9 ms·
Getting people to show up to trial is the main one. I’d like to see an experiment where rather than money, instead a free citizen is offered up for bail. And i
by koolba 8y ago
Getting people to show up to trial is the main one.
I’d like to see an experiment where rather than money, instead a free citizen is offered up for bail. And if you don’t show up for trial the citizen goes to jail till they apprehend you.
- jeffdavis 8y agoI don't follow your proposal. Honestly, it sounds really scary and disturbing, but I'll let you explain it better first.
- koolba 8y agoRather than putting up cash, a friend, brother, sister, etc offers themselves as the bond for my freedom. If I abscond then they’ll be arrested and imprisoned until I’m apprehended. Assuming that “everybody has somebody”, it’s quite fair as rich or poor you’ll be able to find someone to be your bond. Again the idea is to have a strong incentive to report for trial. Assuming your actually emotionally close to the person being offered as bond (ex: I wouldn’t let my brother go to prison) then you’d make sure to show up. In the case of the person who has done no wrong and knows they will show up to trial, it reduces the cost of the bond to effectively zero. For the rich you’re able to put a price higher than just money, the actual freedom of someone they care about. Note that this entire system is predicated on a judge deciding if the person being offered for bond being worthy of the position. Otherwise you could have rich people “buy” their freedom by paying off a sap to sign their name.
- khawkins 8y agoThis has the capacity to put domestic abuse victims in jail for the actions of their abusers, force noble people to pay the price for family members who have no decency, and allow crime lords the ability to escape to freedom by sacrificing someone less influential. This system only works under assumption that the accused is honorable, but it's silly to think that people accused of crimes are generally honorable.
- jeffdavis 8y agoI think this is a bad idea. The whole concept of punishing one person for the crimes of another is disturbing. You'd end up with a lot of cases of a woman trying to help a deadbeat boyfriend who doesn't care about her or anyone else. Are you really going to put her in jail? Maybe he just leaves the country, and then what?
- manigandham 8y agoYou make several assumptions that they have someone in the first place, and that they care about them as well - but justice should never be about assumptions. The entire justice system is designed to let guilty go free if it means a single innocent person is protected from wrongful incarceration. Why do you think involving innocents is a good idea? Especially when it means they go to jail and get their freedoms taken away? People who skip bail already put their family at risk plenty of times, often signing away property and leaving family members destitute. It would be much better to refund bail costs for anyone acquitted than to force this on people who do not deserve it.
- toomanybeersies 8y agoAs other people have mentioned, this is a terrible idea. I wouldn't be surprised if my brother would let me rot in jail and skip bail, obviously I wouldn't offer myself up for bail, but not everybody would be in the same situation. It would be easy for people to coerce (by threats of violence etc.) people to offer themselves as bail.
- topmonk 8y agoIt would easy for people to coerce others into giving up money for bail, as well. How is this worse in that aspect?
- manigandham 8y agoWould you rather give up some money or your freedom? They are not comparable at all, and locking up an innocent person is unimaginably worse.
- shimms 8y agoBecause in the first example all the person lost was money, in the other - their liberty. Not sure how they're at all comparable.
- topmonk 8y agoThe judge can oversee it, and if it appears anything illegal was involved, he can disallow it. With money, this is much harder, because it's difficult to determine where money really came from.
- learc83 8y agoBecause the person who was coerced is in jail as opposed to just missing some money.
- dragonwriter 8y agoIt's worse than having neither hostages nor money bail, which is what it was offered as an alternative to.
- firic 8y agoyou should have written this in your opening post. In your op I thought that you were suggesting for some sort of whipping boy. Your clarification makes more sense. some things that should be pointed out is that your collateral can refuse, and that skipping bail is still a crime, so if you ditch, you will be hunted and be revoked bail rights for the rest of your life.
- monetus 8y agoAre you saying that they should try punishing an innocent until guilt overwhelms the alleged offender? ... That doesn't seem very empathic. Seems like it would create an incentive for vigilantism too. Huh.
- komali2 8y agoI don't understand how a bail is more motivating for someone to show up to trial than the threat of arrest with no bail. We don't have people pre-pay to not commit other crimes, why does specifically this one get it? This is ignoring all the other, wealth disparity type issues, with bail. Seems to me like it just privatized part of the justice system - instead of cops chasing down delinquent criminals, it's bail bondsmen.
- closeparen 8y agoSure we do. Movers, bank tellers, and many other occupantions with high risk to the client/employer require surety bonds. Ever seen “licensed, bonded, and insured” on a contractor truck? Offloading risk to a firm specialized in managing it is precisely the point. The criminal justice system is just one instance - it’s a long lived and widespread form of insurance.
- kbenson 8y ago> I don't understand how a bail is more motivating for someone to show up to trial than the threat of arrest with no bail. In some cases it may remove a significant portion of the money the accused might flee with. In others, it can provide social constraints that are more binding than legal ones. For example, if your parents but their house (or a large portion of what the sale of it would net) up as collateral for your bail, you may be less inclined to flee if it would financially ruin them.
