think your example is clear, so let’s roll it forward. So you would rather see bail set at a percentage of net worth? That would make things equal?
adtechperson 8y ago
This is not a new problem. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in "Democracy in America" in 1835: "It is evident that such a legislation is hostile to the poor and favorable only to the rich. The poor man has not always security to produce, even in a civil case; and if he is obliged to wait for justice in prison, he is speedily reduced to distress. A wealthy person, on the contrary, always escapes imprisonment in civil cases; nay, more, if he has committed a crime, he may readily elude punishment by breaking his bail. Thus all the penalties of the law are, for him, reduced to fines. Nothing can be more aristocratic than this system of legislation. Yet in America it is the poor who make the law, and they usually reserve the greatest advantages of society to themselves. The explanation of the phenomenon is to be found in England; the laws of which I speak are English, and the Americans have retained them, although repugnant to the general tenor of their legislation and the mass of their ideas."
- tialaramex 8y ago
  I don't know if it was true in 1835 that "The laws of which I speak are English" but today the situation is utterly different in the two countries. The UK has no concept of "cash bail", either you may go free, or you are a danger or flight risk and so you're held in jail by the state on its dime to avoid that. The court can set fairly broad rules for bail, it just doesn't [this used to say "can't" but see the example below which proves that they actually can] ask for cash, e.g. "You must give us your passports and other travel documents so that you can't fly" or "You mustn't go near Jimmy who says you assaulted him" or even "You must go see the police once per week between now and your court date". If you break any of the rules, then you may stop qualifying for bail and get sent to prison until trial.
  - multjoy 8y ago
    Actually, that's not true. The courts (in E&W, at any case) can ask for a security (so cash or other assets) or a person to stand as a surety. They rarely do so, but the highest profile one in recent times was when Julian Assange slipped off to that ground floor flat in Knightsbridge and cost his supporters the thick end of £100k https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/JCO/Documents/Judgments/sureties-julian-assange-08102012.pdf https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/JCO/Documents/Ju...
tharwat 8y ago
Mainprise is a startup building a peer-to-peer bail payment platform on NEM Blockchain. The BAIL Token platform will enable family and friends to request low fee bail payments. Instead of throwing money away on bail bondsmen. Families apply for bail on the platform. After verifying their identity, they provide details on the accused such as name, bail amount, arrest charge, jail location, and booking number. The details along with details sourced from public data are fed into an AI-based risk scoring tool to generate a risk score. The tool will use data from millions of cases to help determine if the accused is likely to skip trial or commit another crime if released. Based on the score a fee of 0-3% is paid by the applicant. Once the accused is released, we monitor the court calendars and notify them of court dates and changes. After attending court and regardless of the verdict, guilty or innocent. The bail payment is refunded by the court and returned to the token holders along with a share of the fee collected. http://mainprise.io http://mainprise.io YouTube videos: http://youtube.com/c/mainpriseio http://youtube.com/c/mainpriseio
- jgtrosh 8y ago
  > along with a share of the fee I don't understand this bit: if it's a fee, why return any of it? Is the returned part of the fee to cover extra cost in cases where they don't go to court? Otherwise that extra part is not a fee, just extra bail.
  - tharwat 8y ago
    When bail is paid in full it's returned by the courts when the person attends trial (regardless of the trial outcome). What this platform does is get many people "token holders to make small contributions to paying someone's bail. When they attend court the payment is returned back to the token holders.
    - jgtrosh 8y ago
      That I understood; I am talking specifically about the fee described previously. That is clearly to cover costs for the service and I don't see why that would be returned even partially to the holders.
nimbius 8y ago
speaking from experience (I have been incarcerated in the past) the bail system is a complete joke. If you get the public defender, you'll likely see about a 6 minute pretrial to set your bail if you get one. its factory-like in its efficiency, and you're lined up with 20 other inmates that were just loaded off a bus from the local jail. The judge is half-asleep, likely overworked, or just too jaded to care anymore. assuming you havent killed anyone, you'll get around a 50k bail. mine was just shy of $34,000 USD. If you dont have the cash for bail, you can attempt to secure a bail bond at 10% of the face amount. youll do this through family members sometimes, but youll use the jail phone. Using the jail phone is about nine dollars per phone call as its managed by a private phone company. your access to this phone is often once per week, because jails are massively overcrowded and youre scheduled a 5 minute phone call. After sleeping on a yoga mat in a group cell for about 2 weeks, you'll finally make bail. This often comes with a processing fee from the county or city. depending on your city, you'll also be issued a bill or invoice for your stay in jail. If you were assaulted or sent to medical, your bill will include any treatment. some jails can use this to refuse your bail paperwork...so no matter what you got for a bail bond, its now useless. and behavior? Anything at all can be used to refuse bail processing. Once I'd made restitution and been released from prison, the bond fee had been paid, and I was a free man. Or so you'd think. Most bail bond agencies have their own team of bounty hunters and they dont maintain accurate paperwork for many orders. Due to a misfiling, I was labeled as a skip-jump. Before even checking with the state for a warrant, their 'team' had tackled me in a taco bell parking lot at 8 am on my way to work. I spent nearly an hour in the back of a police cruiser until I was released. I was not given the option to press charges.
