
California governor signs overhaul of bail system - neo4sure
http://www.latimes.com/politics/essential/la-pol-ca-essential-politics-may-2018-jerry-brown-bail-reform-law-1535485040-htmlstory.html
======
lurquer
Instead of the duly appointed Judge making the decision, the power is
delegated to a "Risk Assessment" board. (i.e., a bunch of unaccountable social
workers).

So, instead of an individual Judge getting flack for excessive bail, he can
sleep at night having had his authority delegated to an anonymous 'committee'
that can refuse to set bail altogether.

It seems the general public -- at least in California -- has little idea of
the enormous role in the judicial system played by bail bondsmen. I know
dozens. They are all a bit sketchy. But, they are the front-line dealing with
the lowest rungs of society. They do a lot of good, ensure their charges stay
out of trouble, and show up to court. They do it for a profit. But, that
doesn't diminish their role.

I'm interested in seeing how it will turn out. I wish them well, but I've
found abuses are more likely when the responsibility for a person is diffused
amongst many.

~~~
YokoZar
Isn't part of the problem that judges face a lot of pressures to be extra
harsh when deciding bail?

A board seems less likely to face political blowback when the rare out on bail
person commits a serious crime. That sounds like the sort of incident that
incentivizes judges to be extra harsh.

~~~
firic
If judges risk themselves politically if they release people on bail then that
means that the will of the people is to rarely release people on bail. I know
it may sound weird to you and me but apparently there are a lot of people in
California who feel that someone accused of a crime should suffer in prison
until they are proven innocent. That is the disadvantage of democracy, people
with different opinions get to vote. The solution is to educate voters why you
think that they should vote differently or to move to another place.

~~~
hamandcheese
Or maybe the solution is to remove the political (dis)incentive structure such
that the will of an irrational population doesn't continue to cause harm.

~~~
TangoTrotFox
Completely agreed, but how would you propose to navigate these waters within a
democratic system?

~~~
jacobush
It's really weird when it's completely normal for insurance companies to take
out TV ads for the removal of a judge. On the grounds of something unrelated,
of course.

So, we have the will of the people. So far, so good.

And then we have the complete freedom of capital to nudge the will of the
people.

Something is wrong with this picture.

~~~
TangoTrotFox
Sure, but it's not just capital right? Especially in the internet era if you
somehow removed all capital influence you just shift it to the range of people
between celebrities and confidence men. The fundamental problem is that people
let others unduly influence 'their' worldview.

Seems even if you remove the influence of capital, you're just kicking the can
rather than actually solving the problem.

~~~
jacobush
Maybe, but I think capital must be the main driver. In an age when attention
is scarce, paying for it must have a huge influence.

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rdl
I'm not sure if I agree with this change (there are positives and negatives to
the bail system), but I love that in a federal system individual states are
free to experiment like this. Maybe it will work, and then other states can
adopt it.

~~~
jaxn
I can't think of good sides to the bail system. What positives do you see.

~~~
koolba
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.

~~~
Alex3917
> 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.

~~~
creddit
Is that true? Why not get a bail bond??

~~~
DSMan195276
I'm assuming that _is_ the bail bond. Bail bonds aren't free, you pay a small
percentage that you don't get back. So if you have no money at all, you
obviously can't afford to pay the bail, but you also can't afford to get a
bondsman to pay it instead.

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syrrim
If I had to speculate, I'd say this is primarily a reaction to improved
ability to track people, such that it is next to impossible for a person to
jump bail. You can't get on a plane, or otherwise try and cross the border,
because your passport will be checked. If you drive across the country, then
your credit cards/bank accounts will be tracked, and security cameras can pick
up and recognize your face. I imagine that there is today fewer people not
showing up to court and getting away with it.

If so, then it seems like a good trade-off - those facing trial have more
freedom, and threats to there freedom can't be used in a coercive manner, but
those who aren't facing trial have less privacy.

~~~
philwelch
People who skip bail, by and large, don't get on a plane or drive across the
country.

Also, the bail system isn't designed to only incentivize defendants themselves
to show up to court. The bail bondsman has the financial incentive and the
legal right to apprehend and deliver a defendant who has skipped bail.
Removing the bail bondsman from the equation only increases the public cost of
reapprehending these defendants.

Edit: I should add...people who get caught committing crimes are generally not
the best at responding to the incentive of not going to jail, or else they
wouldn’t get caught committing crimes in the first place. So any mechanism
that relies on this incentive is unlikely to be effective. Introducing a third
party with vested interests at no additional cost is a non-trivial benefit of
the bail system. Although maybe the police unions are happy to transfer the
workload (and added hours!) to their members.

