Bail is the price for the temporary release of an accused person waiting for trial, determined by what price will guarantee they return to all of their court dates. The bail is returned after the trial minus processing fees, unless the defendant used a bail bond, in which the bail bond company gets a max of ten percent return on the bond. Bail is one more tool that can be used to marginalize and discriminate minorities. Despite the fact that the eighth amendment to the constitution provides that “excessive bail should not be required,” the price of the bail in criminal cases still disproportionately imprisons black people. Many defendants find themselves unable to afford the bail price even for petty crimes, and are forced to do damaging time in jail. The movement to change/minimize the harmful effects of bail is known as “Bail Reform.” While the current system of bail involving private companies is very harmful, different methods of bail reform achieve a variety of effectiveness and still need to be evaluated.
According to the article DANGER AHEAD: RISK ASSESSMENT AND THE FUTURE OF BAIL REFORM from the Washington Law Review by John Logan Koepke and David G. Robinson, despite the movement from all fifty states towards bail reform, several important challenges in bail reform that have been overlooked. The first of these challenges are the risk-assessment tools courts use to determine who needs bail. They then talk about how there is obscurity in the risk-assessment tools that escapes public scrutiny and how the risk-assessment tools lend a false sense of scientific objectivity. They show that the risk-assessment tools can be unhelpful through the example of their implementation in Springfield County. This article brings up the important point that courts must have improved guidelines to determine who needs bail. This article also brings up very interesting evidence showing that many states want to have less people imprisoned on bail to relieve the overpopulation pressure of prisoners. The fact that states have an economic reason to reduce bail directly clashes with the economic interests of the private bail bond industry.
In the article PRIVATE INTEREST, PUBLIC SPHERE: ELIMINATING THE USE OF COMMERCIAL BAIL BONDSMEN IN THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM by Thanithia Billings from the Boston College Law Review, she claims that special interest groups like private bail bond companies oppose any reform efforts, and if defendants can’t afford bail, their cases are drastically effected, on top of the fact that they will have to spend anywhere from weeks to years awaiting their trial. Billings also introduces in her article a method of bail reform that is being used to reduce people imprisoned on bail: pretrial service agencies. PSA’s are programs used to advise courts what bail to set. As a way to effectively reduce bail imprisonment, Billings proposes a movement away from private bail bond companies and away from the use of cash as the intermediary of bail. Billings presents statistics that show a decrease in bond imprisonment in Broward County Florida when they doubled their PSA budget. Interestingly, the PSA use risk-assessment tools, but Broward County achieved a lot more success compared to Springfield County. These findings suggest that there is controversy over the effectiveness of the risk-analysis methods.
The article HOW JUDGES THINK ABOUT RACIAL DISPARITIES: SITUATIONAL DECISION-MAKING IN THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM by Matthew Clair and Alix S. Winter from the Department of Sociology, Harvard University studies the judges views on racial disparities. Clair and Winter show that a majority of judges attribute both differential impact (“discriminatory treatment by court officials or police officers”), and disparate impact (“differential rates of criminal offending as a result of poverty or family dysfunction or the disparate effects of facially neutral laws”) to racial disparities. However, a “nontrivial” number of judges attributed racial disparity solely to disparate impact. These findings are alarming because they suggest that some judges refuse to notice discriminatory acts in their courts. In regards to bail, discriminatory practices in court would most likely lead to an increase in bail imprisonment rates. The possible discriminatory practices that are possibly found inside of courts directly contrasts and attacks the states’ economic motivation to reduce bail imprisonment.
I might intervene with my own project by explaining how the bail system need to be changed, piggybacking off of Thanithia Billings proposed solutions, while addressing the issues of risk-assessment tools brought up by Koepke and Robinson. I will address the contrasting data presented by Billings, Koepke, and Robinson.