- metalliqaz 8y ago
  This was god damn depressing
- pwned1 8y ago
  Wow. If you don't mind asking, what were you in prison for?
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
mchanson 8y ago
Bail isn't needed. Most people show up to court. You can go track down folks who don't if the crime is worth it. You can pay for those people through taxes. Currently Cash bail, and pretrial incarceration is used as a punishment and serves no other purpose.
DannyB2 8y ago
Bail is NOT broken. Working as intended. Will not fix. It's profitable. It works against the poor. It works in favor of the rich. The only way the world could be a better place would be to bring back "for profit" prisons. Vacant cells mean lower profit, decreased shareholder value and lower executive bonuses. Thus increasing incentive to incarcerate more people. A working bail system would work against that profitability -- except for incarcerating poor people. I think I'm going to be sick now.
- selimthegrim 8y ago
  Louisiana would like a quiet word with you to explore some investment opportunities. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpB_IGfgF6s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpB_IGfgF6s In the linked video Prof. Aiello of Valdosta State explains that in some ways the convict labor system was worse than slavery. In the strict economic sense a slaveowner had an incentive to treat the enslaved person in such a way that he would survive and produce many years of labor. People leasing convicts have no such concern. The people they have been leased may only be sentenced to 6 months, a year, 3 years, etc. So they may be more willing to work those people to death. Angola, the Louisiana state prison, was originally privately owned by a guy with a convict leasing contract.
zomg 8y ago
meanwhile, in massachusetts where bail can't be used as an economic means to keep people locked up, criminals are being freed and continue to do what they do best. just this month: officer chesna and vera adams in weymouth, ma -- gunned down with his own service weapon by a savage whose bail was reduced ($5k to $500). this asshole then murdered an elderly woman on her own porch who witnessed the murder. marine combat veteran kevin quinn -- killed in a head on crash by another low-life who was freed because his bail was reduced (from $35k to $1k). it's comical that this topic is positioned as "rich vs poor" issue. in reality, criminals who are a serious threat to society, are being let loose and innocent civilians become the collateral damage.
- moate 8y ago
  Here's the question at the heart of this- Which do you feel to be a greater problem in our society; Imprisoning people unjustly, or allowing criminals back into the street to commit more crimes? My answer is "both". Bail reform advocates typically say they want people to be kept out of jail before their trial, for free, if they pose no flight risk or danger to the community (ie, violent criminal past) and want people kept in jail if they pose a flight risk or a danger to the community. There is not a perfect solution, but we can do much better. TL;dr- not all crimes are the same, not all criminals are the same, and we both agree the system is broken. The difference seems to be that you're not actually advocating for any specific solution, just pointing out that bad people have done bad things.
- IanDrake 8y ago
  Funny, I’m also from MA and when I read the article title I thought, “yeah bail is broken, we’re letting too many repeat offenders out on bail”. Yet, the article has the opposite view. Somewhere along the road our society has flipped and now virtue is vice and vice is virtue.
- samstave 8y ago
  Just to point out that there are literally hundreds of thousands more instances proving bail is a broken system as opposed to the two that you selected. The legal system in the US is in large part a horrific dumpster fire.
burkemw3 8y ago
In addition to reform, there are non-profits assisting people within the current system. The Bronx Freedom Fund [0] and their Dollar Bail Brigade [1] are particularly interesting to me. [0]: http://www.thebronxfreedomfund.org/our-work/ http://www.thebronxfreedomfund.org/our-work/ [1]: http://www.thebronxfreedomfund.org/dollarbailbrigade/ http://www.thebronxfreedomfund.org/dollarbailbrigade/
jbb67 8y ago
How does this work in other counties such as the UK?
- gambiting 8y ago
  Police can only hold you for up to 96 hours without charging you with a crime. Once you are charged with something and awaiting trial, you have to be tried within 56 days. If you are not tried within those 56 days you have to be released on unconditional bail - so courts tend to stick to those limits. Police can set up bail before the trail, but it cannot involve money - frequently it involves staying at a particular address, reporting to the police station daily, not contacting certain people etc - it depends on the severity of the crime, you cannot be released on bail for acts of violence or armed robbery for example. https://www.gov.uk/charged-crime/bail https://www.gov.uk/charged-crime/bail https://www.inbrief.co.uk/court-proceedings/remand-in-custody-while-awaiting-trial/ https://www.inbrief.co.uk/court-proceedings/remand-in-custod...
