The Future of Cash Bail

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So people come into my office and let's say it's eight o'clock in the morning and last night their son got arrested for possession of a weapon . They're frantic. The police department isn't giving them information. The court system's not giving them information . So they want to know what's going on. They always want to know what the charge is. They want to know where they were arrested, and then they want to know how they get them out. When I get the person released, my fee is then made . That is Stephen Zeluski. He's a criminal defense attorney in New York , but he also has another job . I am one of the owners of Affordable Bails, New York . Affordable Bails is one of around twenty five thousand bail bond companies in the United States . These businesses are usually across the street from a courthouse, illuminated by neon signs For those accused of crimes , they offer a way to get out of jail while awaiting trial . More than two million Americans use their services each year to post around fifteen billion dollars worth of bail . Bail bonds are a controvers ial business . They're often portrayed as seedy establishments with briefcases full of cash and bounty hunters who kick down doors . And some of that is true , but the economics of the industry are often misunderstood . It's a common misconception that I walk in with one hundred thousand dollars in my hand. Basically I'm giving them a promisory note. When your kid got arrested for doing something stupid, you may not have five thousand dollars you can come to court with. For the free economics radio network, this is the economics of Ever Day Things. I'm Zachary Crockett. Today ,ail b bonds . When you're charged with a crime in America, you're usually taken to a local jail . Within a few days, a judge will review your case and decide if you should be given bail. That's the option to get out of jail while you're waiting for your court date. If you're granted bail, in most cases, the court wants some kind of assurance that you're going to show up when you're supposed to . So they'll order you to put up a sum of money to secure your release . The concept is that if there's a financial stake in your return, people will likely return. Again, that's Stephen Zeluski . If they set bail, they can set it in multiple forms . Some states actually have a schedule. So if you commit crime A, the bail is X . Other states have complete discretion of the court. The amount of your bail varies, depending on where you live and what you're charged with. You might be ordered to pay something like five thousand dollars if you're accused of misdemeanor assault . It could be twenty five thousand dollars for grand theft auto . And for something like murder, kidnapping, or ra pe, bail might be well into the six or even seven figures . When you're granted bail, you generally have a few options. You can pay the full amount, let's say five thousand dollars to the court . Assuming you show up to your court dates, you'll eventually get it back after your case is resolved, less fees and surcharges. If you pay into the court system, the court, for instance, New York take a three or four percent surcharge . If you don't have five thousand dollars , another option is to stay in jail. I would say the majority of Americans right now don't have five thousand dollars laying around in their house they can pay. When you don't pay your bail, you might sit in jail for months or even years waiting for your court date . But there's another alternative . You can call up a bail bond company The bayobond industry traces its origins to the wild west . As the story goes, in the late eighteen hundreds, two brothers, Peter and Thomas McDonagh picked up on an opportunity while working at their father's saloon in San Francisco . They realized that most of the local criminals didn't have any family members around to post bail to the courts when they got in trouble . So they began charging a fee to front them the money . The business was so profitable that the brothers eventually replaced the saloon with a bailbond establish . The concept spread around the country , and by the mid twentieth century, bailbond companies were a fixture in the American justice system. The purpose of the bailbond industry is to provide someone with the ability to get out relatively quickly, as well as make sure that the person returns to court. Zeluski started his firm, Affordable Bailes, New York around fifteen years ago . He was well aware of the industry's unsavory reputation. I was a criminal defense attorney for many years and before I even knew anything about the bond business, all I would hear to be quite honest with you were horror stories . People being charged exorbitant fees, never being able to get collateral money back , you know, people revoking bonds because the guy was fifty minutes late for his check in . Since starting his firm, Zeluski says he's posted around seventy five thousand bail bonds for clients in the state of New York. The business model for all those bonds is pretty simple . So you have to look at us as an insurance agency , a little different than the guy that sells you car insurance, but nonetheless, we are an insurance company. I'm handing them a bond, which is a promisory note that says, Hey, if he doesn't come back to court, I pay . In return for taking on this risk, bail agents charge a fee. In most states, it's around ten percent of the bail amount . So for a five thousand dollars bail, you pay five hundred bucks , and you don't get it back . Sometimes for bigger bail amounts, Zeluski will also take collateral to cover his risk. They may give me the deed to their house and I'll put a lien on their home . I've gotten things as exotic as bugats. I mean, amazing cars. Engagement rings are believe it or not, very common . So we collateralize the bail with what we think is appropriate based on the crime . The people who pay these fees and put up this collateral are usually the defendant's family members on the outs , and they're almost always women . You know, typically they are mothers, grandmothers , spouses, partners, former partners , sisters, and so forth . Joshua Page is a professor of sociology and law at the University of Minnesota. He researches criminal punishment . He spent eighteen months working as a bailbond agent to better understand how the industry works , Paige says there are sociological reasons why bailbond companies target women. They're perceived to be more sympathetic, more loyal, and ultimately more willing to put up money for loved ones in need . To find clients, bail agents will often attend the initial court hearings where judges assign bail . They'll seek out a defendant's family members in court and offer emotional support. The legal process is often really confusing. You know, people, lawyers, judges in many ways speak a different language. So what bail agents do is