In practice, in most states, bail is a system that moves the cost of enforcing failure to appear from the state to private industry. That is, bail serves as a m

In practice, in most states, bail is a system that moves the cost of enforcing failure to appear from the state to private industry. That is, bail serves as a mechanism to give bail bondsmen a significant financial interest, so that they then make their own risk evaluation in setting the price of a bail bond. The cost of locating and detaining those who fail to appear (skip tracing, bounty hunting, etc) is then covered by the pool of bail bond payments. It is essentially an insurance scheme for failure to appear. Cash bail seldom exists in any meaningful way without the bail bond industry to support it, otherwise no one would ever be able to post bail and pretrial detention would become an unamangeable expense. One of the arguments for elimination of cash bail and replacement with a risk scoring approach is that it is essentially taking the existing system and moving it from private industry into the state. Currently, when bail is set for someone, what really determines whether or not they go free in most cases is a data-based risk evaluation made by a bail bondsmen to determine whether or not to offer a bond and, if so, whether or not to do so at a manageable price. CA has set a limit on bail bonds (as have many states) at 10% of bail, although they are usually lower, so one way to look at it is that bail bondsmen must make an evaluation of whether the risk-weighted cost of finding the fugitive or losing the bond is less than 10% of the bail amount. In other words, they must compare the expected value of the bond rate to the expected value of the bond owed to the state. This is something that the bail bonds industry has increasingly systematized, and states are hoping to take advantage of that effort to cut out the middleman. Cash bail is so closely tied to the system of bail bondsmen that it is seldom useful to discuss one without considering the other. There have been cases where states have largely eliminated bail bonds, such as Oregon, but they have tended to pose significant difficulties that made the need for bail reform even more apparent (essentially that not a single person could ever make bail, since it is quite rare for bail to actually be set at an amount that the accused can come up with).