  - buckminster 8y ago
    Since the government tightened up the bail rules the police have mostly stopped using it. Instead, you are "released under investigation". This has no legal meaning. It was invented by the police to deprive suspects of their bail rights.
  - nkw 8y ago
    > you have to be tried within 56 days If this was attempted in the United States, and we wanted to maintain the due process protections afforded by our Constitution, we would have to fund our indigent defense programs at levels far, far beyond what anyone has been willing to do.
    - mjevans 8y ago
      If it isn't worth properly funding the /defense/ for then maybe the matter should just be dropped entirely. Should save quit a bit on paperwork, jail stays, and the prosecution as well.
- 8y ago
merpnderp 8y ago
Isn't this really a problem of over-criminalization? If our court systems weren't clogged with suspects, wouldn't judges have more time to properly set bail by evaluating each suspected offender on their merits? We don't want dangerous criminals set loose without proper guarantees, and we don't want the less wealthy pleading guilty because they can't make bail. So the real solution seems to be to roll back as many non-violent criminal offenses as possible and perhaps simply live with people serving plastic straws that 99.9% won't wind up in the oceans instead of throwing them in jail for 6 months, or at least make them into civil offenses.
nkw 8y ago
I think most people with more than a passing acquittance with the bail systems in most states could agree with the title, but what I have not seen are any proposed solutions that address the underlying problems certain characteristics of our bail systems are meant to address. For example, without the threat of forfeiture how do you ensure people actually show up to court? Without bail bondsmen how do you fund the extra police/marshals/sheriffs to find and arrest those who do not show up for court? Without the ability to set bond amounts based upon offense characteristics and individual financial circumstances and criminal history, how do you prevent especially violent offenders with a likelihood of committing more violent acts while on pretrial release from committing new violent offenses? Keep in mind there are some jurisdictions where you are constitutionally entitled to bail of some amount. There is much (justified) lamenting on the evils of the use of the bail bond industry, but after bail reform in the Federal system which effective ended the use of the industry for the Federal criminal system -- do people really think the Federal system is better? If so why? If you want to go the other direction and eliminate money bail, do you really want to police/prosecution to able to indefinitely incarcerate people until trial? Do you want to seriously jack up the criminal penalties for failure to appear in lieu of money forfeiture? That is going to screw over a lot of people. Again, there are serious problems, but I haven't heard significantly better solutions.
- mikestew 8y ago
  For example, without the threat of forfeiture how do you ensure people actually show up to court? Because my life is fucked worse than it already is if I don't show up. If that's not the case, then that's almost the working definition of "flight risk", and you don't release them for any amount of money.
  - nkw 8y ago
    > Because my life is fucked worse than it already is if I don't show up. This is already the case, but surprisingly people (including those accused of crimes) do not always make choices which are in their long-term self interest. > If that's not the case, then that's almost the working definition of "flight risk", and you don't release them for any amount of money. So how do you determine who is a "flight risk"? Past FTA? Past convictions? Don't own property? No family ties to community? From the wrong part of town? Wrong skin color? These are the types of things that will end up going into detention decisions when you take the posting of security off the table and start trying to decide who is a "flight risk". The reason we have our bail system, including in many places a constitutional right to bail for non-capital offenses, is before that Courts would simply deny bail willy-nilly for certain crimes or people they didn't like.
canada_dry 8y ago
The three most critically important systems that we need to thrive as a society: politics, healthcare and law are all in need of critical overhauls. Sadly, in the West we are hell bent on pursuing unbridled capitalism while more disciplined countries (e.g. Sweden) just shake their heads in disbelief.
gregcrv 8y ago
You can support California SB 10 to help fixing the Bail system. https://www.aclunc.org/article/california-money-bail-reform-act-2017 https://www.aclunc.org/article/california-money-bail-reform-...
troupe 8y ago
> Those who can’t make bail are 13 percent more likely to be convicted, Is it possible that people guilty of crimes are more likely to be convicted and guilty people are less likely to make bail?
- amigoMigo 8y ago
  There is a huge incentive to plead guilty when you cannot make bail. After several weeks in jail they most likely let you walk after a guilty plea because you get time served.
shanselman 8y ago
Check out https://appolition.us https://appolition.us - They take your purchases and round them up so that your digital loose change goes to help people make bail.