~~~
bodas
It would also be a lot cheaper to dispense with courts and replace them with
private arbitrators with the power to send people to prison.

A system where the decision on whether you go to jail or not is made by bail
bondsmen is not just. If they decide not to grant you a bond, to where do you
appeal?

~~~
philwelch
Where do you appeal if the judge decides not to release you of your own
recognizance? Where do you appeal of the judge decides not to even offer you
bail, for that matter?

By the time you're dealing with a bail bondsman, you're already in jail, and a
judge has likely decided not to release you of your own recognizance. The
question is whether or not you have to stay there until trial.

~~~
sjy
> Where do you appeal of the judge decides not to even offer you bail, for
> that matter?

To a higher court, as with any other judicial order? This is how things work
in normal common law countries like the UK, Canada and Australia.

~~~
philwelch
Eventually you run out of appeals, or the higher court refuses to hear your
appeal, just as you eventually run out of bail bondsmen. I don't see the
situation as any different.

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fdr
I see nobody has mentioned the "Freedom Funds," so, I will do so now. One of
the better known ones:
[http://www.thebronxfreedomfund.org/](http://www.thebronxfreedomfund.org/)

What these are revolving, non-profit bail funds. They screen those who require
bail as to maximize the recovery of the money, choosing those that are thought
to have good prospects in showing up to court. They seem to be quite effective
at this, so I think there is a reasonable chance the law's "commissions" can
also enjoy some accuracy. It also lends some ideas as to how such commissions
can be held accountable, benchmarked, or enjoy some internal competition.

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drewmol
Bail seems like an outdated concept that has ballooned into a mechanism to
extort money with little public benifit. When a deposit was enough to keep
someone charged with a crime from running off to the next town and never being
heard from again it was probably effective. Now, if bail is a major factor in
whether a defendant returns to court or turns wanted outlaw, the charges are
either too minor to warrent bail, or so serious that paying for release
probably should not have ever been an option. Bail is just an initial deposit,
a checksum to make sure no one gets out free: either cash or tax dollars for
the administration and encarceration of poor defendants. Hope this doesn't
turn into a system of simply optimizing bail payment per offer by setting
custom amounts.

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downandout
This is terrible. Pretrial detention in rough California county jails is often
used as a bargaining chip by prosecutors to get quick convictions in exchange
for probationary sentences. _" Don't like the constant threat of being raped
or assaulted every day? Sign the deal, take a felony conviction, and you'll
get out on probation tonight"._

This won't result in more poor people being released. It will simply result in
a higher percentage of middle and upper class people being extorted into
guilty pleas that they would not otherwise take, under the threat of losing
their careers and families as a result of many months, and in a large number
of cases, years, of pretrial detention.

~~~
pm24601
> This won't result in more poor people being released. It will simply result
> in a higher percentage of middle and upper class people being extorted into
> guilty pleas that they would not otherwise take, under the threat of losing
> their careers and families as a result of many months

Instead of just poor people?

~~~
downandout
Again, I do believe that the system should be adjusted to encourage judges to
give free pretrial release to poor people that they think will show up for
court. I just think that judges shouldn’t be given broad new authority to
arbitrarily incarcerate people that can post money bail along with that
adjustment.

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lsiebert
I'd remind people that when dealing with a bad system, a less bad system that
still has bad points is still an improvement.

What you really want is a system that allows further changes based on
assessment of it's faults.