they, you know, strategically present themselves as somebody that can help . Many bail agents will also form quid pro quo relationships with criminal defense attorneys . They have this mutual referral system . bail The ag ents, when they talk to defendants, will try to refer them to the lawyers and the lawyers will try to refer clients to the bail bond agents. If all else fails, they'll make cold calls They'll pay attention to the jail rosters that are increasingly online . And when people's bail comes up, they'll put their name and number and birth date into a software program that provides information about family members and sort cold calling, saying that they're happy to help them out and get the defendant out of jail . When a family member signs a contract with a bail bond company, they become a cosigner , or essentially a guarantor on a loan . And if a defendant is bailed out and decides to go on the run , that can become a problem for everyone involved. That's coming up . The economics of everyday things is sponsored by Mint Mobile. Mint mobile plans are only fifteen dollars per month. Wondering what's the catch? There isn't one. There are no gimmicks and no gotches. Just unlimited talk, text and data, fast reliable coverage on the nation's largest five G network, and an award winning care team. That makes Mint Mobile a catch. 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My responsibility then is to monitor the person, make sure they go back to court . If a defendant goes on the lamb, the bail bond company could be on the hook for the full bail amount. It's in Zeluski's interest to find the fugitive and bring him back in , and for that, he's usually employs a bounty hunter. We're gonna hunt this scum down. The only way this guy will get away from us is if he kills himself right now and jumps into a pool of sharks. You may recognize this line of work from reality TV shows like Dog The Bounty Hunter , but Zeluski says those depictions are exaggerated . They had three or four Bell Bond shows, and you know, they made everybody look like they were crazy . What it did is it took an industry that had some legitimacy and made it look ridiculous. I mean, I don't need a guy with , you know, hair extensions and paintball gun running around to catch people. It's just it doesn't make any sense . If there's a kernel of truth in these shows, it's that bounty hunting can sometimes be violent . There have been many documented cases of bounty hunters killing Bailebond fugitives . In one case, a New Orleans man was allegedly shackled, beaten and st uffed in a trunk. He had failed to show up to court for stealing a bottle of aspirin . But Zeluski says the typical search is resolved without incident . So the first calls we make are to the family. What we do is we check to see if the person's been rearrested or if they're in the hospital. Within two hours of finding that out, we are at their house to see if they're home. And I'd like to tell you it's a big secret, but it's not. ninety percent of the people who skip bail are with a family member. The average search, to be honest with you, probably takes three to four days if someone's really running . Every now and then, Zeluski's bouncy hunters cut it pretty close. So someone was on a five hundred thousand dollars bail. They left . We searched for two months and could not find the person . We get a call from a retired police officer who lives in Tennessee . And he says,, Hey, listen are you looking for somebody and describes the woman? And it turns out she met this fellow, they were dating, and she spouts off that she ran on a five hundred thousand dollars bill in New York. And we went down to Tennessee and got her. Sometimes, Saluski says, Returned defendants will attempt to use his office as a storage unit for contraband. People would literally come to surrender and they bring their backpack and I'd take the backpack and search it and there were guns , drugs . And I'm like, Are you kidding me? So I can get this when I get out. I said, No, you can't get the gun back and the drugs . Once the fugitive is apprehended, the bounty hunter is typically paid ten to twenty percent of the bond amount . Joshua Page, the sociologist , says family members who cosign the bail bond contract often have to foot the bill . If a bail company sends a bounty hunter after a defendant , the cosigner will be charged for the expense of the bounty hunter. Cosigners also agree to give bail companies access to all kinds of personal records and when a person goes missing, it's the cosigner that the bail company really contacts a lot . In theory, if a fugitive isn't returned to court, the bail bond company has to pay the full amount of the bond . In the business, that's called a forfeiture . But courts rarely make these companies pay up . We were doing an average of sixty to one hundred million dollars a year. We were doing for feitures in pay less than one tenth of one percent . By contrast, automobile and property insurers pay out up to sixty percent of their revenue and losses. Part of the reason for these small forfeiture rates is that bailbond firms are backed by a handful of major insurance companies that often fight tooth and nail to avoid forfeitures . And courts tend to go easy on the bailb indoustndry by giving them long grace periods . With a bailbound company, when someone doesn't show up in court, the court usually gives us sixty to ninety days to return the person , thereby avoiding forfeiture. The courts have their own economic incentive for giving bail bond companies leniency . And Paige says it has to do with a serious point of contention in the American justice system . For the courts, it's more of a matter of trying to save money and to offload responsibilities , you know, if people can't afford the bail, then they'll remain locked up. And so in some ways the bailbond industry functions as a release valve to try to deal with jail overcrowding . The court's stated purpose of bail is to give defendants a way to get out of jail before their trial while giving the court assurance that they won't jump down . But some scholars and criminal justice activists say that charging people cash has actually served the opposite purpose . In the nineteen eighties, with crime at record levels and politicians calling for tougher punishments , judges started setting higher cash bail . Between nineteen ninety and two thousand nine, the average bail amount doubled . Since then , jails have become increasingly crowded. It's estimated that on any given day, there are four hundred thirteen thousand people in city and county jails who haven't yet been convicted of a crime This pretrial incarceration comes at the expense of taxpayers . On average, it costs around seventy seven dollars a day to house a single person . Across the entire pretrial prison population , that's nearly twelve billion dollars in public funds each year. The problem isn't just that cash bail is set too high