115 points by cubano 8y ago

Yeah, I'm sorry, but as a citizen of the UK, the US system of bail and bail bounty hunters is just nuts. A child could see that it is incredibly regressive (in the economic sense of the word).

gambiting 8y ago
Same as the plea bargain system - it's completely obvious that US has loads of completely innocent people pleading guilty just to get out of jail, if the alternative is waiting a year or longer for the trial. It's insane.
- crankylinuxuser 8y ago
  Which is insane. We acknowledge that someone making a statement when they are kidnapped is under extreme duress. Yet when the state does it, somehow the "confessions" aren't under duress and are legally binding? Hardly. Edit: Currently at -1. For those who -1'ed me, I'd like to hear your arguments why state imprisonment prior to a guilty verdict isn't extreme duress, or a violation of "nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"
  - amarkov 8y ago
    When you've been kidnapped, you have good reasons to think that the kidnapper might just kill you if you don't go along with what they want. I've heard a lot of abusive police interrogation practices in the US, and none of them go so far to make you worry you'll be taken out back and shot. You're drawing an equivalence that just isn't there, and I think you know that.
    - gambiting 8y ago
      I do remember reading articles saying that prosecutors frequently say to detainees who have already spent 3-6 months in jail "look, you can plead guilty to this minor crime, and with the time served you can go home to your family tomorrow. Or you can wait for trial, which can happen maybe in next 12 months, if the judge isn't sick on that day and doesn't reschedule for another 3 months later. So what will it be? Do you want to go home tomorrow, or stay locked up for a year before even going to trial?" Like, I don't think I'd care how innocent I was - I'd want to get out asap. If your options are presented as "get out now" or "stay locked up for an indefinite amount of time, with no hope for compensation for the time lost even if you win" then it's an easy choice.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    - shawabawa3 8y ago
      It's absolutely not a false equivalence. For starters, many people do die in police custody without being convicted But "kidnapping" does not require a threat of death to have a real impact on your life. If your choice is to "confess" to a minor crime with time served, or lose your job/home/etc due to being locked up without trial, it's a no brainer for many people to falsely "confess", and it's absolutely under duress
- noer 8y ago
  The Plea Bargain system is really a result of the problems with the money bail system. There's less incentive plead guilty if you're not in jail.
nkw 8y ago
> Yeah, I'm sorry, but as a citizen of the UK, the US system of bail and bail bounty hunters is just nuts. Which is somewhat ironic since the foundation of our bail system originates from UK common law and the limitations on it (e.g. the 8th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution) originate from limitations put into place after abuses of bail in the UK legal system. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excessive_Bail_Clause#Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excessive_Bail_Clause#Origins