~~~
GeneralMayhem
That's true, but not always politically viable. You only get to muster up the
political will to take a swing at the big structural problems every so often.
If this turns out to be horribly insufficient of a measure, it'll be a few
years before it's likely to change again, so for that reason it's
understandable for organizations like the ACLU to be annoyed at what they see
as missing their shot.

~~~
lsiebert
And that's why the ACLU is still working to make regulation of this rule and
how it's assessments work more fair. It wanted changes to the risk assessment
tools in the bill, but didn't get that. What I think the various California
ACLU groups (there are three of them actually) groups wanted data collection,
independent risk assessment service agencies, and better due process for those
facing negative bail decisions.

Anyway they are going to try to get changes to tweak the law, probably try to
do their own assessments of racial bias, and I expect they'll sue locally for
specific county level changes that are allowed within the law.

I think we'll get there. We know that existing risk assessment tools tend to
overestimate black and latino people reoffending and underestimate white
people, and if they can show a systemic bias they'll have ammunition to change
things.

Getting rid of the bail industry is huge though, especially getting rid of
lobbying from them against this in the next round. I'm hopeful that this will
be a step forward, and allow for another step forward.

------
mrweasel
Other countries do just fine without a bail system, so I'm not sure why the US
needs one. Is it because of slowness in the legal system and you don't want to
have people in jail while they wait to their trial? Because then maybe one
would need to look at reducing the amount of time between being jailed and put
on trial.

------
jmspring
For communities already pushing the extremes of what Prop 47 and Prop 57
allow, this will be one more blow to the common citizenry. Places like Santa
Cruz have a very high recidivism rates where serial bike thieves, petty theft,
even violence towards common citizens are maybe ticketed and at best brought
in and released in a couple of hours will use this as further excuse to do
nothing.

Examples - woman assaulted in front of her child at a city park with a ranger
near by, perp didn't even get a ticket. Known bike thieves carrying a bike
while riding another - nothing done.

This happens in a number of CA cities (Berkeley, SF, Santa Cruz). It's always
interesting to see how ideals of one party left unchecked drive a city/state
in to the ground.

~~~
firic
What does this have to do with one party? How is a primary system in one party
different than a general election amongst two parties?

~~~
jmspring
California did better with balanced government. Republican Gov and democratic
legislature. There was some semblance of balance.

Without that balance, we see prop 47 and 57. Local communities using those as
an excuse to not really do much in the way of law enforcement — the city
government of Santa Cruz was actively hostile toward the police well into the
90s. An individual casing bikes with bike tools in the east bay would have an
“encounter” with PD, in Santa Cruz PD actually told me in a meeting - they
won’t engage unless they actively see an incident in progress or the owner
reports it.

~~~
dragonwriter
> California did better with balanced government. Republican Gov and
> democratic legislature.

No, it didn't. It was nonstop crisis.

------
refurb
I can't find it now, but I was reading a Reddit post on this from someone who
works in the California court system.

His/her opinion was that this wasn't going to really change much. People
arrested for minor crimes are often released on their own recognizance and
major crime they aren't offer bail terms they can meet. Under this new system,
the same people will likely be released without bail and the same people will
be kept behind bars.

Interestingly, if you skip out on a court date, an arrest warrant is issued,
but they expire after 3 years. Apparently getting people to show up for their
court date is a huge problem as the consequences are pretty minor unless you
encounter law enforcement.

------
kodablah
> work with lawmakers and the state’s top Supreme Court justice [...] Under
> last-minute changes, judges would have greater power to decide [...] Chief
> Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye, who helped craft the legislation

It's an improvement, sure, but no surprise consulting a branch or two of
government to draft it would end up with more power to a branch. What are the
objective criteria for the "risk analysis" that divides the accused into the
three risk levels? And how often do extenuating circumstances really occur
that require judicial override sans approval from an additional independent
council?

------
ENOTTY
Both judges and "risk-assessment tools" have biases. Judges have unconscious
biases and risk-assessment tools are fed biased data. So I'm not confident
this will actually help matters.

~~~
Someone1234
Judge's biases exist in the money bail system too. Judges often set bail
amounts from a range.

This doesn't solve all issues, this just solves one issue, which is that
someone's economic status shouldn't be why they're in jail, only their
likelihood of committing more crime, witness tampering, or skipping court.

I'm sure this new system will have problems that will need to be addressed,
but it is a moral thing to TRY.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Judge's biases exist in the money bail system too. Judges often set bail
> amounts from a range.

Or deny it because no arrangement can adequately guarantee appearance, yes.
The fact that money is the key element used to guarantee appearance doesn't
mean that money is always sufficient even in the money bail system.

------
sewercake
A relatively new podcast has a really enlightening episode on the bail system
[1]. Episode two. Highly recommended.

The big takeaways for me: \- the process for setting bail prices is very
opaque, with little accountability. Many districts have extraordinary or
unmanageably high bail for common crimes. \- if you are poor, and can't afford
bail, you either have to stay in jail, meaning you are apart from your family,
unable to work, or more often than not, pay a bail bondsman a non-refundable
amount of money to get you out of jail, meaning, before you are charged,
before you are guilty (or innocent), you end up paying a fine.

[1]
[https://twitter.com/justice_podcast?lang=en](https://twitter.com/justice_podcast?lang=en)