- eftychis 8y agoStill. If you are innocent, you might not be able to afford the bail and receive irrecoverable financial damage -- lose your job, insurance, etc. (Enter plea agreements...) If you are guilty, I expect you actually don't want to end up in jail no matter the cost. Let us say you face 10 years in jail, you have actually committed the crime: what are the chances you think you will just take it one step further and ruin your family?
- kbenson 8y ago> If you are innocent, you might not be able to afford the bail and receive irrecoverable financial damage Sure. I'm not making a case that bail is perfect, or even good overall, I'm just laying out some of the reasoning behind why it exists. > Let us say you face 10 years in jail, you have actually committed the crime: what are the chances you think you will just take it one step further and ruin your family? What are the chances that your friends and family don't understand this, and as such are unwilling to put up collateral as bail? It's not like the the accused get to put up other people's money and property without their say-so. The accused might con them into paying the bail, but really, there's only so much you can do in a case like that. If you could solve that scenario, you could probably eliminate confidence crimes altogether.
- adrr 8y agoSounds like China where the rich pay other people to serve their sentence.
- Alex3917 8y ago> Getting people to show up to trial is the main one. So I think at the top end of the spectrum this might make sense. The problem is that a very large percentage people in jail are there because their bail was literally $50 or $100 but they didn't have the money to pay it, so they end up in jail for months or years on end. And for these people, bail has zero impact on whether they show up for trial.
- woodpanel 8y ago> And for these people, bail has zero impact on whether they show up for trial. All the while that 50$-based jail time has disastrous impact on their personal lives (losing jobs, eviction by landlords, more complicated interaction with police, three-strike-rules ....).
- WillPostForFood 8y agoWell, then a common sense incremental change would be to drop or discourage those tiny bail amounts, not throw out the whole system. Speaking of losing jobs, a whole industry just lost theirs.
- woodpanel 8y agoI agree with your first point: incremental changes are often for the better. Regarding your second: > Speaking of losing jobs, a whole industry just lost theirs Doesn't the legitimacy of the job come before the right to perform it? A whole industry just lost their jobs is probably what many said in 1833 after the passing of the Slavery Abolition Act.
- WillPostForFood 8y agoI agree that legitimacy of the job comes first, but don't think bail bondsmen are illegitimate. They definitely aren't illegitimate if you think there should be bail system. Instead of comparing it to slavery (which is borderline Godwin's Law), I'd compare it to being a distiller when 18th amendment passed.
- siruncledrew 8y agoSo then gangs or cartel members could just forcibly “offer up” a free citizen, then skip trial while someone they don’t care about sits in jail?
- maxxxxx 8y agoThat's how it used to be in Britain. Rich people would send somebody else to prison in their place.
- davidsawyer 8y agoWow, that's absolutely insane. How did people think that was a good idea?
- Kadin 8y agoThat's literally how bail worked in its original incarnation. Someone would post bail on your behalf, and if you skipped down, _they_ would be responsible for the bail amount. So therefore they would basically be taking responsibility for ensuring you stuck around and made it to court. It obviously doesn't work well for people without a connection to the community in which they were arrested.
- marzell 8y ago|I’d like to see an experiment where rather than money, instead a free citizen is offered up for bail This is fundamentally wrong... the "other person" is not the suspect in this situation, so you would be putting an innocent up for punishment in lieu of a suspect. Honestly, I'm not even sure if you are trolling or just misdirected here, but if it isn't obvious to you why this isn't an acceptable idea, I'm happy to discuss.
- jakeinspace 8y agoPossibly the stupidest idea I've yet to read on HN. This flies in the face of centuries of advancements in the idea of justice, quite hammurabian.
- aaronbrethorst 8y ago“There is no evidence you need money to get people back to court,” said [D.C. Superior Court Judge Truman Morrison], a judge since 1979. “It’s irrational, ineffective, unsafe and profoundly unfair.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/when-it-comes-to-pretrial-release-few-other-jurisdictions-do-it-dcs-way/2016/07/04/8eb52134-e7d3-11e5-b0fd-073d5930a7b7_story.html?utm_term=.0e00be193506 https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/when-it-c... (n.b. the next paragraph of the article doesn't invalidate this argument. If a defendant is deemed to be a serious threat by a judge, they don't have to let the defendant go—bail or not.)
- dragonwriter 8y ago> Getting people to show up to trial is the main one. Washington D.C had demonstrated that the pretrial services model does that without the economic Injustice of money bail, so, no, that's not a relative advantage of money bail. > I’d like to see an experiment where rather than money, instead a free citizen is offered up for bail. And if you don’t show up for trial the citizen goes to jail till they apprehend you. This kind of primitive hostage system is very much like some of the ancient precursors of bail; I'm not sure what reason we'd have to reexplore that, though.
- pm24601 8y agoOh you mean like what they did in the middle ages? Now who could pay for that person? And we are back to a bail situation