revscat 8y ago

It's not broken if your overarching goals are to decrease the political power of the poor and middle classes through increased financial instability and/or incarceration.

crankylinuxuser 8y ago

This is only one part of a system that the rich have their rules, and the rest have "their rules". It also goes along with the idea: pay for a bigshot attorney, get out of murder charge. Be poor accused, get public defender and a guilty charge. In Indiana, you can even expunge felonies up to a certain criminal threshold. Do you know what the primary criteria is? You have to PAY for them to expunge. The USA has always been pay-for-play. Now, its being called out for what it is. This country, the legal system, elections; you name it. The more money you have, the more influence you have, and the "better" the system is for you. How do we fix this? The simple answer is to elect people who have more liberal mindsets that try to get rid of these poor=disenfranchised laws. That's a long term, and not even guaranteed to work. What do we have short term? I have no clue.

rectang 8y ago
The ideology underpinning such unequal treatment ferments in places like HN. How often do we see the argument around here that unlimited inequality is fine so long as everyone improves in absolute terms? That argument is bogus because political power closely tracks wealth -- and thus unlimited inequality facilitates a society where we are not equal under the law.
- IanDrake 8y ago
  For the sake of argument, can you name a current law that treats people unequally by some immutable quality of the individual?
  - rectang 8y ago
    "Immutable", eh? That would exclude wealth. But disparities of wealth are a fountainhead of unequal treatment under US bail laws.
    - IanDrake 8y ago
      I wouldn’t consider wealth to be immutable, but I think your example is clear, so let’s roll it forward. So you would rather see bail set at a percentage of net worth? That would make things equal?

adtechperson 8y ago

This is not a new problem. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in "Democracy in America" in 1835: "It is evident that such a legislation is hostile to the poor and favorable only to the rich. The poor man has not always security to produce, even in a civil case; and if he is obliged to wait for justice in prison, he is speedily reduced to distress. A wealthy person, on the contrary, always escapes imprisonment in civil cases; nay, more, if he has committed a crime, he may readily elude punishment by breaking his bail. Thus all the penalties of the law are, for him, reduced to fines. Nothing can be more aristocratic than this system of legislation. Yet in America it is the poor who make the law, and they usually reserve the greatest advantages of society to themselves. The explanation of the phenomenon is to be found in England; the laws of which I speak are English, and the Americans have retained them, although repugnant to the general tenor of their legislation and the mass of their ideas."

tialaramex 8y ago
I don't know if it was true in 1835 that "The laws of which I speak are English" but today the situation is utterly different in the two countries. The UK has no concept of "cash bail", either you may go free, or you are a danger or flight risk and so you're held in jail by the state on its dime to avoid that. The court can set fairly broad rules for bail, it just doesn't [this used to say "can't" but see the example below which proves that they actually can] ask for cash, e.g. "You must give us your passports and other travel documents so that you can't fly" or "You mustn't go near Jimmy who says you assaulted him" or even "You must go see the police once per week between now and your court date". If you break any of the rules, then you may stop qualifying for bail and get sent to prison until trial.
- multjoy 8y ago
  Actually, that's not true. The courts (in E&W, at any case) can ask for a security (so cash or other assets) or a person to stand as a surety. They rarely do so, but the highest profile one in recent times was when Julian Assange slipped off to that ground floor flat in Knightsbridge and cost his supporters the thick end of £100k https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/JCO/Documents/Judgments/sureties-julian-assange-08102012.pdf https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/JCO/Documents/Ju...