~~~
pas
Isn't bail set by the judge after you are charged, that is after arraignment?

------
theptip
To add another data point to the discussion -- I recently discovered that the
bail system is sometimes used as a tool to force women into prostitution; see
[https://www.theguardian.com/global-
development/2018/jun/29/r...](https://www.theguardian.com/global-
development/2018/jun/29/revealed-how-us-sex-traffickers-recruit-jailed-women-
for-prostitution-the-trap).

TLDR is that pimps find women who are up for bail, offer to bail them out, and
then threaten to rescind the bail if they don't start working for them.

It seems like the easier fix would be to forbid a bail payment from being
rescinded once it's made, but removing bail entirely also solves the problem.

------
rootw0rm
my gf has bail review on the 30th, too bad this won't help her. her bail is at
$355,000, she's currently in vista detention facility =(

~~~
komali2
Jesus, what kind of crime allegation gets that kind of bail set?

~~~
rootw0rm
she's accused of beating up 3 old people with a bat, then smashing up their
vehicle for good measure

~~~
mirimir
Impressive.

So why did she do that? And did they deserve it?

I'm guessing maybe a bicycle accident. Just a wild guess. I mean, been there,
almost did that. But with a chain, not a bat. Those jerks almost killed me.

~~~
lightbyte
>And did they deserve it?

Is this sarcasm? I'm struggling to think of a good reason for three elderly
people to deserve getting beaten with a bat.

~~~
mirimir
No, I wasn't being sarcastic. Seeing a friend run off the road while riding,
and almost killed, and having people stop and blame them for the accident,
generates lots of anger. I know, because I've been there. And I've also been
run off the road myself, more than once.

So anyway, does that equate to "deserve it"? Maybe not, upon calm reflection.
But sometimes shit just gets out of hand. I am, of course, sympathetic for
everyone involved.

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alistairSH
I haven't seen numbers... does anybody know, or have sources, for the rate of
skipping trial (with and without bail)?

I wonder if, like excessively long prison sentences, that increasing bail has
limited returns (in terms of getting people to show up for their trials). IE,
most people will come to trial anyways. Those that are likely to skip will
skip regardless of bail amount.

------
DanCarvajal
I wish Gov. Jerry Brown was young enough to run for President. I don't like
the crop of Democrats that are vying for 2020.

~~~
MBCook
Wow. I didn’t realize he was 80. I knew he’d been governor for quite a while.

~~~
GeneralMayhem
Jerry Brown has had a pretty nutty career. He's been governor for 4 terms (16
years), but that's split into two stints _30 years apart_. He was first
elected Governor in 1974, at which point he was not quite the youngest
governor ever, but close. He's now the oldest governor ever.

I can't imagine what that first day back in 2011 must have been like. "Oh
yeah, just like I left it... except now there's all these computers, those
weren't here before..."

------
gesman
Just wonder in case of dangerous local gang member - couldn’t gang influence
(threaten) risk assessment board people to let the guy go free?

~~~
pjgrad
They could rob people to pay their buddy's bail too, and threaten the judge to
reduce sentencing. What's your point?

------
cft
Why do they bother to write (D-Van Nuys) after state senator names? (Van Nuys)
would suffice. California is a one party socialist state.

~~~
TheCoelacanth
Lol, what? Democrats have a super-majority, but there are still Republicans in
office. I also haven't noticed much abolishment of private property or class
going on in California, so the "socialist" part is inaccurate too.

------
saltedshiv
Everytime bail comes up I see the same comments. Like, nearly word for word.
The more I let that set in, the more uncomfortable I feel