tharwat 8y ago

Mainprise is a startup building a peer-to-peer bail payment platform on NEM Blockchain. The BAIL Token platform will enable family and friends to request low fee bail payments. Instead of throwing money away on bail bondsmen. Families apply for bail on the platform. After verifying their identity, they provide details on the accused such as name, bail amount, arrest charge, jail location, and booking number. The details along with details sourced from public data are fed into an AI-based risk scoring tool to generate a risk score. The tool will use data from millions of cases to help determine if the accused is likely to skip trial or commit another crime if released. Based on the score a fee of 0-3% is paid by the applicant. Once the accused is released, we monitor the court calendars and notify them of court dates and changes. After attending court and regardless of the verdict, guilty or innocent. The bail payment is refunded by the court and returned to the token holders along with a share of the fee collected. http://mainprise.io http://mainprise.io YouTube videos: http://youtube.com/c/mainpriseio http://youtube.com/c/mainpriseio

jgtrosh 8y ago
> along with a share of the fee I don't understand this bit: if it's a fee, why return any of it? Is the returned part of the fee to cover extra cost in cases where they don't go to court? Otherwise that extra part is not a fee, just extra bail.
- tharwat 8y ago
  When bail is paid in full it's returned by the courts when the person attends trial (regardless of the trial outcome). What this platform does is get many people "token holders to make small contributions to paying someone's bail. When they attend court the payment is returned back to the token holders.
  - jgtrosh 8y ago
    That I understood; I am talking specifically about the fee described previously. That is clearly to cover costs for the service and I don't see why that would be returned even partially to the holders.

nimbius 8y ago

speaking from experience (I have been incarcerated in the past) the bail system is a complete joke. If you get the public defender, you'll likely see about a 6 minute pretrial to set your bail if you get one. its factory-like in its efficiency, and you're lined up with 20 other inmates that were just loaded off a bus from the local jail. The judge is half-asleep, likely overworked, or just too jaded to care anymore. assuming you havent killed anyone, you'll get around a 50k bail. mine was just shy of $34,000 USD. If you dont have the cash for bail, you can attempt to secure a bail bond at 10% of the face amount. youll do this through family members sometimes, but youll use the jail phone. Using the jail phone is about nine dollars per phone call as its managed by a private phone company. your access to this phone is often once per week, because jails are massively overcrowded and youre scheduled a 5 minute phone call. After sleeping on a yoga mat in a group cell for about 2 weeks, you'll finally make bail. This often comes with a processing fee from the county or city. depending on your city, you'll also be issued a bill or invoice for your stay in jail. If you were assaulted or sent to medical, your bill will include any treatment. some jails can use this to refuse your bail paperwork...so no matter what you got for a bail bond, its now useless. and behavior? Anything at all can be used to refuse bail processing. Once I'd made restitution and been released from prison, the bond fee had been paid, and I was a free man. Or so you'd think. Most bail bond agencies have their own team of bounty hunters and they dont maintain accurate paperwork for many orders. Due to a misfiling, I was labeled as a skip-jump. Before even checking with the state for a warrant, their 'team' had tackled me in a taco bell parking lot at 8 am on my way to work. I spent nearly an hour in the back of a police cruiser until I was released. I was not given the option to press charges.

metalliqaz 8y ago
This was god damn depressing
pwned1 8y ago
Wow. If you don't mind asking, what were you in prison for?
- maxxxxx 8y ago

mchanson 8y ago

Bail isn't needed. Most people show up to court. You can go track down folks who don't if the crime is worth it. You can pay for those people through taxes. Currently Cash bail, and pretrial incarceration is used as a punishment and serves no other purpose.

DannyB2 8y ago

Bail is NOT broken. Working as intended. Will not fix. It's profitable. It works against the poor. It works in favor of the rich. The only way the world could be a better place would be to bring back "for profit" prisons. Vacant cells mean lower profit, decreased shareholder value and lower executive bonuses. Thus increasing incentive to incarcerate more people. A working bail system would work against that profitability -- except for incarcerating poor people. I think I'm going to be sick now.

selimthegrim 8y ago
Louisiana would like a quiet word with you to explore some investment opportunities. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpB_IGfgF6s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpB_IGfgF6s In the linked video Prof. Aiello of Valdosta State explains that in some ways the convict labor system was worse than slavery. In the strict economic sense a slaveowner had an incentive to treat the enslaved person in such a way that he would survive and produce many years of labor. People leasing convicts have no such concern. The people they have been leased may only be sentenced to 6 months, a year, 3 years, etc. So they may be more willing to work those people to death. Angola, the Louisiana state prison, was originally privately owned by a guy with a convict leasing contract.

zomg 8y ago

meanwhile, in massachusetts where bail can't be used as an economic means to keep people locked up, criminals are being freed and continue to do what they do best. just this month: officer chesna and vera adams in weymouth, ma -- gunned down with his own service weapon by a savage whose bail was reduced ($5k to $500). this asshole then murdered an elderly woman on her own porch who witnessed the murder. marine combat veteran kevin quinn -- killed in a head on crash by another low-life who was freed because his bail was reduced (from $35k to $1k). it's comical that this topic is positioned as "rich vs poor" issue. in reality, criminals who are a serious threat to society, are being let loose and innocent civilians become the collateral damage.

moate 8y ago
Here's the question at the heart of this- Which do you feel to be a greater problem in our society; Imprisoning people unjustly, or allowing criminals back into the street to commit more crimes? My answer is "both". Bail reform advocates typically say they want people to be kept out of jail before their trial, for free, if they pose no flight risk or danger to the community (ie, violent criminal past) and want people kept in jail if they pose a flight risk or a danger to the community. There is not a perfect solution, but we can do much better. TL;dr- not all crimes are the same, not all criminals are the same, and we both agree the system is broken. The difference seems to be that you're not actually advocating for any specific solution, just pointing out that bad people have done bad things.
IanDrake 8y ago
Funny, I’m also from MA and when I read the article title I thought, “yeah bail is broken, we’re letting too many repeat offenders out on bail”. Yet, the article has the opposite view. Somewhere along the road our society has flipped and now virtue is vice and vice is virtue.
samstave 8y ago
Just to point out that there are literally hundreds of thousands more instances proving bail is a broken system as opposed to the two that you selected. The legal system in the US is in large part a horrific dumpster fire.

burkemw3 8y ago

In addition to reform, there are non-profits assisting people within the current system. The Bronx Freedom Fund [0] and their Dollar Bail Brigade [1] are particularly interesting to me. [0]: http://www.thebronxfreedomfund.org/our-work/ http://www.thebronxfreedomfund.org/our-work/ [1]: http://www.thebronxfreedomfund.org/dollarbailbrigade/ http://www.thebronxfreedomfund.org/dollarbailbrigade/

jbb67 8y ago

How does this work in other counties such as the UK?

gambiting 8y ago
Police can only hold you for up to 96 hours without charging you with a crime. Once you are charged with something and awaiting trial, you have to be tried within 56 days. If you are not tried within those 56 days you have to be released on unconditional bail - so courts tend to stick to those limits. Police can set up bail before the trail, but it cannot involve money - frequently it involves staying at a particular address, reporting to the police station daily, not contacting certain people etc - it depends on the severity of the crime, you cannot be released on bail for acts of violence or armed robbery for example. https://www.gov.uk/charged-crime/bail https://www.gov.uk/charged-crime/bail https://www.inbrief.co.uk/court-proceedings/remand-in-custody-while-awaiting-trial/ https://www.inbrief.co.uk/court-proceedings/remand-in-custod...
- buckminster 8y ago
  Since the government tightened up the bail rules the police have mostly stopped using it. Instead, you are "released under investigation". This has no legal meaning. It was invented by the police to deprive suspects of their bail rights.
- nkw 8y ago
  > you have to be tried within 56 days If this was attempted in the United States, and we wanted to maintain the due process protections afforded by our Constitution, we would have to fund our indigent defense programs at levels far, far beyond what anyone has been willing to do.
  - mjevans 8y ago
    If it isn't worth properly funding the /defense/ for then maybe the matter should just be dropped entirely. Should save quit a bit on paperwork, jail stays, and the prosecution as well.
8y ago

merpnderp 8y ago

Isn't this really a problem of over-criminalization? If our court systems weren't clogged with suspects, wouldn't judges have more time to properly set bail by evaluating each suspected offender on their merits? We don't want dangerous criminals set loose without proper guarantees, and we don't want the less wealthy pleading guilty because they can't make bail. So the real solution seems to be to roll back as many non-violent criminal offenses as possible and perhaps simply live with people serving plastic straws that 99.9% won't wind up in the oceans instead of throwing them in jail for 6 months, or at least make them into civil offenses.

nkw 8y ago

I think most people with more than a passing acquittance with the bail systems in most states could agree with the title, but what I have not seen are any proposed solutions that address the underlying problems certain characteristics of our bail systems are meant to address. For example, without the threat of forfeiture how do you ensure people actually show up to court? Without bail bondsmen how do you fund the extra police/marshals/sheriffs to find and arrest those who do not show up for court? Without the ability to set bond amounts based upon offense characteristics and individual financial circumstances and criminal history, how do you prevent especially violent offenders with a likelihood of committing more violent acts while on pretrial release from committing new violent offenses? Keep in mind there are some jurisdictions where you are constitutionally entitled to bail of some amount. There is much (justified) lamenting on the evils of the use of the bail bond industry, but after bail reform in the Federal system which effective ended the use of the industry for the Federal criminal system -- do people really think the Federal system is better? If so why? If you want to go the other direction and eliminate money bail, do you really want to police/prosecution to able to indefinitely incarcerate people until trial? Do you want to seriously jack up the criminal penalties for failure to appear in lieu of money forfeiture? That is going to screw over a lot of people. Again, there are serious problems, but I haven't heard significantly better solutions.

mikestew 8y ago
For example, without the threat of forfeiture how do you ensure people actually show up to court? Because my life is fucked worse than it already is if I don't show up. If that's not the case, then that's almost the working definition of "flight risk", and you don't release them for any amount of money.
- nkw 8y ago
  > Because my life is fucked worse than it already is if I don't show up. This is already the case, but surprisingly people (including those accused of crimes) do not always make choices which are in their long-term self interest. > If that's not the case, then that's almost the working definition of "flight risk", and you don't release them for any amount of money. So how do you determine who is a "flight risk"? Past FTA? Past convictions? Don't own property? No family ties to community? From the wrong part of town? Wrong skin color? These are the types of things that will end up going into detention decisions when you take the posting of security off the table and start trying to decide who is a "flight risk". The reason we have our bail system, including in many places a constitutional right to bail for non-capital offenses, is before that Courts would simply deny bail willy-nilly for certain crimes or people they didn't like.

canada_dry 8y ago

The three most critically important systems that we need to thrive as a society: politics, healthcare and law are all in need of critical overhauls. Sadly, in the West we are hell bent on pursuing unbridled capitalism while more disciplined countries (e.g. Sweden) just shake their heads in disbelief.

gregcrv 8y ago

You can support California SB 10 to help fixing the Bail system. https://www.aclunc.org/article/california-money-bail-reform-act-2017 https://www.aclunc.org/article/california-money-bail-reform-...

troupe 8y ago

> Those who can’t make bail are 13 percent more likely to be convicted, Is it possible that people guilty of crimes are more likely to be convicted and guilty people are less likely to make bail?

amigoMigo 8y ago
There is a huge incentive to plead guilty when you cannot make bail. After several weeks in jail they most likely let you walk after a guilty plea because you get time served.

shanselman 8y ago

Check out https://appolition.us https://appolition.us - They take your purchases and round them up so that your digital loose change goes to help people make bail.